“I thought of the people on the roof and wondered how they managed to stay up there as there was nothing to hang on to but, thinking back, I think they had either been shot or had fallen off the train many miles back as we left Strausberg.”

“Within minutes we had left the station and were entering a cutting with trees on both sides, so the horror of the massacre was now out of sight. The train left the wooded cutting, and we saw Strausberg on fire. There were Russian tanks in the streets and soldiers on foot entering buildings. People were being dragged out, and shot.”

“I look back to where my life had been. It's always risky to think of letting go. That's why this is the perfect ending. Nothing left to reconcile.”

“Down, down, down. Would the fall never come to an end? “I wonder how many miles I’ve fallen by this time?” she said aloud. “I must be getting somewhere near the centre of the earth. Let me see: that would be four thousand miles down, I think—” (for, you see, Alice had learnt several things of this sort in her lessons in the school-room, and though this was not a very good opportunity for showing off her knowledge, as there was no one to listen to her, still it was good practice to say it over) “—yes, that’s about the right distance—but then I wonder what Latitude or Longitude I’ve got to?” (Alice had no idea what Latitude was, or Longitude either, but thought they were nice grand words to say.)”

“What a twisted, twisted place, I think in retrospect… and yet when it was all happening back then, and for many days after I emerged, I couldn’t help but wonder if perhaps it had actually been the straightest place I’d ever visited.”

“And this was perhaps the first time in my life that death occurred to me as a reality. I thought of the people before me who had looked down at the river and gone to sleep beneath it. I wondered about them. I wondered how they had done it—it, the physical act. I had thought of suicide when I was much younger, as, possibly, we all have, but then it would have been for revenge, it would have been my way of informing the world how awfully it had made me suffer. But the silence of the evening, as I wandered home, had nothing to do with that storm, that far off boy. I simply wondered about the dead because their days had ended and I did not know how I would get through mine.”