Silesian Station

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Miriam Rosenfeld placed the family suitcase on the overhead rack, lowered the carriage window and leaned out. Her mother's feelings were, as ever, under control, but her father was visibly close to tears.

'I'll visit as soon as I can,' she reassured him, drawing a rueful smile.

'Just take care of yourself,' he said. 'And listen to your uncle.'

'Of course I will,' she said, as the train jerked into motion. Her mother raised a hand in farewell and turned away; her father stood gazing after her, a shrinking figure beneath the station's wooden canopy. She kept looking until the station had been dwarfed by the distant mountains and the wide blue sky.

Her great-grandfather had come to this part of Silesia almost sixty years earlier, driven west by pogroms in his native Ukraine. He had been a successful carpenter in a small steppe town, and his savings had bought the farm which her parents still owned and worked. Seduced by the vista of looming mountains, his had been the first Jewish family to settle within ten miles of Wartha. Mountains, he'd told his son, offered hope of escape. The Cossacks didn't like mountains.

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