So she had missed the pumpkin-patch trips, the symphony orchestra outings, and the fifth-grade day trip to Philadelphia. But she’d never felt like a slacker for taking a pass, until this time, until she had outright overlooked a field trip consent form because she’d been distracted by an asylum case and its fallout.
The violation was aggravated by the fact that Mikey was child number three, the one who didn’t see her as much in his elementary school because she had ported her efforts to the middle and high schools, where she didn’t have to bake or laminate so much. It was also intensified by the emerging fact that child number one had drifted away and child number two seemed well on her way to being fully independent of her mother.
When Jessica had read the overdue consent form, she’d recalled all of those times in grade school when Mikey had batted those long eyelashes and asked if she could please please please chaperone. Then she’d thought of the nights this year when he had no longer needed or even asked for her help.
This go-around, she would sign up and spend some time with her little boy.
And that was how she found herself on this gorgeous fall day, heading to DC and the Holocaust Museum.
Jessica placed her hand on a cracked pleather seat back as she scanned the bus to find Mikey. She moved forward, seeing him joking around with a group of boys in the back. Mikey raised his head, waved at Jessica, and grinned his toothy smile.
A preteen, prejaded moment like this reminded Jessica of Conor as a sweet mama’s boy, happily walking next to Jessica at the mall—directly next to her, not the five steps back that he did now, as though he didn’t know the woman in front of him who’d just bought him the newest iPhone. Maybe she should have gone on some field trips with Conor.
As she moved toward the rear of the bus, Mikey was already back to joking with his friends. Jessica stopped short. He didn’t want her back there. A needle of pain spiked her chest, then came the warm flush of embarrassment. The other two moms and the teachers sat at the front of the bus. They already knew. Jessica joined them in the mom zone.
It didn’t take long into the trip for Jessica’s nose to alert her to the fact that a good number of Mikey’s classmates had hit puberty. Mikey wasn’t fully there yet, but hauling Conor and his friends home from sports practices had familiarized Jessica with the ripe odor of boys who hadn’t yet learned the utility and courtesy of deodorant. The odor would be enhanced exponentially after a full day’s activities, possibly sealing the deal that this would be Jessica’s one and only field trip.
Despite today’s noisy passengers and poorly maintained shock absorbers, the drive flooded Jessica with memories of her commuting days. The eight lanes full of anonymous commuters jockeying for position and the unremarkable landscape of highway-adjacent suburbia remained unchanged. She’d disparaged the sixty- to ninety-minute commute when she had moved from DC. Years of carpool, however, illuminated the luxury of being alone in the car, with no kids fighting over the radio station and no one interrupting her thoughts—Jessica thought of Conor skulking out of the kitchen—and no one ignoring her.
As the bus finally started inching its way through DC’s streets, Jessica turned from her memories back to the view outside her window. The sun penetrated the capitol city, but the wind seized the day. Conservative suits rushed by, the backs of suit coats flipping in the updrafts. A couple of white-haired tourists in Washington, DC, sweatshirts and fanny packs struggled to unfold their map as blasts of fall air whipped it away from their hands.
That could have been her in another life. Not the fanny-packed tourist lost in DC but the rushing suit, a partner at Highland & Cross instead of a chaperone on a yellow bus.
Her gaze fell on a woman standing on a corner up ahead. About Jessica’s age, she wore Capitol Hill navy and carried a sleek black bag. Her shoes were too expensive for her to work for the government, so she must have been a lobbyist or a lawyer at one of the big law firms.
Considering the twentysomething young man accompanying the woman, Jessica went with lawyer. The young man looked eager, if a bit harried, and pulled a wheeled mobile file case. Jessica had once been that young associate. He had probably been up most of the night, getting the due diligence files organized ahead of the meeting they were on their way to right now.
Working as a young associate had been exhausting.
H&C represented Fortune 500 companies and boasted partners who had previously worked for the SEC, the FTC, and the whole federal alphabet soup. That first client meeting had been heady for Jessica, the fresh lawyer from Iowa, shifting in her chair, taking notes, and not understanding half of the discussion going on around her. But she had inhaled every sight and sound and reveled in the importance of it all. Exhaustion had been exhilarating.
The light turned green. The two maybe-attorneys crossed the street, and the yellow school bus turned left. Jessica picked at the cracked black pleather of the seat.
DISGORGED FROM THE bus, the sixth graders scrambled ahead of the adults to form a line to go through the metal detector, seemingly oblivious to the mass genocide that would be on display inside the building in front of them. Their teacher’s admonitions to be respectful and quiet hadn’t had any effect.
Jessica cleared security and joined the group in the atrium, relieved to find the boisterous kids had become model children, quiet and still. Turning, her eyes pulled ever upward, Jessica decided it hadn’t been the teacher’s words that had caused the transformation.
The atrium was large, open, and bright. But it was also ominous, with cold brick walls and exposed industrial metal braces framing the glass ceiling.
As the docents led the group toward a corner of the atrium, Jessica smiled lightly at Mikey, who listened attentively to the woman addressing the group. This wouldn’t be the bonding experience she had planned. She got her own instructions from a teacher: keep an eye on wandering kids and quiet, unruly behavior, and make sure everyone returned to the atrium in sixty minutes. Her assigned group didn’t even include Mikey.
The main exhibit started on the top floor, winding its way back down toward the maybe-it’s-a-train-station-maybe-it’s-not atrium. Stepping off the elevator on the fourth floor with her group, Jessica wilted at the huge photo of burnt bodies that faced her. She pivoted away and edged to the rear of the pack of students, which quickly dispersed into whispering clumps throughout the low-lit exhibit.
Jessica followed the students, threading her way through hushed visitors and watching for wanderers and unruliness among her charges. They, like she, were pulled to the photos, videos, and artifacts surrounding them. The babble of news reels and images of Nazi Germany blended into a harsh mosaic, ultimately distracting Jessica from her chaperone duties. She’d seen this mosaic before, in textbooks, historical fiction, and World War II movies over the years. But now modern images from her research began to flit through her mind, mirroring the destruction and human atrocities depicted in black and white around her.
Then the smell hit. Jessica could feel it in her chest before she could even process the origin of the vaguely nauseating scent. Looking around the dim room she had just entered, she saw a jumbled gray mass open to the air. Her eyes panned the length of the mass and stopped on a single item—a woman’s lace-up oxford, small heel, no lace, and its original color lost to history.
Like the thousands of other shoes in the mass, this oxford was a disintegrating gray brown. Before she could envision the last wearer of the shoe, she panned out and saw a child’s first shoe, a woman’s pump, a man’s work shoe—thousands of them, intermingled. All of them were grayed with age, and no shoe was anywhere near its mate. Each of these shoes, these dull, lifeless pieces of cloth and leather, represented a lingering and fading shadow of a life lost, a story untold. Someone had worn these shoes. Before. These shoes once had important places to go, important things to do. And now they, too, were turning to dust.
BACK IN THE ATRIUM and missing her charges, Jessica found a helpful docent who directed her to whe
re the students had assembled, fidgeting and whispering and eyeing an empty chair sitting in front of them.
Before any unruliness commenced, an impish woman with intentional posture walked up to the chair, made a slight bow, and sat. Though delicate and slight, she faced her young audience with a commanding eye. In her brown polyester slacks, cheetah-print cardigan, and chunky necklace, she could have been anyone’s grandmother. Her comfortable mall-walking shoes were all white except for the cheetah-print laces. She either loved animal prints or she always matched her laces to her top.
As the woman scanned the room, the whispering stopped, though not the fidgeting. She introduced herself. “I am Ada Rubenstein. I am a Holocaust survivor.” Her German-accented words flowed clearly and slowly, sentences tending to build in a soft crescendo, drawing in her listeners.
Her calm in front of the students contrasted with the life in her eyes and in her words. Movement in the audience ceased. With a flourish of her hands to highlight a part of her story, she would draw the students in even more.
The woman started with a story about a visit to the beach with her family. “My father”—she smiled as if she were paging through a scrapbook of her youth—“he would throw us up into the air, my three sisters and me, as high and as far out in the water as he could, like we were flying. He was very strong.” She flexed her arm. The kids snickered, and she giggled. “I still remember the sky that day. It was so blue, with clouds like cotton. And the sea stretched out as far as we could see. I remember the smiles on my little sisters’ faces.” That was the last trip her family had taken before four of them stepped onto the cattle car that took them to the camp.
Before that train ride, however, Ada and her family had watched the world around them mutate from a world the sixth graders would recognize as similar to their own—“without Snapchat, of course,” she noted—to one filled with fear and confusion.
“My family had a jewelry store. The Nazis destroyed it during Kristallnacht, which you learned about on your tour. But my father was convinced the terror would pass once the Nazis felt secure in their power. Instead, atrocities became a part of life. We grew used to witnessing degradations and humiliations in the street. It became normal.”
The kids listened politely. Mikey rested his chin on his left hand, transfixed, while Jessica had a growing sense of unease about what had befallen Ada’s family. She had the same feeling each time she spoke with Amina, a thick dread at what she was about to hear and sinking guilt for being a mere observer.
Ada took care with her description of her family’s arrival at Auschwitz. She’d clearly spoken to many groups of school kids and tailored her story for the age group in front of her. Her two youngest sisters had been hidden at a neighbor’s home when the Gestapo herded the rest of the family to the trains, so they had been left behind. She spoke of her father’s last words to her before guards led him away with the other men toward a brick building in the distance. She spoke of how she and the one sister with her would secretly sing Hebrew songs to defeat the guards in their own innocent way, and how a mother whose baby had died looked after Ada and her sister when their own mother died of starvation.
A warm tear rolled down Jessica’s right cheek. Her nose would start running shortly, and she didn’t have any tissues on her. Her sleeve would have to do, though she wouldn’t be able to do anything about the splotchy face she was sure to have by the time Ada concluded her story.
“I was one of the lucky ones. I was alive when the Allies arrived. But in the chaos of the liberation, my sister and I were placed onto separate trains.” Ada was adopted into a Jewish family that had escaped to Switzerland in the thirties, and they emigrated to the United States in 1949.
“I searched and searched for my father and my sisters. My father, I knew in my heart he had gone to the gas chambers, as that is what they did with the men there. But to a young girl, nothing is impossible, so I always imagined he had made a daring escape and spent the rest of his life trying to find us.” Her eyes sparkled at the thought of his escape or perhaps glistened at the heartbreak of his murder.
“I never found my sisters. After the war, you see, orphans were placed with families in Europe and America. Those who had been in hiding were often given false papers and even converted to other religions to help keep them safe. The little ones sometimes never learned their true identities.”
She leaned forward, gazing at the students from left to right. “But they survived. I like to think that my little sisters grew up in France, where they went to the beach every summer and had foggy but happy memories of being thrown through the air by a man with strong arms who made them feel safe. They might not know if it was a true memory or just the shadow of a dream, but they would feel the warmth of love along with the warmth of the sun.”
The woman folded her hands in her lap, closed her eyes, and took a deep breath that filled her face with calm. The sixth graders glanced nervously at each other then at their teachers. There was some hesitant clapping, but that tapered quickly.
Jessica just wanted to give the impish little lady a hug. Not to make the Holocaust survivor feel better but to alleviate Jessica’s sadness, to alleviate her guilt for never having gone through anything so horrific, to acknowledge that the survivor’s experience was not in vain, and to promise that Jessica would have done something back then to help, would do something now. She would do something now.
As the students piled into the bus, they returned to form. Someone threw a straw that was lying on the floor, and someone else started making fart noises.
As the bus rumbled awkwardly through the afternoon traffic, every bump seemed magnified, each jolt intentional. Fanny packs and suits blended meaninglessly in the passing blur of the city. If the bus still smelled, Jessica didn’t notice.
“Mom?”
Jessica glanced over from the driver’s seat. She and Mikey had been driving in silence in the ten minutes since the bus had dropped them off at school, and Mikey didn’t even have his phone out. “Yes?”
“I was thinking. About the Holocaust lady and her family. It’s really sad that she never found them.” Mikey’s mouth turned downward with concern.
“I know, honey. It’s terrible what they all went through. I don’t know if it’s worse to know what happened or not to know.”
Mikey didn’t miss a beat. “It would definitely be better not to know.”
“Really? Why do you say that?”
“Well, because if you know something bad happened to them, it would make you very sad to think about that bad thing happening. And you would probably think about it over and over, and that would be terrible.”
“That’s a good point. But some people think at least then you would have closure, meaning you can move on and not continue to worry about what might have happened.” Jessica turned on her blinker and slowed ahead of the stoplight.
Mikey spoke deliberately. “But I think that if you don’t know what happened, you can imagine happy things. You can have hope for their lives, you know? Like the lady said. You can have hope that you’ll see them again, right?”
“What about the bad things that might have happened to them? Wouldn’t you think of those, too?”
Mikey looked through the window at the cars crossing the road in front of them. “I don’t think you should think of the bad things that might have happened. What good does that do? Thinking of good things can at least keep you happy. And maybe it would be true.”
It was hard to argue with that. Mikey didn’t seem so little anymore.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
“I thought you would be done with me.” Amina was uncharacteristically casual, even picking at a muffin that she let Jessica buy her.
“I wondered about it myself, to be honest.” Jessica slid her chair closer to the table, wincing at the scrape of metal against the concrete floor. “I’ve never been in such a scary situation.” She stared at the steam rising from her coffee. She hated how she sounded. She didn’t kn
ow scary. She’d spent the last week and a half trying to convince herself, almost successfully, that those men had just been three idiots spouting off and nothing more. Scary or not, at least she’d had her husband to return home to that night.
Amina’s face didn’t reflect the anger or resentment Jessica would have expected, whether toward the men or toward Jessica’s handling of the situation. “I am so sorry. I shouldn’t have waited so long to see you. I should have called you afterwards. Are you okay? How have you been doing?”
Amina sipped her tea. “I’d rather tell you about my brother.”
“Of course.” There had been two brothers listed on Amina’s asylum application, one living, one deceased.
Amina smiled, her face filling with the glow of the memory. “My younger brother was Samir. He was so good. All the people loved him from when he was a smiling baby. Even when he was a teenager, he still brought fruit to the elderly and played hajla with the little children in the street. He could talk with the old men for hours. He would have been the gentlest doctor, the kindest teacher.”
Jessica ran her thumb down the length of her cup as she took a fortifying breath, half hoping the drone of the coffee grinder would drown out what was to come. Samir was the deceased brother.
Amina pulled her bag onto her lap and stared out the coffee-shop window. “Once, when he was around six years old, he found a baby bird by our door. The baby bird was dead, but my brother, he still tried to heal it. He wrapped it in cloth and carried it around in a tiny basket for a day to keep it warm. We tried to tell him the bird had gone, but he was so young. He felt important. He felt responsible.”
Unbroken Threads Page 14
