Flamboya Tree: Memories of a Mother's Wartime Courage - Clara Olink Olink Kelly - Hardcover - 1ST

Chapter 1 Holland, 1946 "Why didn't you try to escape?" That was all she said. Not "Thank God you made it. Now you are safe." "Why didn't you try to escape?" Why was she saying that? She was supposed to be so happy to see us. I saw again in my mind's eye the barbwire fences and the soldiers with their glistening bayonets, and felt once more that excruciating fear in the pit of my stomach. Try to escape? Lots of people had tried to escape. I pushed the brutal memory from my mind. How long had we lived for this very moment? Through all those years, the words "when we get back to Holland" had sustained us. There had been no doubt in our minds that one day we would return to Holland to meet aunts and uncles, as well as cousins our own age. We had talked about celebrations with real cakes, and cookies, and lemonade. It was going to be such a happy time. I had imagined my grandmother telling us how lovely it was to see us at last. How big we'd grown, how pretty and handsome we looked. We had never met her, though we had heard so many wonderful tales about her. And now here we were in Holland, standing on her doorstep, and all we could do was stare at one another as though we were all waiting for something very special to happen. Why hadn't we tried to escape? It felt like a rebuke. We must not have tried hard enough. I looked over at my mother, wanting to protect her from the harsh words. My poor, sweet mother was obviously in a lot of pain, standing there on her infected, swollen legs. Sometimes she could hardly walk on them, let alone run. And wasn't that what you did when you tried to escape-run? Run as fast as you could? Glancing back at my grandmother, I began to feel very uncomfortable. She was standing there studying each of us in turn. Our pasty yellow skin and sunken eyes. Our bones sticking out through our worn, donated clothes. And worst of all, our filthy, lice-infested heads. She saw it all, and her eyes welled with tears. My mother, my two brothers, Willem and Gijs, and I had only that day returned to Holland, my mother's homeland, after spending more than three and a half years in a Japanese concentration camp in Indonesia. We were not a pretty sight, and we had caught my grandmother completely off guard. The ambulance drivers who had brought us here from the boat finally broke the awkward silence. They were still carrying the stretcher on which my oldest brother, Willem, lay covered with blankets. He was extremely ill with double pneumonia, and they were anxious to get him out of the damp, chilly air. My grandmother pulled herself upright and immediately motioned us all to come into the house. Gijs and I held tightly on to each other's hands and followed closely behind our mother as she hobbled painfully up the stone steps. Her beriberi was so bad by this time that she could probably not have survived more than a few months longer in the concentration camp. "Is this another camp?" Gijs asked once we were inside and he had looked all around. "Where are the other people?" Having been born just weeks before we were interned, he had grown up in the camps and had known only those overcrowded, filthy conditions as the way of life. This large, empty house was alien to him, as well as to me. We expected a horde of people to appear from every doorway. As we milled around in the spacious hall, my grandmother asked the ambulance men to follow her upstairs with the stretcher so Willem could be put to bed. She was taken aback when Willem protested vehemently. Sick as he was, he was desperately trying to get off the stretcher to stay with us. My mother rushed to his side to reassure him and asked that he be allowed to lie in the same room where we would all be. Our many years of living in fear now made us want to stick close together. While all this was going on, GiKelly, Clara Olink is the author of 'Flamboya Tree: Memories of a Mother's Wartime Courage - Clara Olink Olink Kelly - Hardcover - 1ST' with ISBN 9780375506215 and ISBN 0375506217.