I remember the sound of the morning before the shooting. My brother Pavlos was trying to catch a dog that lived near the commissary tent, and he was running in circles and laughing the way he did when he thought no one was watching him. That is the last uncomplicated thing I remember.
The men on horseback came before nine. We had been told to expect something, but we had been told to expect something many times before, and most of those times the something had not arrived. That morning it arrived.
My mother did not speak when she heard the first shots. She was already moving. She took Pavlos by the collar of his jacket and she took my sister Eleni by the hand and she looked at me with the expression she used when she meant for me to understand something without her saying it, and I understood. We went into the pit.
My father had dug the pit the previous autumn, before the cold came. It ran beneath the floor of the tent, two feet deep and covered with boards, with a rug over the boards. Some of the women called them refugios. My mother called it the hole. She pushed us in and lowered herself after us and pulled the boards over.
I do not know how many hours we were in the hole. I know it was less time than it seemed. The sounds above us were things I have spent thirty years trying to describe and have never described correctly. Footsteps. Breaking. A particular sound that was not wind but moved like wind. The smell of the fire came before the heat did.
My mother held Eleni against her and covered her ears and kept her face pressed against my mother’s shoulder. She held Pavlos with her other arm. I was eleven years old and I understood that I was the one who was old enough to be in charge of myself, and so I was.
The fire burned for a long time. The smoke came down but there was a gap at one end of the pit where a board had not fit flush and we breathed through that. I do not know if my mother planned that or if it was luck or if it was some combination of the two that cannot be sorted out now.
We climbed out when we could not hear anything above us. The tent was gone. Most of the camp was gone. The afternoon light looked strange because there was nothing for it to fall on.
There were eleven children in the death pit on the south side of the colony. None of them climbed out. I knew two of them by name: Onofrio Cortez, who was six, and a girl named Elvira whose last name I was never certain I pronounced correctly. The others I knew by sight.
I did not speak of this for thirty years. My children did not know this story until my eldest asked me directly, in 1944, and I found I could answer. I answered because by then there was a man who was willing to write it down, and because I was tired, and because the names should be somewhere.
Their names should be somewhere.