August 1939
I’d flipped the sign to CLOSED for the evening and set to organizing the new bolts of fabric for the shop that had arrived that afternoon. I was annoyed as my hands shook with nervous energy, as if I’d had too much afternoon coffee, though I’d given up the stuff weeks before due to heartburn. That was perhaps the cruelest deprivation of my pregnancy so far. My back ached and my feet were swollen as my body reacted to the changes within, and there was no getting used to the ever-present shaking of my hands, no matter how I tried to master myself.
The days were tolerable. I kept busy tending to clients and threw myself into the day-to-day bustle that came with running the shop. It kept my hands busy and took up just enough space in my head to keep me from running mad. The nights were torture. I couldn’t lose myself in Grandfather’s legal texts like I had in the past. I couldn’t find the focus to take in the words, and it was too dangerous to let my mind wander. It always ended at the same place: Samuel. I woke up each morning covered in tears and clutching the pillow that had been his. Parched for water but loath to replenish myself only to expend the water again the following night.
I wanted to let the tears flow so long, so fervently that I would simply dry up and float away on the breeze like a crumpled, brown autumn leaf. I thought longingly of disappearing. Floating away from the realities that faced me as a widowed soon-to-be mother. To exhale one last time and let the pain wash away. But I would not be the coward my baby’s father had been. I would not be the coward my own father had been.
I would keep my head down and I would survive. For the baby’s sake if nothing else.
I’d managed to keep my condition well hidden for months, though I’d noticed a few more glances at my midsection as the weeks passed. I wore loose clothes to minimize my growing abdomen and was lucky that my bulge wasn’t yet that noticeable. But my time wasn’t far off—only three months left until the baby would make his way into the world and I’d have a fresh new set of worries on my shoulders. Soon, no dress in creation would be able to conceal what Samuel had left behind. I wished I could will the baby to stay as it was for another year. To wait until I could devise a real plan for us. But, like all mothers before me, the timing was not in my hands. Most days I just tried not to think about the baby and all that lay ahead. I focused on that day, that hour, that moment.
Other times, I obsessed about every moment of the future. I rehearsed a story about a beau who got killed in service to the country. Perhaps in the Sudetenland. A good German man with a good German name. Hans Fischer or Rudi Müller, perhaps. He had answered the Führer’s call and had fallen in service to the Fatherland. No one would care about a lovers’ tryst when soldiers were being called to the borders and tensions were mounting as the Führer set his sights on expanding his territories. There were plenty of girls who’d gotten themselves in a similar condition and weren’t treated like the pariahs they would have been a generation before. They were treated as respectfully as any other mother in the Reich.
Every baby born was another future soldier or future mother in the service of Germany, and that was all that seemed to matter. If it kept us alive, I wouldn’t argue.
Weary, I climbed the stairs to the apartment that had once been my mother’s refuge, then Samuel’s. Though Mama had sent word that she was safe, and I couldn’t be entirely sure Samuel was dead, I could feel the restless bits of their souls trapped within the walls. Captivity was a special kind of torture that had left its mark on both of them, and in turn, a bit of each of them would haunt this space as long as it stood. I wasn’t superstitious, but I began to believe that ghosts were well and truly real, and not always remnants of the dead. Sometimes the living left splinters of themselves behind and had to move forward with the fragments that remained.
Even if Samuel were miraculously still alive, he would never be whole again.
Nor would Mama.
Nor would I.
I collapsed into a chair and tried to will myself to make a nourishing dinner. So many nights I made do with bread and a bit of jam or butter, but I knew the baby needed more. I just wasn’t equal to the task of doing better. I hated myself for it, but there was no energy left to summon.
I rocked back and forth in Mama’s favorite old rocking chair, wishing the motion might somehow lead me somewhere. No matter how long I rocked, I was still in the same place I’d been when I started. I knew I had to do more than I’d done in the four months since Samuel left to plan for the baby and to make a life for us. But that required moving on. It felt like even simple gestures like making a plan for the birth of the baby would mean acknowledging the passing of time. In so many ways I clung to the fantasy that this had all been a dream and that he’d come back through the door and the time we’d been apart would be dismissed as the stuff of nightmares.
But nightmares weren’t usually this cruel.
Deep within me, I longed to go to the registry office to ask after Samuel; but I knew that after all the attempts to get travel papers for Mama and my enquiries about the Eisenbergs, I was becoming recognized. If I went in asking after Samuel, I’d surely lose the thin veil of protection that my Aryan appearance bought me. The office was continually staffed by the same few people, so there was no hope of remaining anonymous. I wasn’t the only one who’d taken note. The queue of women asking after their lost husbands and sons had grown shorter and shorter. Either they realized the risk was too great, or had been taken off themselves. If it were just me, I would have taken the risk. Knowing Samuel’s fate would have been worth attracting attention. But the baby had to be my focus now. I would protect him the way my father never protected me. I would be prudent in a way Samuel hadn’t been.
I wrestled with that uncomfortable truth. Samuel had been foolish.
Of course, he’d burned with worry for his parents and sister. He loved them dearly and would have traded his life for theirs. I could not fault him for this.
But they were either gone or beyond our reach.
Giving his life by causing trouble with the authorities served no purpose other than to leave me a widow and to ensure our baby grew up without a father.
It was foolish. It wasn’t noble. It was selfish.
And I could not forgive him for it. Perhaps in time I would, but I knew it would be a long way off.
As I rocked, I realized I could no longer pretend that the baby wasn’t coming. I had to do something to prepare. Tonight. It didn’t have to be big, but it had to be something. I trundled back down to the shop and wandered about the displays, pretending for a moment that I was one of my own clients.
The baby needed clothes. This I could do.
I browsed the sturdy cottons and soft wools that mothers favored, but I found myself among the impractical silks and satins that were seeing far less use these days. One of my favorites was a fine matte white satin. Many brides chose it for their wedding dresses and many mothers for their babies’ christening gowns. It seemed like an extravagance, but it was one I could actually manage to provide for the darling child who would be born with so many other disadvantages.
He would be born Jewish in the middle of a country that despised him. He’d be born without the love and protection of a father. He’d be born to a mother who would struggle constantly to give him even the smallest boon beyond his basic necessities. But he could have this.
Unless a miracle occurred and I was able to leave Germany, I wouldn’t be able to have a proper bris if the baby were a boy, nor an equivalent blessing in the synagogue if she were a girl. But just because we couldn’t have a ceremony didn’t mean the baby shouldn’t feel welcomed into the world. I cut several lengths of some of our softest fabrics along with material for a swaddling cloth like the one Mrs. Eisenberg had wrapped Samuel in for his bris. I added a few patterns for baby gowns and the notions I’d need to complete them. Mama had always insisted on paying back into the till whatever fabric we used, but this once I would defy her meticulous bookkeeping and take what I needed without bothering with the records.
I retreated upstairs where Mama’s sewing machine now resided in a windowless interior room. When she was forced to work out of sight, her one joy had been working in the bright sunlight of the parlor window. But now I always did my sewing after shop hours. More and more, I could not trust that any neighbor who spotted me sewing by kerosene lamp at all hours of the night wouldn’t find some reason to mention it to a block captain. The block captain might find some reason to question me, which could lead to no good outcome.
I selected one of the patterns and cut the fabric with Mama’s best scissors. When I was first learning, I would cut out a dozen or more pieces of fabric under Mama’s watchful eye and marvel that the jumble of pieces, if assembled properly, would become an actual dress. Even as the years passed, I never lost that sense of wonder. There was something soothing about looking at the pieces of material and forcing myself to have faith that they would come together, almost miraculously, to create an article of clothing. If I couldn’t take joy in reading anymore, at least I could have this.
I spent that night engrossed in the small garment I crafted from a daisy-yellow flannel. Carefully stitching, embellishing it tenderly; even finishing it with my initials hidden in the hem. I didn’t know if my baby was going to be a boy or a girl. I didn’t know if my child would be drawn to the law as I was, to music like his father, to some combination of both, or to a path uniquely his own. I didn’t know how I would care for the child and make a living. I didn’t know how to keep either of us safe. But as I clipped the final thread and released the gown from the machine, I knew at least the baby would have one beautiful thing to his name, and it seemed like slightly better than nothing to get started with.