Lost and Found (ONC2024)

Chapter 14

Jude

The moment I opened my eyes, I knew I'd fallen asleep and ended up in a living nightmare. We shouldn't have taken the time to 'relax.' There was no time to relax. I found myself in a place that made Salem in the 1660s seem like a walk in the park. It was the worst place I'd ever landed in my entire life. The sickening stench alone evoked images of death.

As I knelt on the cold ground, I looked up to see a boy, no more than nine or ten. His eyes were the biggest and most hollow I'd ever come across. They remained fixed on me, barely blinking, as if he was trying to convey something without words. He was there when I appeared and didn't react to my nudity or my sudden appearance. The area reminded me of a Victorian era ghetto with its old brick buildings and crowded streets, but the young boy's clothing wasn't Victorian. If I had to guess, I'd guess 1930s or 1940s. His tattered clothes hung loosely on his frail frame. He wore a white armband with a blue Star of David.

Star of David armband? I realized this situation was worse than I thought.

A few feet away, a naked man crouched, removing the pants of an emaciated dead man. Percy traveled with me again. When I first traveled, I frequently hid, unsure of how to find clothes or where to go. Percy acclimated to time travel well. Here Percy was, removing the clothes of a dead person. The man was nothing more than a skeleton with a thin layer of skin. Stripping a dead man of his clothes, of his last shred of dignity, bothered me.

"What are you doing?" I asked him.

"He's dead. He doesn't need his clothes anymore," Percy said. He handed me the man's overcoat, followed by his pants. The sight of small bugs crawling on both garments made me recoil in disgust. I cringed as I slipped my leg through the pants' leg.

"What are these things?" I asked.

"Just put the clothes on." Percy moved on to another corpse. "We're in a Jewish ghetto in Poland."

I wasn't sure how he concluded it was Poland.

"This is bad... really bad," Percy said. "How could you let me fall asleep?"

"How could you let me fall asleep? We should have left when I said so."

"Let's not argue about it," he said, scanning the area. "Fuck."

A group of men walked down the street, their slow and labored movements suggesting exhaustion and fatigue. Some looked as though they'd drop dead any minute. A cluster of women headed in the opposite direction. As my eyes wandered, I gasped, spotting a woman holding a baby, both dead on the ground. Percy gripped my arm, squeezing it, as horrified as I was, but more restrained.

A young girl, no more than seven or eight, stood in front of Percy; her eyes as big and brown as Percy's. After a few seconds, she threw his arms around his legs, hugging him like she knew him, as if he was something very special to her. As tears welled in her eyes, she raised her gaze to meet his and began speaking in a foreign language. Percy glanced at me, shrugging his shoulders. She took his hand in hers and led him down the street.

"She thinks I'm her father," Percy said, barely audibly, as I walked beside him.

"How do you know?"

"She called me Papa. She's German. I studied German in high school and college."

I was so confused. "But I thought we're in Poland."

"We are. The Germans sent German Jews to ghettos in Poland, Latvia, and the Czech Republic. It was Moravia back then. I was a history major in college and took a class on German history. Don't speak. You sound American."