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The Vanishing: Chapter Three:
Once upon the time there were three of us, Esther the eldest, Talia (I’m the middle daughter) and Rachel was the youngest. We had a happy life, a life shaded in the tragedies of our families past but my sisters and I had a good life, a happy life.
We were not ignorant of our families past, but we were protected until the day my sister disappeared, vanished on her way home from school one day. She was just a couple of weeks shy of her seventeenth birthday and was getting excited, the following year she’d be a Senior, and she was looking forward to all that entailed. Rachel would not just up and leave, besides the Swastika carved into the tree in front of the high-school told a story that we knew all to well, targeted for being Jewish.
Hatred for some was like a drug, it gave them some kind of sick high. Something I could never understand, something I would never want to understand.
The vivid images of my sisters and I running through a park, during a family picnic, but opening my eyes brought me back to reality. The noises and smells of the hospital reminded me of where I was at, at how quickly things had changed.
“Talia, it’s going to be okay.” Esther encouraged me, doing her best to offer words of comfort, Mother and Bobe had gone home to get some much needed rest. The armed officer still sit outside my door, a…
