Short Story: Mariska

These devastating losses propel Nomi’s desire of leaving the Mennonite town of East Village. I remember the time my dog died, as she caught some serious illness during weeks of heavy rain. Subsequently, the visit to the vet informed my family and I that the treatment would cause extreme pain and had a very low guarantee that it would work, so we decided to let her drift away more peacefully. There was a period of sadness and grief, but it eventually faded as time went on.

The foragers soon helped themselves to whatever they pleased, sometimes leaving civilians without enough food to survive the winter. They set ablaze many homes, outbuildings and fields when they were done ransacking them. The local residents hid anything of value in the woods and

Trista had always been a normal kid except for her stories. It wasn't that they were disturbing or horrific, they were just unusual. Sometimes they seemed exactly like the kind of thing you'd expect from a kid, but other times, I'd have to look at her and wonder how she came up with such things. It started when she was four, shortly after our dad split, leaving the two of us on our own.

The few concrete houses had been built by families whose sons or fathers had gone south…” which made me feel like her village was a small cozy, beautiful place, but after the Taliban invaded it, its beauty had been destroyed.

Many of the people living in the village have come from a variety of lives before moving into the community. Some old, some new, and often have been alone most of their life.

Not everything is back to normal though. Many people moved away from the desolate town to more populated areas. Alvin Dewey never built his dream farm house. Instead, “[he] built a new house in town” (341). He did this because his wife was scared. This proves that no matter how much closure one can receive there will always be some fear left.

In document C it says “my skin and eyes are almost spoils with continual smoke.” In their huts there are no windows there is no air flow so the smoke from their fires stayed in the huts also they should have had like chimney or something so there fire can let the smoke out. They also had to sleep and hay piles on the hardened mud ground. In document C it says they had “poor food, hard lodging, cold weather, fatigue, nasty clothes, and nasty cookery”. And since they had to sleep on the ground the floors were cold to.It also says they had a spirit of alacrity. So even tho the conditions were bad and it was hard to live there most of them still had a positive attitude. The place they were staying was bad and had bad food and more but they weren't all sad and miserable they had hope and I think that's

The period of time that the villagers were living is completely different from our culture

The conditions were terrible and supplies were scarce. This book shows the struggles of people and the hazardous conditions they were

Although the villagers were very reluctant to make any changes, they did manage to modify certain things to their benefits “Mr. Summers had been successful in having slips of paper substituted for the chips of wood that had been used for generations” (kirszner and Stephen pp.305). As little as it was, it was change. Traditions affect our decision making and the way we see things. A lot of bigotry and prejudice that we deal with today is because custom it was taught by or passed down from someone, things like racism and sexism. One day just like the northern village it’ll be a thing of the past.

Splitting the rations up evenly between both of the families was very hard. Both of the families never had enough to eat. All they had to eat was bread, beans, and rotten potatoes. After a while the food was tasting ancient. They all desired to their previous years with the homemade cooking. If they were to survive they had to be on rations and hiding.

like a bunch of rats in the New York City sewer. The walkway was nothing but dirt. And, there

Families would often be wiped out, and on occasion the surviving children would be orphaned. Travelers would start to take precautions such as burning the clothes of the victims and their wagon, or even try abandoning their wagons in order to flee as far as possible from it. The few remedies developed against it were Laudanum and camphor, for everything else there were home remedies such as baths and herbs used.

The “Gypsies” were said , by the Nazi’s, to have evil powers and would only bring sorrow and misfortune to the villagers. The fear and suspicion quickly turned into hostility. The villagers poked, prodded, kicked, whipped and tortured the boy for days while other watched and laughed “My body burned from the slashes of the whip...”(Kosinski 17). As time passed, a plague spread throughout the village, they believed that the boy must have brought the misfortune to them. They believed that if they rid themselves of the “Gypsy boy”, they would be free of the misfortune. Enraged, the villagers threw the boy into the river in hopes of his death by drowning. The actions of the villagers were compelled by their prejudice against the boys’ perceived ethnic origins. The alienation and loneliness the boy feels after being separated from his parents and the only other person that has taken care of him is gone, now he is all alone. The boy learns that he will have to learn to cope with the alienation and loneliness in order to survive this world. The unknown causes people to be quick to judge. The fear and hate of the unknown causes people to commit horrible acts, which only gets easier when they are sanctioned by state authority.

The majority of the Gypsy communities live on the extreme margins of the society (Barany, 2002). They live in abject poverty and this makes them easy targets in times of trouble. There are various Gypsy communities