Away from the Killing Field

Fleeing a tragic civil war, almost one million refugees from El Salvador live silently in our midst. Some come with families. Some are alone. Few speak English. Few have work skills. Very few have money. Some have medical problems. Many have mental problems rising from their experiences at home: repression, terrorism, and outright combat.

Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, the diagnosis given so many of our Vietnam veterans, is widespread among Salvadoran refugees. Because most of them have entered the United States illegally, they are afraid to seek help for their difficulties because of the threat of deportation by the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service, whose policy accords political asylum to only a tiny percentage of their number.

What follows is an account of one refugee's story, changed only in minor details to protect her identity. A similar story could be told by almost any one of the million refugees. —B.B.Z.

We did not need the money to put food on the table. I got the idea of having a store just to earn a little extra--to buy a pretty dress for the baby, books for my older son who was doing so well in the primaria. He was so intelligent. He could become a teacher like his father. Extra money can buy food for the spirit, help it grow strong and beautiful.

I started with a few staples--flour, salt, cooking oil, some cans of milk, coffee--arranged on a shelf in the living room. The neighbors soon learned to come through the open front door to buy a little of this, a little of that. I liked to feel the weight of coins in my apron pocket.

In the beginning no one needed to ask for credit, but when bodies began to be found in the streets, life got more difficult. Those bodies belonged to the sons and husbands of my neighbors. Dead, they could no longer earn, and families began to feel hunger. I did what a Christian should. I helped those who needed it and added a notebook for IOU's to my apron pocket.

One summer night--it was before the Fiestas Agostinas--we awoke to the sound of shooting nearby. Unthinkingly I turned on a light. Jose Luis went to the children. The front door burst open. I saw soldiers--six or eight of them--with guns hot in their hands. The commander gave the order to search. My husband stood with the children, frozen and silent, as the soldiers kicked aside the furniture, turned out the drawers.

The comandante grabbed my arm. "Where are the guns? Where is the ammunition?" His breath in my face smelled like death. "We are not guerrillas," I protested.

I took his slap across the left side of my face. No one had ever done my body such violence before, but worse was the violence to my heart to know what my children were seeing.

The soldiers left, carrying off a good part of my stock in trade. I walked through spilled flour to close the door.

Thereafter we lay huddled in darkness on the nights when fighting broke out in Barrio Chamalco. Life became muted. People talked less but their eyes said more, gazes of such a sadness that I tried not to look.

The next time the guardia came, they knocked before entering. They left with Jose Luis. It was now the schoolteachers they were arresting. I did not close the door after them. I just watched until the daylight began to come through it and I could go outside to see if they'd killed him in the street.

I did not want the children to see their father dead. I took them to my mother's house and began to look for him in the places they dumped the bodies of the "disappeared"--the young ones, women big with pregnancy, the old ones. Why ever would they kill such old people?

Some of the corpses were fresh, others in different stages of decomposition. It got so I could no longer smell the odor, but I will never forget it. I searched for three days, along the river banks where bodies washed ashore and then back to the dumping grounds. I could not find him. At last I gave up and went home.

TURNING THE CORNER of my block, I saw the trucks. Soldiers were rounding up people off the street. I was taken with neighbors and strangers out past the edge of town along the road to San Juan del Lago, where the shrine is. The men were separated from the women.

It was so quiet. I could hear the soft thumps of gun butts hitting slow-moving bodies, the scrunch of pebbles beneath boots and sandals, the tearing of cloth--all as if amplified a hundred times over.

Some of the soldiers led the men away beyond some trees. Others began to push the women around, questioning them but not really wanting answers. It was meant to hurt and terrify.

There came a thunder of gun shots from behind the trees. They had executed the men. Then suddenly, silence. But no--I could hear singing! A religious procession with banners flying was making its way across the fields, approaching the San Juan road.

The soldiers fell still at their commander's order. The women became agitated, moving about, talking and then screaming. I stood quietly at the edge of the crowd. The soldiers turned their attention to the increasingly hysterical women.

In the chaos I slipped across the road and joined the procession. I whispered to the woman beside me, "They are going to kill me." "Pretend you are one of us," she said. And that is how I walked away from the killing field.

I did not cry until we entered the church. I went back to my town the next day on the bus. There was no one on the road, but I saw dogs and zopilotes--buzzards--near that stand of trees.

I found my mother feeding my children tortillas with salt. My father agreed with what I already knew to be the truth: To protect my family I must leave it.

I do not remember the trip. I rode many buses. The food my mother packed for me in her plastic shopping bag lasted well past the Mexican border. After that I don't know if I ate. I don't know if I breathed. I had no more body.

I have lived illegally in the United States for six years. I feel as though I have lived illegally on the planet for that time as well. My body is back in my country. My body is my children. I send money for them to live--for me to live.

And they send me letters. "Mama, when are you coming home?" "Mama, I need shoes for school." "Grandma owes the storekeeper $200, and he won't give her any more groceries." "Mama, can I come to see you?" At night I dream the zopilotes are eating my heart.

Barbara Beausoleil Zelwer was a psychotherapist who had seen a number of Salvadoran refugees in her private practice on a pro bono basis when this article appeared. She attended St. George Serbian Orthodox Church in Oakland, California.