My grandmother was six years old the year the Nazis walked into her village. I say walked and not “invaded” because they walked out again just as soon as they arrived. By Poland’s standards, there weren’t enough people in the village to count as a legal place, and it wasn’t. A place, I mean. At least not exactly. But everyone my grandmother knew lived and died there. People came sometimes, but she was the first one she knew of who left. The actual departure happened when she was eighteen, but she always said that she had left in her heart long before that.

          She was six years old. It was autumn. The apples were red. The field of wheat outside grandma’s house was shorn to its earthy skull. Grandma was picking corn poppies for her mother when the first belch of black smoke curled up from the horizon. It came from one tank in a long line of tanks. Grandma ran crying to her mother without a name for her fear. My great-grandmother took the forgotten corn poppies from her clenched fist and whispered comforting things into her ear. 

          It was autumn. Their armbands were red. The closer they got, the hotter the red glowed, until my grandmother coughed with their smoke, there in the doorway in her mother’s arms. The parade of tanks gleamed bright enough to cut. Soldiers stared out from truck beds, guns looming over their shoulders. Not seeing her. They came to the center of town, a dusty intersection, paused for a terrible moment, and chose left, towards the apple orchards. Something about this struck my grandmother’s young brain as disastrous and she tore free from her mother’s embrace to sprint towards the head of the smoke belching beast. 

          “Wait!” Her mother cried.

          “The apples!” My grandmother cried back.

          Her mother caught her up in her arms just before her feet touched the dirt road. Grandma cried out and her mother clamped a hand over her mouth.

          “They cannot see you.” She said into her daughter’s brown curls. Grandma could see then that it was true. She stared up at the faces trundling by. Young faces as old as time. But the faces did not see her back. Not one. Eyes passed over her like she was another blade of grass in a field. The tanks rolled on and on. Grandma started to cry. She knew she should not be afraid, but she was still afraid.

          “Don’t cry.” her mother said. “They will not see the apples.”

          But grandma did cry.

          “There will be other apples, down the road.” she sniffed after a while, “Will they see them?”

          “Yes.” her mother held on tighter, “yes.”