It is raining here now. The rain is cold and hard, like a bitter slap to the face, but I have learned to lift my face to the rain and blink its stinging tears from my eyes. My name is Eva, and I have just come to America.

Here I am, standing for the first time in ten years with a coat on my back, and the rain still surrounds me. If I try, I could close my eyes and the rain would disappear, but they told us never to close our eyes. For if we close our eyes, and the sun shines again, they might rediscover the rain and make it fall harder than ever.

The rain I felt was sixty kilometers north of Prague, in a ghetto called Terezin. There the rain we children felt was the cold words and angry slaps of the guards, the SS men coming, the awful conditions, and the fear of the train. My best friend Gabi (her real name was Gabriela) left on a train five years ago. She was not on the boat to America with us. I got the news a week ago: the rain had fallen too hard. She was dead.

Even in the lightning and thunder, there was a rainbow hidden among the barracks. There were forty girls in our house. We shared the rainbow of laughing and cheer among ourselves, each picking up a single luminescent color. Gabi and Miriam had brought paper, and we drew our piece of the rainbow with their pencils and crayons.

Some of the girls wrote poems, too, and I wrote a poem. It was a beautiful poem. Gabi said so. I showed it to her. It was the last thing we did together.

The rain falls now, on all of us here in a huddled group, so lucky to have been protected. It falls through the branches and across the pavement, into our eyes. There are only twenty of us, only twenty out of a hundred that were protected. The rain falls on us now, but we are not afraid. n