Vienna, Austria. I lived there for three weeks. The days of confusion and shock. The memory of that time, even during its formation, was fragmented, unreal, dreamlike and emotionally overwhelming. All life around for the first few days had a quality of a foreign movie without translation and subtitles.
My mind was quiet, real quiet. It refused to trust my visual perception and I frequently would touch objects around, feeling them with my hand to make sure that they are indeed real. First automatic door scared shit out of me. I froze for a moment there, processing the surge of adrenaline in my body and suppressing my fight/flight response.
I acted normal, double checked every word from my mouth and every emotion on my face – I had two teenagers on my hands. When my mind questioned reality of my surroundings, their minds questioned reality of me and themselves. And they looked in my direction for reassurance. It was tense, but I acted casual.
For one thing, none of us, emigrants, who crossed the border of the country legally, were left without attention. Our basic information was taken at the point of crossing the Ukrainian border. A few terrifying hours “what if?…”. But it was just a simple bureaucratic procedure.
We traveled by bus to the train station in Prague and from there by train to Vienna. The security upon our arrival was tight and scary. There were no other trains there or any people, only soldiers with guns hanging over their necks. Every one of them had a mean looking dog, leashed but perhaps more alert than the handler. For some reason I thought about the war movies about Nazis and Jews. I give myself quick and meaningless reassurance “not to worry…” and I did not have much time to ponder mysteries of my mind because our last name was called and we were directed to one of the buses.
My family along with a few others was moved from the train station into a dormitory; just a tiny room that was probably built to accommodate one person, although it was just my interpretation based on nothing, which I doubted later.
Many years later I had to spend one night in Amsterdam in transit from Kiev to Detroit, I needed a good night’s sleep. I paid for my room $225, and I had certain expectations. Well it took me a few minutes before I was able to find the bed that was part of the wall and I had to pull it out to make it a bed. There were no towels. Call housekeeping! You would think so, but there was no telephone in my room and I was too exhausted to leave the room, so I went straight to bed after my shower.
Upon arriving in Vienna, the next day we got our temporary ID’s in English that was an excellent time to spell our names whichever way we wanted. And some of us spelled them so hideously that years later we changed them to something like Sarah Smith. Real story.
At that day we were processed. Processed… repeat this word and listen to the sound…
No comments:
Post a Comment