What Silences Protect
For the rest of the summer, Esme read the journal.
She read it slowly, in small bits, in the mornings, with a cup of black tea. The journal was in German. Esme spoke German, badly — Helga had spoken German with her, occasionally, and Esme had had three years of it at school. Her mother helped her with the harder pages.
The journal was not a relentless catalogue of horror. That was the first thing that surprised Esme. It was, instead, a careful and watchful diary by a fourteen-year-old who had decided to write down small specific things she remembered — *the colour of the gate, the songs we sang in the children's home, the woman who taught us to draw with charcoal because we did not have proper pencils, the smell of the cabbage.* The journal was about a year of her grandmother's life that had also contained, somehow, friendship and singing and a teacher who had taught the children mathematics in an attic, even though the teacher had known that nobody would be examining them on it.
Some pages were terrible. Esme read those once, then closed the book and went outside and walked round the block.
But most of the journal was the diary of a young girl who had decided, at fourteen, that the only honest thing she could do with what had happened was to write down, in detail, the people she had known there. So that they would not be only numbers. So that they would have, somewhere, in