Fear Is a Strange Thing

She would rather be the one who was persecuted than the one who did the persecuting.  Both had a terrible price to pay, but she would rather endure the humiliation and fear than grow numb to what it was to be human.

Fear is a strange thing.  It strips off masks… In some people it brings out the lowest instincts, while others become more compassionate.  Both have to do with survival.  But the choice is ours.

Your friend whom you will trust with your life suddenly becomes a stranger.  You start doubting whether just a simple thing you say will be used against you.

Trudi lives through these times.  Actually, at some points, I even forget all about Trudi.  Consumed by what is happening around her, I often forget about Trudi's condition.  I often forget about Trudi's problems, her hopes, her fears, her dreams.  But then again, how can you hope?  How can you dream?  When all you have to worry about is the fear.  The fear for your life, the fear for your friends, and the fear of the war and what it was doing to all of them, to their town, to their country.

But even so….

She felt dizzy longing for peace, a longing as powerful as the passion with which she used to will her body would grow as consuming as the passion that had fueled her revenge on the boys who'd humiliated her.  And what she wanted more than anything that moment was for all the differences between people to matter no more - differences in size and race and belief - differences that had become justification for destruction.

No One

At this point in her life, Trudi is starting to realize the good things of her being different.

One thing is that she can decide to be something that was not allowed to girls her age.  She is starting to feel that, after all, being not the same as everyone else will put her in situations that she's not required to because she's different.

But still, there is something that she wanted to do so badly.  Something inside her that desires more than the conveniences of being different.

At some points in reading the story, I could almost feel for Trudi.  And there are some points that it feels like I have had enough of everything that has been happening to her.  Every pain, every sacrifice, every lost friend, lost love.  But the will to go on reading is stronger.  I want her to realize that there is more to life than being different, that there is more to life than being normal, and, that there is more to life than being how everybody is supposed to be.

I look forward to the time to see Trudi triumphed against all that she dreaded; against all the pain she felt.  I look forward to seeing Trudi see what else is there for her and not what she's been looking for all the time.  I'd love to see her see the other side of her that is waiting to be acknowledged, recognized and reinvented.

I want Trudi to know what Pia meant when she said:

"No one but you can change that."

As if I can change her fate.

As if I can turn her life around as I turn the pages.

Violated

Her secret place was hers only.  There, she can do what she wanted, she can be what she wanted to be, learn things she ought to know, think calmly.  There, she is the normal person that she is, that she always thinks she is.  But this is just a secret to herself.  A secret that only happens in her own secret world.

On that day that her secret place was violated, she should have listened to that mist of cloud that she saw as a bad sign.  But we people always choose to learn the hard way.  She went on until the four boys decided to go for a game they call water fart.

Trudi thought that hiding behind the big rock would give her the chance to know their secrets that these four boys might be keeping in her secret place.  But she was wrong.  Instead, they found her and then it was her turn.  Small as she is, she does not have the strength of even one of them.  Overpowered, obviously, she couldn't do anything.

They took her away from her secret world.  Inside the barn of one of these boys, they began to touch her, violate her.  Touch her in a way that was even worse than what normally happens to normal people - normal women.  You wouldn't believe it, but how Trudi wished they did touch her the way they would touch a normal girl.  That way she would have been just like any other normal victims.  The way normal women get violated.

All of them did except Georg.  Yes, her friend Georg was one of them.  Although he did not touch her, he didn't do anything to stop them from violating Trudi.  Because if he did so, that would not be normal.  He would not be normal; thus, he would not fit in.

After all these, she went back to her secret place - her secret world.  The place that was witness to what was bound to happen.  There, she threw four stones.  One for each boy who did this to her.  She vowed to take revenge, and I think she couldn't care less how long it took.

Between The Lines:

In real life, she knew it was not that easy to tell whether the villains were, and even if you could identify them, they were not total villains.  No one was entirely all of one thing.  Cowards could be courageous in some matters, and love was not always declared and might not be pure love, but mixed in with hate and fear and powerful wish for revenge - like what she felt for Georg Weiler, who went to great efforts not to glance in her direction, even if both of them stood in front of their houses.

On Being a Freak

If you lost something you'd once had - a limb, say, or an eye  - people didn't treat you like a freak; they remembered you the way you had been.  But if you were born without arms or sight, you were a freak.  If your body didn't look like the bodies of others, you were a freak. And if you lived in a freak's body long enough, though you didn't feel like a freak inside - what could you do than to make sure your body wouldn't turn all of you into a freak?

On Friendship

The first sin he become proficient in was lying.  It became a necessity.  But he would never tell a lie to Trudi.  Not even after he'd grow up and marry Helga Stumm and lie to her.  He'd never tell a lie to his first friend, the only one who accepted his difference so much easier than his own, though he would come to betray her in other ways.

On Having

Georg was lucky when it comes to rolling the tiny balls into the hale he'd scooped into the damp soil between the two sets of steps, but he was just as generous in letting Trudi borrow marbles from him if she lost hers.  To keep playing was far more important to him than winning.

We All Pay

We all pay.

Gertrud told Leo.

But Leo did not understand.  He probably never will.  And it was Trudi who eventually knew why.  Hegi's style of revealing the story behind Emil and Gertrud is very unique.  The kind of thing that required the character a good imagination and the kind that requires the reader a better one.  It took me to reading, repeating it a few times in order for me to get the whole thing; to get what she's trying to say.  But, still, it feels like there is still something missing; something I am still missing.

The secret.

We all have secrets to tell.  We all hold secrets told by others.  Trudi held a secret at a very young age.  I wonder if she's too young to hold on to this one.  Because sometimes it feels like a secret becomes a burden, even to an adult.... too much to bear.  Sometimes, it felt like this becomes an even more burden to a child.  A guilt formed for knowing the story because they become part of the story, part of the sin.  A pain for being a child and not being able to do something about it, or rather, not being allowed to do something about it.

Only you were there.  Unless you told.

Her mother says.

And now it breeds more fear.

Sometimes it's better not to know.

Different

The agony of being different.

Trudi is different and she's in agony.

Aren't we all different from one another?

But she's indeed different.

But, I say, how different can we be to be considered different and be in agony?