Free Watch You Die by Katia Lief Page A

the present, in the hope that some part of her might realize that she not only survived but went on to find safety and love. Aside from caring for and loving Nat, staying present as a living reminder to my mother of her survival was the most important commitment of my life.
    Seeing the bones today had touched the core of this fear: that my mother had also seen the bones. Different bones. That
the echoes
, as she called those memories, might have come back upon her like a tsunami and submerged what was left of her mind.
    But sitting with her now as she slept, I felt reassured that it hadn’t happened yet. She was still safe. I stayed another hour before kissing her forehead and quietly leaving.
    Walking down the deep canyon of West End Avenue, I had a change of heart and decided that instead of going directly to the subway at 72nd Street I would turn around and detour to Zabar’s on Broadway and 81st. Nat wouldn’t begrudge me the extra half-hour and I would be able to pick us up a delicious dinner not to mention some treats from their bakery. I turned around – and there he was.
    Joe.
Definitely
Joe. He was about half a block behind me and until I turned around he had been following me. I was sure of it. For a moment we were face to face. Mine must have registered the shock I felt. His also looked surprised: to have been caught. For a moment his expression appeared suspended between shame and the possibility of a quick-save greeting. The pupil of his gimpy right eye widened as if to drink me in, and then …
    He turned and ran,
ran
, in the opposite direction.
    “Joe!” I went after him. He couldn’t follow me and pretend he wasn’t. Following me was wrong but pretending he wasn’t was even worse. And what was running? Cowardly. Idiotic.
    He was a fast runner. Young. With my bag of laptop, books and other stuff weighing down one shoulder, I couldn’t keep up.
    “
Joe!
”
    My voice trailed him as he disappeared around the corner in the direction of Riverside Drive. When I reached the corner, I couldn’t see him anywhere. He might have ducked into the lobby of one of the buildings. Or sped up and made it into Riverside Park.
    Panting, I ran partway down 74th Street in the direction of the park before giving up. “Joe!” I called again, and stood there, listening helplessly to my voice reverberating down the street. What did he want from me? Why was he following me? How could I make him stop?

CHAPTER 4
    IN JANUARY 1945 my father survived the infamous death march from Birkenau, Poland, by escaping into a forest so dense with snow – snow piled on the ground and snow relentlessly falling – he was able to hide in it. Because he was small and thin, a twelve-year-old boy weighing sixty pounds, he was able to conceal himself from sight behind the trunk of a tree. He waited all afternoon and through the night, his feet frozen in ice-socks that had formed inside the boots he had taken off a camp-mate “who was not so lucky” which was how he’d put it. My father felt lucky, and in the context of the moment he
was
lucky, to be hiding behind a tree trunk in the freezing snow for hours as tens of thousands of skeletons marched along the nearby road. These skeletons who were his comrades and whom he had abandoned with the certainty that at the end of the road would be more death.
    Alone in the German countryside, with the last of the thunderous footsteps receding up the frozen road, he finally stepped away from the tree. “I was hot with fear,” he said. The fear warmed him as he headed into the woods in the opposite direction from which they had just marched over three days. He ignored his frozen feet, hoping his fear would radiate into them and also warm them. The goal was to get back across the border into Poland and if he was
really
lucky meet up with the Russian liberators from whom they had fled at Gestapo-gunpoint.
    He spent five more days alone in the snowy woods, avoiding the road, unsure what direction