Devil's Bridge
Devil's Bridge on the road to Silhac








While tending the flock, we often wandered to the bottom of the hills. There was a lovely small waterfall next to a large body of shallow water—a natural pool—where, to our delight, someone had either forgotten, or laid out, two still damp boys' swimming trunks.

Wearing our newly-acquired trunks, we were playing in the water when two nuns from the nearby Catholic children's home bade us return the trunks forthwith.

Here we were then, naked as the day we were born, forced to undress under the prying eyes of the nuns and with the snickering of the kids in our ears.

The event was traumatic, as the cardinal rule for potential survival was, for boys, never, ever, ever, to show one was circumcised.

The episode was strange, the laying of the trunks like a premeditated lure—and I wondered if this had not, in fact, been an entrapment in order to determine if we were Jewish.