"After supper, the Englishwoman, Mary, give a concert for the children. They sat with rapt attention as she sang in a language they didn't understand, but they understood the music.
Only one Yugoslav and two Czech journalists spoke Polish; the rest of us depended on an interpreter. The children wanted to know everything. Where had we come from and why? Did we live in houses? What were they like? If we had children, where were they, with us so far away? Had we left them with relatives or strangers?
They did not speak of their own histories except in the most indirect fashion, and not always in words. They were painfully alert to any sudden movement and fell into abrupt silences in the midst of merriment, when they seem to sink into troubled dreams that raced like camera lights across their faces; then they would suddenly burst out into hectic, even frantic laughter."
~ Paula Fox
"Children of the Tatras"
The Coldest Winter: A Stringer in Liberated Europe
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/106394.The_Coldest_Winter
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