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A Promise Kept
By Ed Cook

[1] I had my first chocolate bar at five years old. I’ll never forget the delicious, comforting taste. But the circumstances were anything but sweet. It was World War II. I lived with my family in the Lithuanian town of Taurage when the Russian army swept west toward Nazi Germany. Many people in our village fled in panic.

[2] In the confusion, I stood with my 12-year-old sister, Elyte, and my three-year-old brother, Joseph, near the railroad station, where a train bound for Germany waited.

[3] Only families were allowed to board the train. Just before departure, a woman traveling alone approached us. “I’ll take care of him,” she told Elyte, and pulled me onto the train as it left the station. The entire trip I cried for my motina, my mother.

[4] We arrived in Hamburg. Corpses littered the bombed-out streets. Now that the woman had escaped Taurage she had no more use for me. I lived on the streets, like thousands of other children in that war-torn city. I survived by stealing food. Still, there was never enough. I was skin and bones, close to starving.

[5] Then the American occupation troops arrived. They looked so big and healthy. Filching food from them was a cinch. I’d slip into the mess hall, hide under a table and make off with loaves of fresh bread.

[6] One afternoon as I lurked around a mess tent in search of food, a huge hand lifted me up by the collar. An American soldier. “Got ya!” He shouted.

[7] I was scared, and I could see it upset him. “It’s okay, kid,” he said. He reached into his fatigue jacket and handed me a chocolate bar. “Here, have some of this.” I unwrapped it and took a small bite. I thought I’d gone to heaven.

[8] The soldier took me and some other homeless children to an orphanage run by the Red Cross. Four years later I was transferred to an orphanage in America. Soon after, a family who lived in Donaldson, Pennsylvania, adopted me. Again, as with that first taste of chocolate, it was as if I’d gone to heaven. Later, I joined the Army, then attended college under the GI Bill. Eventually I earned a master’s degree in clinical social work. God, I want to pay back all the people who were so good to me, I prayed.

[9] So in 1983 I went to work for the Department of Veteran Affairs as a clinical counselor, treating veterans who suffer from post-traumatic stress syndrome.

[10] The troubled soldiers sit in my office and wonder how I can possibly understand them or help ease their pain. “What do you know about living with terror?” Asked one Marine, who still was tormented by the image of a platoon member being killed in a battle.

[11] That is when I tell them my story, and about the GI God sent to save my life.

[12] “I never did learn his name, but I remember his kindness,” I say. And then I open a drawer in my desk that is always full and offer them some chocolate.

In your opinion, why does the author entitle the story “A Promise Kept”?

Translate the underlined sentence in paragraph 2.

In paragraphs 7 and 8, the author uses “I’d gone to heaven” twice. How do you understand this expression?

Translate the underlined sentence in paragraph 9.