The Sunflower Forest

Megan was sitting in the kitchen when I arrived home from school on Monday afternoon. She had her schoolbooks stacked on the corner of the table and her stockinged feet up on the chair across from her. One apple core lay beside her already. She was crunching her way noisily through a second apple while deeply absorbed in a book that lay open in her lap.

‘Hey Lessie, come here and look at this,’ she said when I appeared. I crossed over to the table.

It was a book on the Third Reich, an adult book, something for readers far older than Megan.

‘Where did you get that?’ I asked.

‘The library. I went in after school and asked the lady there where they had books about the Second World War. She gave me these. See?’ She indicated a couple of other books on the table too. ‘I’m going to read about it. I’m going to learn all there is to know.’

‘Those books are too old for you. You won’t even understand them.’

‘No, they’re not. I can read them. The lady at the library gave them to me.’

‘What did you do? Tell her you were a kid genius? Megan, those books are for adults.’

‘Not necessarily. Lookie. This one’s about kids. See?’ She pulled a thin paperback from the stack. ‘There are poems and stuff that these kids wrote while they were in a concentration camp for children. See what it says here in the back? The library lady showed it to me. Fifteen thousand children went into this camp. And only a hundred ever came back.’

There was a sudden, potent silence. Megan remained intent a moment longer over the book. ‘This could have been us,’ she said quietly without raising her eyes.

‘Megan, you shouldn’t be reading stuff like that. It’s macabre.’

‘It’s the truth though,’ she said. She looked up. ‘It happened, for real. And it could have happened to us. This here, in this book. If we’d been born, they could have taken us away just like these kids and put us in a camp.’

‘They couldn’t either. Those were Jewish children. They took them away because they were Jews.’

‘But we still could have been one of these children. If we’d been born then. They were kids just like us. See, look at the way this one kid writes. He makes his G’s just like I do.’

‘Megan, listen to me. It wouldn’t have ever happened to us. Those were Jewish children. We aren’t Jews. We never were and we never will be. So it could never have happened to us.’

‘It could have.’

‘Megan, it could not have. Wash your dirty ears out. I said, we’re not Jews. It could not have happened to us. So don’t be stupid and keep insisting. You’re as bad as Mama with your ridiculous opinions.’

A frown formed across her features. ‘How come you keep on saying that? “It couldn’t happen to us; we’re not Jews?” Why do you say that all the time? It happened to people, Lesley. Real people. And because we’re people too, it could have happened to us. You’re the one who’s stupid.’

‘You shouldn’t be looking at stuff like that. It makes you crabby,’ I replied. ‘Besides, what do you know about anything? You’re too little to understand what’s really behind it anyhow. You don’t know anything; you’re just a baby.’

Megan’s scowl deepened.

I set my books down and went to the cupboard to get down the peanut butter and honey for my sandwich. ‘All I’m saying, Megs, is that we’re in no position to be even discussing it. We don’t know what happened. That’s my point. We just don’t know. So it’s stupid to go reading about what happened to the Jews and generalizing it to everyone else who was in the war.’ I turned around and looked at her. ‘And if you ask me, you just shouldn’t be reading that kind of junk.’