We start with exposition, "We were waiting for a train in the echoing underground. / I was thirteen. He was old, a family friend, a refugee from another century," Without knowing the context of the poem at first, I wondered why there was two of them on the train -- a young girl and a old family friend, until, "The Gestapo hammered at his front door with the order for his arrest" and now we're in a very specific time and a general area in Europe. The Gestapo is the secret police of Nazi Germany. This brings to light some insight on the "refugee from another century" who "walked out the back door with nothing but his passport in his pocket."
We return to the train station and the girl and the friend have a slight conversation:
Just before our train thundered into the station, making it impossible to hear
out of the blue, he said to me, memory is a paradise no one can expel you from.
This morning, in another century, I woke up remembering.
"Memory is a paradise no one can expel you from" reads very specific and it's very similar to this quote from Jean Paul, "Memory is the only paradise out of which we cannot be driven away." But I don't think there's a bigger connection other than the quote itself. I think the way this narrative is told, the speaker has a bias on why the refugee told that to her, "he walked out the back door with nothing but his passport in his pocket." Memories before that time. How paradise is defined with what is lost.
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