When The Fascists Came

When local fascists came to take their neighbours, they asked her father to take them to the station on horse cart. From the station they would be sent to a concentration camp.

Her father refused because they were his neighbours and family friends. In response, they beat him until he lay in his own blood and threatened him with death. He had no choice.

She began to cry as she told me this. She had been just a little girl, but she never forgot.

Now, here at the cemetery, where Christians and Jews lay together for centuries, she places a stone on the graves of people whose faces she remembers—people she never saw again.