Dancing in the Starlight, Part 2

[Gael]

In the year 1968 AD, the city of Prague in the nation of Czechoslovakia was like many other major cities on Earth. Cosmpolitan, cultured, urbane, a center for trade and the dealings that keep a city and a nation operating. And, like many cities of the time, it was a hotbed for unrest. A great war was over twenty years in the past yet the people of the city and the nation found themselves oppressed and restricted by policies put in place by those who had deemed themselves liberators of the invaders that occupied the country during the war. And war remained. Quiet, skulking in the shadows and alleyways and backrooms where it did not show itself in arms and armor upon the field. A war of ideals was waged and the leaders of Czechoslovakia were trying desperately to find better ideals than those in place. Ideals those who held sway over a large swath of eastern Europe did not hold with and, in late August, voiced that displeasure with armies and tanks flooding the streets like a spring rain.

 

I was born somewhere in Prague sometime around April or May. I truly cannot say with certainty any closer time period than that. I can tell you, though, that my parents were Romani. What most would call Gypsy. I can also tell you that they had survived the great war, the Second World War as most would name it, by little more than luck. During that war, some six million Jewish people were simply slaughtered as 'ethnic enemies' of Germany. In addition to that a number of Romany were killed as well. Some say it was over two hundred thousand, others claim the number was as high as one and a half million. Whereas the Jewish, wanderers by circumstance, kept meticulous records, the Romani, wanderers as much by choice as by fate, were never so organized. When my parents were rescued from the concentration camp, they were only young children with no other family to claim them so they were fostered to others who then moved to Prague. By the time of my birth, Tsura and Pitti Kyirsocs were probably in their late twenties and both had managed to find work in the Canadian Embassy in Prague; she has a housekeeper and he as a general handyman.

 

A woman who worked there as a secretary to the ambassador became friends with my parents. Her name was Elspeth Hollinger and she, too, had lost much to the previous war; a husband and a son both. As spring gave way to summer and the unrest grew and grew, my parents grew fearful of what would become of them and me, the infant Miriya, if the Soviets arrived to enforce their doctrine directly. The Soviets, if anything, were even less tolerant than the Nazis when it came to other races. Especially 'inferior' ones like Romani.

 

So it was that Elspeth carried me, hidden within a satchel with a diplomatic seal, onto an airplane in August of 1968, only days before Warsaw Pact soldiers and tanks mowed down the Czechoslovakian Spring with very little bloodshed.

 

I barely remember the man and woman who gave me life. Dim memories of being held and suckling at a breast as a woman whose voice had cried and screamed itself into a rasp as an infant and never quite healed back to smoothness sang to the babe in her arms. Of being held and looking into dark green eyes that always darted in search of what was going to come and steal away what little joy he had been able to find in this world. I had a picture of them that Elspeth brought in the satchel with me. A small baby swaddled in a colorful blanket more patches than whole cloth; wisps of black hair showing as I slept in my parents' arms. When I looked at it once with a magnifying glass, I could see parts of the numbers that had been tattooed on their wrists so that, once they had been put to the gas chamber, the bodies could have been properly catalogued before being dumped into a mass grave.

 

I was born of desperate love. I was given away in the hope that, in a new world, I might never fear hands in the night dragging me away screaming to some living hell. Elspeth told me she tried to convince them to flee, that she could get them sanctuary was refugees.

 

They told her no.

 

They had managed to cheat Death once each already.

 

Even a Gypsy's luck only went so far.

 

Did they die when the Soviets arrived? Did they live on? Did they choose to run in a different direction or stay in Prague? Did they live on to die of old age or during a world war even greater than the first one they survived?

 

These are questions I shall never be able to answer.