The Day I was Born in a Refugee Camp

The Day I Was Born in a Refugee Camp after the War

My mother washed her face in cold water, tied her hair back, and put on an old dress. 

She said she knew my birth would be hard, that she had given birth before, to my sister, and that then the dirt had flushed out of her body like a rabid dog that had finally snapped its chain. She said as well that there had been storms the day before I was born and that the creeks near the refugee camp were running high and that some of the barracks near the river were evacuated.

Except for the nurse, my mother was alone that day I was born. My father had seen my sister Danusha being born two years earlier, and he wept and said to my mother that he couldn’t go through that again. So she told him he should just leave, take the money they had and go buy himself some vodka, find a barn he could crawl up into and drown himself in the drink, until he couldn’t hear her screams or see the mess that was coming.

It didn’t matter that she was alone.  No one could really help her with the darkness and the screaming when I started to come. There was just me and the tearing in her stomach and her bones breaking apart like life had decided to squeeze her until she was nothing but blood exploding through her useless skin.

And feeling it, feeling that river of shit and the squeezing and the bones breaking, my mother remembered the road that brought her there to that Displaced Persons camp in Germany and that darkness.

She remembered the Germans who killed her mother and raped her sister and kicked her sister’s baby to death, and the years in the slave labor camp when the guards would promise her a potato if she would suck them, or a piece of meat if she would fuck them, and she remembered being thankful for the food.

She remembered too the time right after the war when the other women in the refugee camp struggled to hold on to their babies because they knew that giving birth to them would kill them because their wombs were still in the war, still weak and tortured and beaten, still kicked and stabbed and wounded, still bleeding and crying and hoping, still falling and slipping and starving, still kneeling and begging and weeping, still everything that had happened since the day the Germans put her and the girls from her village on the train to bring them to this Germany where every birth was a struggle in the mud for a breath.

And she screamed then and knew that screaming was useless, and so she screamed again and kept screaming until the flood came and my bones poured from her flesh like tomatoes exploding in the hands of a God who didn’t care about what she remembered or feared or wept over.

She knew that all God wanted was to hold another life in His hand, and that nothing she could beg for could change the way He turned the baby, regarded it, and let it live or not.

—

From Echoes of Tattered Tongues, a book about parents and the war.  Available on Amazon.