Finally, they came again.
I knew always that they would.
The first time when they came I was fourteen years old. This was 1944. For me they came, and for my little brother, Ludvik. Ludvik: Chaim his name was, in Hebrew. It means life.
They put us in a truck, the children only.
Our Mami had died before the War. So endlessly sorrowful it seemed to us then, but no. She never knew what happened, so for her it was a blessing. Tati by the time the truck came was also gone. I knew: the SS troops shot him, they took the men away and shot them all. Grandmother didn’t tell me and I didn’t tell Ludvik, but I knew.
Ludvik was mine to raise after Mami died, mine and Grandmother’s. She said I must be Ludvik’s Little Mami. Tati was sweet, and funny, but so sad about Mami, and children? You might have thought we were from the moon. Sometimes his face became so puzzled, he tilted his head so far trying to understand us—Ludvik and I had to laugh.
Ludvik laughed a lot. He was a happy boy, full of jokes and pranks. Grandmother and I tried to shield him from what was happening around us. This was not really possible, especially after the men were taken away, but I think he understood we were trying and so he pretended. And he had such a happy nature.
Early one morning, a neighbor ran to Grandmother to say a truck was coming to take away the children. Grandmother’s face went white and she tried to hide us. She told us to lie flat on the bed slats and she put the mattress over us and made up the bed. The mattress was heavy, the slats were hard and I held Ludvik’s hand, though he was eight years old and not a baby. We lay facing the floor, trying to breathe between the slats. We heard pounding on the door, then men’s voices yelling. Pots crashed in the kitchen and dishes broke. Boots stomped closer; the men came into the bedroom. They threw the closet open, pulled the wardrobe down. It crashed to the floor. Great-grandmother’s bowl fell from the top of it and shattered.
Then the coverlet flew off the bed. The mattress, that heavy weight, was lifted off and Ludvik was pulled from my hand. Then I, too, was pulled up. I staggered. Grandmother was crying, she was on her knees. She begged them not to take us. A soldier hit her with the back of his hand, sent her sprawling across the floor. He grabbed up Ludvik under his arm like a sack and carried him out of the room, out of the house. Ludvik kicked. The soldier punched him. Grandmother wailed. Hands pushed me forward and I went, stumbling out the door. The soldier threw Ludvik onto the back of a truck already filled with children, some crying, some frozen in silence. The soldier grinned at me, a horrible face, and he pointed. I climbed onto the truck, skinning my knee.
The journey was very long. More children were picked up, loaded together with us. Many of them we knew. We were friends, we had played together, had gone to school together when that was still allowed to Jews. The older children stood so the babies had room to sit. Ludvik insisted on standing, too, with me. So many were crying. As it got dark, and cold, the crying slowly stopped. Everyone huddled together, trying to keep warm.
Late at night the truck drove through the gate of a place we’d never seen. It stopped and loud-voiced men told us to get out, to line up. The lights shone very bright. The soldiers went down the line and I could see: they were pulling out the older girls, taking them away. When a soldier came to me he ordered me to step forward. I heard my voice shaking as I said to him I would do anything they wanted—I knew full well what they wanted, it terrified me—anything they wanted, but please let my little brother come with me.
Skinny, he was, this soldier, with glittering, small eyes. He said, You will do whatever we want, in any case. Which is your brother? I showed him.
Step forward, he said to Ludvik. Ludvik took a step and reached out his hand to me.
The soldier raised his pistol and fired.
The noise was very loud. Another child screamed. Ludvik made no sound. Eyes still open, his hand still held out, he fell forward in the dirt. I tried to run to him but another soldier lifted me and dragged me away. I kicked and shrieked. He hit me hard.
• • •
For nearly a year I was there. I sat in a room, on a bed, waiting for the men. The things they did to me, I won’t describe to you. Some of the other girls I could hear screaming or sobbing in their rooms. Some of them died.
When no man was there I watched out the window in case Ludvik was not dead, in case he had only been hurt and would soon march past carrying a shovel or pushing a wheelbarrow. As other little boys did. The boys whose sisters had not tried to save them.
When the Americans came, I hardly knew. They gave us clothes and blankets and they gave us food, and I ate and wrapped myself but I thought they were just more men and would do more things to me. They moved us, the older girls, to a different building. Then, a few days later, again in trucks, they took us to another place. A different kind of camp, they said, but it was the same to me. Doctors examined us. They asked my name but I didn’t speak. Since Ludvik died, I hadn’t spoken. Do you not know your name? one man asked gently. I knew what my name had been before I came here, but now, I was someone else. Her name, I didn’t know.
So I said nothing, and went wherever in the new camp they told me, and sat in my blanket, and ate the food they brought, and waited for the men.
But no men came.
What happened was, they brought the children.
From where, I don’t know. Young children, skinny and crying and scared. Some they carried in, some walked. They had beds for them in another big room past the room for us. One little boy tried to walk with the others but he was unsteady and he fell down, right in front of my bed. He looked so sad but he didn’t cry. He just sat where he’d fallen, watching as the Americans led the other children away. After a time I got out of my blanket, picked him up, and carried him back with me. I wrapped us up together and rocked him, and he fell asleep. When he stirred and started to cry, Hush, I said.
• • •
I stayed in that camp, a relocation camp it was, for two years. I ate and grew strong. I helped with the children. From the soldiers I learned English. The people in charge, many different agencies, they tried to find families, if anyone was left. Many children had no families anymore, or didn’t know who their families had been, knew only Momma and Pappa, Mami and Tati.
In the end the camp was closed. The children who no longer had families were taken in by families who no longer had children, or by agencies in Israel, in Canada, in America.
I had no family; I was sent to America, here to this quiet, pretty town. A kind couple whose son died in the War took me into their home, sent me to school. I will not say their names because both are gone now and I do not want their memory dishonored by what has come after.
All my life since I came here I have lived in this town. I did not marry. After the camp, never again would I let a man touch me. I went to college and became a teacher. In the public school I taught and also in the Hebrew school in the town’s single synagogue, Temple Sinai. Why did I do this? After all that had happened, all I had seen, did I still believe in a benevolent God? Or at least, a righteous one, a God who would avenge the wrongs done to His people?
I did not.
I taught in the Hebrew school because these children, these beautiful children, they had to know who they were. If knowledge is in any way truly power, then knowing the past would help them be prepared, more prepared than we had been, when the Nazis came.
But knowledge is not the only power. Very early, I bought a gun. I would not be helpless again.
• • •
And to our quiet town, our pretty town in the middle of America, more than seventy years later, the Nazis came.
Neo-Nazis, they call them; alt-right, and skinheads, and nativists. We have now a president who allows it, who says some of them are fine people. I know who they are. The swastikas on their armbands and the eagles on their flags, I know. Their loud voices and mean faces, their fists, I know.
The Nazis decided they would march here, down our Main Street, from the playing fields—the children’s playing fields!—to City Hall. In our town we have many churches. To one of them most of the black people go, Mount Horeb Baptist Church. It sits down the street from Temple Sinai. Sinai and Horeb: different names for the same mountain. The route these Nazis chose went in front of both.
We knew the route in advance because the mayor announced it. We cannot stop them from coming but we will fight them with knowledge, he said. And with peace. Everyone along the route, close your doors, stay inside, turn your backs. Deny them what they want: attention.
We were not sure. At Mount Horeb Church, they also were not sure. The minister came to meet with our rabbi. His Elders came, and our Board of Assembly, and we met together. We discussed and debated and together we prayed. In the end there was no vote: consensus was unanimous. Peace, yes, we agreed; but we would be seen. We did not think the Nazis wanted only attention. We thought—I knew—they wanted to frighten us. To scare us into hiding ourselves. Once they saw we were scared, they would grow stronger. So we refused.
They came at night. Lifting high their torches, they stomped and chanted, they shouted and saluted. We saw them coming up the street. Our congregations had chosen to mix ourselves together. In front of Temple Sinai and also in front of Mount Horeb Church Jews stood silently. Black people stood at Mount Horeb and at Temple Sinai. Men and women together, in lines. Also with us, many people from the town, neither Jew nor black but people who wanted also to be seen.
The children had been told to stay at home, but at Temple Sinai the recent bar and bat mitzvahs, the thirteen- and fourteen-year-olds, had a meeting the adults did not know about. They took a vote and came out as one to stand in the lines. We are adults now, said their spokesman, a boy whose voice had not yet broken. We share the responsibility for our community.
I was so proud of the children.
I was there, in the line. I am on the Board of Assembly and I had been part of the debate. My duty was to be there, but people said, You are eighty-six years old. They said this gently, but I answered, Yes, and my greatest regret is that I was so frightened when the Nazis came the first time that I obeyed.
We stood. They came. At first, they just raised their fists, they shouted louder. Black people and Jews standing together, unafraid, it incensed them. Then they broke ranks, charged right up to us. They cursed, screamed Heil Hitler and Niggers burn in hell. The police came, pushed them back. That the police were there, fighting against them, it made them furious. This is our country. Someone threw a bottle. Die, nigger. Someone threw a punch. Fuck the Jews. So many people shouting. Scuffles and fights. One of the bat mitzvahs, a freckled girl named Leah, yelled to a Nazi. A troublemaker, Leah, a girl I always liked. To the Nazi, a boy who looked no older than she was, she screamed, Your mother is ashamed.
The Nazi pulled Leah from the line, threw her down, and started punching her.
I pulled out my gun, fired into the street beside him. I would have shot him without hesitation but I was afraid for Leah.
Concrete sprayed. The Nazi boy leapt fast and fell over. He looked frantically for the person with the gun. I had it fixed on him, not four feet from his face. Lying on the ground, eyes wide, he begged. No, no, please. He raised his hands. Please don’t shoot me. I was holding the gun so hard my arms shook.
So badly, with my whole body, I wanted to shoot him. More, I thought, than I had ever wanted anything. But as soon as that thought came I knew this: even more, I had wanted to see Ludvik from the window of my room. And then I thought, this Nazi boy, he is someone’s grandson. He is someone’s little brother. I let the gun lower slowly. My whole body slumped.
The Nazi boy jumped to his feet and pulled away my gun. I staggered. Jew bitch! Jew bitch! He pointed it at me. Leah lunged up from the ground to knock his arm away. The gun fired. Two policemen also then shot their guns.
• • •
Leah’s funeral was this morning. Within twenty-four hours, we bury our dead. The entire synagogue was there, and the Mount Horeb congregation came, too. The Nazi boy, I don’t know when his funeral will be, or who will come. His name was in the newspapers but I don’t remember it.
At the funeral, everyone came and said, Are you all right? I hope you know this isn’t your fault. I know. Directly from the funeral I came home. I sat on my bed and wrapped myself in my blanket and I took these pills, all these pills. But not because I think it was my fault.
It’s only, nothing has changed.
If we’re silent, if we speak up; if we’re cowardly, if we’re brave; if we’re unwary, if we’re prepared; if we’re harsh, if we’re merciful: the ending is the same.
I wanted to save Ludvik.
I wanted the children to know who they were, to be ready.
I wanted to show the Nazi boy pity, to let him live.
I wanted to save Leah.
Finally, now, there is nothing I want.