Paris, August 1, 1990

Shortly after noon on Wednesday, August 1, 1990, I boarded a train in Amsterdam that was headed to Paris. I was twenty-two years old. I had just spent four days in Utrecht. Before that I was in Nice for three days, preceded by equally short stints in Florence, Rome, Munich, Budapest, Prague, Warsaw, Krakow, Berlin, Heidelberg, Freiberg and Vienna. I was backpacking through Europe for the summer. I had a Eurail Pass, which covered all of Western Europe and parts of Eastern Europe and which enabled you to board any train in any direction at your whim, so long as there was an empty seat. It was designed for guileless foreigners like me who thought that the best way to get to know Europe was to hop from country to country, and I was making the most of it. It was my first time overseas and it began with considerable promise. In May, my mom, dad, two sisters, and I flew from our home in Winnipeg, Manitoba, via Zurich and Vienna to Israel for a three-week-long family vacation. I had belatedly moved through my teenage years, which were drawn full of angst and rebellion, and for the first time in a long while I was relaxed and easy to be around. By all accounts, it was a great family trip. We had a sagacious Israeli named Michael for a guide, and he took us from one end of the Promised Land to the other, supplementing what I had learned about the country in my youth, courtesy of my private Hebrew school education, and by then mostly long forgotten. Every square mile of Israel was fascinating, from the historic old city of Jerusalem and the Western Wall to the cosmopolitanism of Tel Aviv. We swam suspended in the Dead Sea, climbed Masada, and picked our way through ramshackle Bedouin markets. We spent a quiet afternoon at Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Museum, and had lunch at Yad Mordechai, a kibbutz that was renamed in 1943 in honor of Mordechai Anielewicz, the leader of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising (two months later I stood, awestruck, on Anielewicza Street in Warsaw, where the uprising took place). We skipped the Gaza Strip, which was unsafe even then. I have great pictures from this trip. It was fascinating and edifying, and it was a happy time. We stayed in nice hotels and ate good food and at the end of the three weeks we flew together to Vienna, at which point my mom, dad, and older sister, Jacqueline, returned home. My younger sister, Lisa, and I stayed in Vienna for a couple more days and then began our summer sojourn together. The plan was to travel for a week or so through Germany and then split up to travel with our respective friends for a couple of months before meeting up again in Paris in the second week of August. We were going to spend our last week there together before flying home on August 13. Instead, I left Paris, alone, on the morning of August 2.

My sisters and I have always been very close, and traveling with Lisa was marked by the kind of easiness you can only get with family. Europe was full of small miracles for us. We were endlessly impressed by the architecture of history, and each experience seemed richer than the last. We went to Berlin and stood where the Wall had come down the year before. We toured the Reichstag and naively poked fun at armed guards in East Berlin (who were humorless and impervious to our advances). There were vestiges of the Holocaust throughout Germany—indeed, throughout Europe—memorialized in monuments and museums. I have never been religious, but being Jewish has always been central to my identity, and traveling around Europe felt like a tour through the history of anti-Semitism. The attempted annihilation of the Jewish people became tangible for me for the first time and, seriously impressionable, I started to read Elie Wiesel and Primo Levi. A month later I went to Poland to see Auschwitz and stood, at a loss for understanding, under the "Arbeit macht frei" sign at the entrance to the main camp, only to return to Germany for a second time to go to Dachau, the Nazi concentration camp outside of Munich. My immersion in Holocaust literature turned out to be a postrape saving grace, or at least so I thought at the time. It provided me with a clear juxtaposition: although what happened to me was bad, compared to the obscenity of the death camps and the mass extermination of the Jews, well, there was no comparison. What I later came to understand was that this convenient contrast was just one among many intellectual devices I was able to rely on in order to avoid facing the pain of my own traumatic experience.

After Lisa and I split up I spent some time traveling alone and some time traveling with a good friend from Winnipeg. Being on my own was a test that I felt I needed to pass. I had spent the previous couple of years cultivating an image of myself as an independent woman, and although I was occasionally lonely and insecure, I had this idea that if I beat down my anxiety then at least there would be truth in the persona. This would prove to be a recurring theme following my rape, and it wasn't entirely disingenuous. I did gain a robust sense of accomplishment from meeting the challenge of getting by on my own. It was an adventure and, at times, was thrilling. Still, it was a lot easier traveling with a friend. We went to Italy and Germany, but the highlight of our time together was Prague. Nineteen eighty-nine had been the year of the Velvet Revolution, which saw the overthrow of the Communist government in what was then Czechoslovakia, and one year later the country was just opening up to tourists. Prague was the most beautiful city that I had ever seen, and we spent weeks there. Cigarettes were a dime a pack and the view of the Prague Castle from the Charles Bridge was exceptional. Our days were idyllic. We ate waffles from street vendors and warm gusts of summer moved around us.

In early June, while still traveling with Lisa, I spent a day and a half in Heidelberg with my ex-boyfriend who was there for the summer, studying German. I think he now goes by his given name, David, but back then everyone knew him by his nickname, Stream. Stream and I met in 1987 in New York City. I lived there for two years while attending the Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT), where I studied fashion merchandising. I had gotten there by accident. I graduated high school—barely—in 1986. The rebellious years that I referred to earlier were at their peak then and I was struggling to find my way. I went through half a pack of cigarettes a day and spent my weekends smoking pot and getting high. Those were dark days. I would regularly sneak out of my house in the middle of the night to meet other wayward friends and then sleep through classes the following day (during my junior and senior years, my absentee rates were routinely higher than my grades). The only thing I was focused on was avoiding the emotional consequences of my privileged, middle-class, suburban upbringing.

My parents are intelligent, funny, and charismatic people, and they are also kind, loving, and supportive. They have nurtured us into a very close-knit family and I cherish my relationships with them both, but things have not always been smooth. They were the children...