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cousin if I could keep the photographs. Later that night, back in my hotel room, I spread them out before me and stared at them for a long time. I tried to connect these images with those already embedded in my mind. But it was no good. Too many of the connecting links were gone, destroyed forever. Then I cried, from fatigue and frustration. I cried for the young man in these pictures, and also for myself because I had never known him. I suppose that night, so many years after that day in camp when I had learned of his death, I finally mourned for my father.
    The only happy event during those first weeks in Dobryd was the return of my father’s brother, still in his Russian army uniform. But when we were reunited I did not think of it as a joyful occasion. Somehow in my mind my uncle’s return became associated with the state of grief that my aunt and my mother suffered. What was coincidental became for me cause and effect. For a long time I resented his presence.
    The weeks in the army camp were very unhappy for me, even worse than the time in the loft. What frightened me most was that my family had forgotten about me. For weeks on end they sat silently together, so lost in their grief that they took no notice of me.
    Eventually, however, they became aware of me again. One day I noticed that they were responding to me as they used to, treating me with the attentiveness that I had assumed was my right. Slowly they began to notice the activity around them.
    Life in the camp had taken on an intense pitch. The town was being restored. People were rebuilding their lives. My family realized they had to rouse themselves.
    Yet there remained some distance between them and the other refugees. Several times I overheard people in the camp telling stories about them. Those who knew the family before the war spoke of my grandfather. Of how he had lived as the largest landowner in the area. They told the others that the family were never like other Jews. There was always something foreign and aloof about them. They were too assimilated, too rich, and they travelled too much.
    I noticed that when these stories were told, certain people did not hesitate to express satisfaction that the war had reduced everyone to the same level. I began to feel very uncomfortable in the camp. I longed for us to leave, to be on our own. My mother agreed. Yuri promised to help us.
    During the short time in the camp I had lost some of my confidence in the new world of freedom. People were neither happy nor good to each other as Yuri had promised. Would they ever be?

PART TWO

I
    I was glad to leave the army camp. Yet the move back to Dobryd filled me with uneasiness. My first impressions of our entry into the town were still vivid: the death-like stillness, the ruins, the absence of other people. I had never seen anything so desolate. How would we survive in a place where all human activity seemed unimaginable?
    I said nothing of this to my mother or my aunt. I sensed that I must not add to their feelings of hopelessness.
    My fears disappeared as soon as we returned to the town. In our absence, Dobryd had been transformed into a city for the living. Bombed-out buildings, piles of rubble, caverns gouged out by hands—all had become shelters. Everywhere we went, people swarmed over the ruins, determined to survive.
    They began to arrive almost as soon as the Germans had retreated. At first singly, furtively, then en masse , as if a common signal of confidence had spread amongst them. Ragged, emaciated, with small precious bundles of unlikely objects, they came into the town in steady streams of life that defied the ruins. Every corner of the town pulsed with activity. A new community was created. Even those who remembered the elaborate pre-war civilization that had flourished here seemed too preoccupied with reconstruction to mourn it. In this new Dobryd, my optimism about the future returned once again.
    At last we had a home of our own. In the