We all wanted them to be special, and might have each been a little disappointed in how ordinary they were. Two very quiet people in normal clothes that didn't quite fit properly, who were quieter than the adults we were used to. I don't know what we expected for our first survivors, but being raised on images of fighters, two little mice-like creatures that leaned into each other for protection was a slight disappointment.
We were driving home that evening after the meal, with no staying around afterwards to talk with anyone, so I was left alone with my confusion. Why did we use the same word for where I went to spend weeks during the summer as was used to describe those places where millions — a number far too big for anybody really to understand — of people died?
Obviously not all of them who entered the camps had died, some of them had walked away, somehow or other, and I saw two of them that night. Two very ordinary people who, unless you saw them in the company of others, really were no different to look at, which made it even harder to understand what had happened to them.
The lights of the oncoming cars as we traveled down the highway back to Ottawa that night could have been the search lights in a camp or the flashlights of campers out on a walk at night in the woods. Sometimes it was so hard to tell things apart.
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