Don March

The Secrets of Mary and the Trainbabies Don March

My Mom grew up in German occupied Poland. Being an American citizen in the midst of the Holocaust, would seem to put her in jeopardy, for whatever reason German and Polish officials put some value to that citizenship, time and again her American citizenship saved her life, saved her from being loaded on buses, diverted her from this line or that. We can only guess where those buses or those people in those lines were headed. Taking my Mom?s stories, scrutinizing them with some solid research and it became apparent that Mom?s life didn?t go exactly the way we had always been told, she had several dark secrets. Research put together the bits of stories explaining why till the day she died she feared being deported back to Poland and why her story started years before she was born, her story started in America. One of the first secrets she let slip out was her encounters with the camp trains. She told of throwing apples and water to the people in the trains headed to the concentration camps and sometimes the people in the trains would throw their babies from the trains, as a last chance hope to save them. It bothered me, what horrors would it take for a person, a parent, compelling them to throw their baby from a train, risking all their lives and the lives of everyone in that train car, to save the baby. I put together my mother?s stories, her secrets and then I read hundreds of accounts of Holocaust survivors. I wanted to tell not only my mother?s story but I needed to tell the stories of the people, the families and the babies of occupied Poland.