Free Hostage by Elie Wiesel

out, her hand over her mouth.
    “A Russian officer.” And after a pause. “He’s Jewish … like me.”
    Panic-stricken, she left me brusquely and went into the kitchen.
    • • •
    Piotr reappeared two days later. I was waiting for him in the street. He brought me shirts and winter clothes, food and coal.
    “Gifts from German citizens,” he said, laughing noisily. “They led the good life here. Now it’s your turn.”
    The governess wasn’t at home.
    Piotr helped me settle into the living room, which I wasn’t familiar with. He left me a piece of paper with his address in Kiev for after the war.
    “That way, you’ll have someone to look up when you’re over there.”
    I told him we already had someone over there. “My older brother. A Communist to the bone.”
    Seeing his stupefaction, I told him the story of my brother, a devoted admirer of Stalin, who had left the family and gone to the Soviet Union.
    “And where is he?”
    “I have no idea. He may have joined a relative of ours who lives in Moscow, apparently. At home, they used to say that he worked for a very important person.”
    “What’s his name?”
    “Leon. Leon Meirovitch.”
    “What! Repeat what you just said.”
    “Leon Meirovitch.”
    “You’re pulling my leg, Shalti?”
    “Of course not. Why would I?”
    The soldier rose from his seat and started clapping his hands excitedly. “The great, illustrious, one and only Leon Meirovitch is his brother’s boss, a member of his family, and he tells me this as though he were your ordinary corner grocer!”
    He sat down again and took my hands. “Listen closely, child. I have to leave for the front again. I’ll do my best to return. I want to make sure I can find you again.”
    “But I don’t think I’ll be living here.”
    “Where would you live?”
    “Home. I’ll wait for my relatives to return. Some of them may have died, but not all of them. At least, that’s what I hope.”
    Piotr thought for a moment, then tore a sheet out of his notebook (which he had taken from a German). “Give me your old address.”
    I wrote it down and handed it to him.
    We embraced. As I watched him leave, I wondered: Who will I see first, him or my family? To whom will I tell the story of how I survived?
    A few days later, I “moved home,” as they say, with a bundle of belongings packed by the governess. Except it wasn’t our home anymore. A family of strangers had moved in, an emaciated, surly man, a sad-looking woman and two unruly children. I told them who I was, and they looked at me uncomprehendingly at first, then with hostility.
    “Go away!” yelled the man. “We live here; it’s our house. Go back to where you came from. Otherwise …”
    He took out of his pocket a certifying document with official stamps.
    Why argue with him? As he was on the verge of pushing me out the door, I left and went to the police. An indifferent police chief explained to me that hundreds of apartments andhouses vacated during the occupation by their Jewish residents had been assigned to the homeless people from the neighboring cities and towns who had been bombed out and lost everything they owned. “We had to put them up somewhere, didn’t we?”
    I asked him where I should go. He shrugged his shoulders. I wanted to explain to him that if I didn’t live at home, my parents, when they returned, wouldn’t know where to find me.
    He snickered. “There must be orphanages for kids like you.”
    “But I’m not an orphan! My parents are going to return!”
    He dismissed me with an impatient gesture.
    Back in the street, under a blazing sun, I couldn’t hold back my tears. I walked aimlessly, for how long I don’t know, until I was stopped by a Russian soldier who was coming out of a commandeered building. He asked me why I was crying. I told him that I didn’t know where to go, that I no longer had a place to live, and especially that I was afraid of being permanently separated from my family. The