I will never forget

I will never forget the time when my parents and I were driving past one of the cemeteries outside Warsaw. By the side of the road we saw a girl of about 18 years old who was hitchhiking. It was winter but she was just wearing a thin dress. We stopped to pick her up. She looked cold and my mother lent her the cardigan.

She told us where she wanted to go. We drove on in silence. We wondered what she had been doing standing by the side of the road. We took her to a block of flats in a small street, the same where one of my mother’s friend lived. She got out, smiled and went into the building.
A few days later my mother met her friend who lived on that street. When she told her the girl’s description, she told my mother that the girl used to live there but had died a few months before…