Free After the Train by Gloria Whelan

the room belongs to the boy I was. My books, records, magazines, even my clothes have nothing to do with me. In all the familiar, I am a stranger. How can it be that they don’t know where my real mother is? What does it mean for mothers to get lost? What if Mother and Father don’t want to find my mother for fear she will take me away? What I can’t decide is whether I want to find my real mother. What if I don’t want to be her son? What if I have to move away from school and all my friends and from St. Mary’s?
    It doesn’t seen fair to have to give up something just to have what was mine. Why should I have to choose between two lives, especially between a life that I know and a life I know nothing about? I want to stay right where I am, where everything is familiar. Yet the other life is something that belongs to me as well, something I have coming, something I must have. I know my mother and father love me, but what about the woman who is my leibliche Mutter , my birth mother—my wirkliche Mutter , my real mother? If she’s alive, wouldn’t she want her son with her? What if she needs me to take care of her? Maybe I can be with Mother and Father half the year and with her the other half—but then with twolives, I would be two boys. Wouldn’t that be confusing? And if I turned out to be Jewish, what would that second life be like? And worst of all, Father has said he didn’t know who my mother was. How is that possible? Where have I come from?
    On my desk are my notes from Herr Schmidt’s class. I remember how bored I was in that class and how I resented hearing about the fate of the Jews. That might have been my fate. I hear Mother, her voice always so low and calm, give a shrill cry. I head for the stairs and stop when I hear Mother say, “We agreed to silence on the matter.”
    Father says, “He has half guessed, Emma. He has a right to know.”
    “What is the good of bringing up the tragedy of that poor woman now? War is full of tragedies, but we can’t go back and undo them all. We have to get on with our lives.”
    Father says something I can’t hear. He’s calling to me. Step by step I drag myself down the stairs, worried about what Mother will have to say to me. Will she be angry about my reading the letters? When I get downstairs, I see she is wiping away tears and I feel awful, as if all this is my fault.
    “Peter,” she says, “your father tells me you recognized the woman in the photo you saw, that she was thesame woman who was in your nightmares, but that’s impossible. You were only a toddler. Can’t you put all that out of your head? It is only a nightmare.”
    “I have to know where my—my real mother is,” I say. Immediately I am sorry, for who is more my real mother than the one who stands before me?
    “ Real mother? How can you ask such a question? I am your real mother. I have cared for you all these years. Who could love you more than I do?”
    “We had better tell Peter everything,” Father says. He takes a deep breath as though he is ready to run a long race, and then he plunges in, talking rapidly, getting it over with like a quick swallow of medicine. “When your mother and I were married, there was no thought of war. We only wanted to settle down and have a family. The bad days of the Depression were over. New buildings were going up in Germany. As an architect I was getting work. We had a pleasant home in Ulm with a bedroom for the child we hoped to have, but no child came along. We worried that we might never have a baby. Then the war came. I was drafted into the army as an architect; your mother and I were separated.” He looks at Mother.
    “I hated the war,” Mother says, “but it was impossible to escape it. I gave up my teaching position and joined the Red Cross, where I thought at least I coulddo something to help those who were suffering. We met trainloads of wounded soldiers and tried to comfort them while they were awaiting medical care. It was