The Consequences of War
By Vivienne (Isoken) Uwaifo ’29, Contributor; Edited by Rebecca Liu ’25, Head Editor-in-Chief
Warsaw Poland October 15, 1945. After many years of Anna being trapped, tortured, and treated horribly in a Soviet labour camp, Anna stepped off her train with her body stiff, and her happy spirit had been taken away. The war had stolen everything: her family, her friends, her health, everything. The streets of Warsaw were literally unrecognizable, fire, smoke, burnt down buildings, ashes, bodies lying across the road. Everything was just so… horrible.
She walked towards the apartment that she had once lived in as each of the footsteps that she took kept getting heavier than the last. When the door creaked open, she found her mother sitting there, in the rocking chair, older, weaker, not having that same look of life she once had in her beautiful, blue eyes.
Anna froze from shock seeing her mother look so much more different than when she had last seen her. She wanted to run into her mother’s arms bawling but she felt like the bond that she once had with her mother was gone and buried under the years of formation by the Nazis. She stepped forward to her with tears in her eyes, and she pulled Anna into a tight hug. Anna stood as still as a statue silently crying as she was home, but it no longer felt like the home that she had once enjoyed in her childhood. She realized that in all these years, she had been forgotten by this world and the scars that she had whether seen or unseen, never faded away.
