by Carol Zoref
“Hey toots, you can’t go in there,” a man called after me. “You gotta get a number!”
My fingers were already wrapped around the doorknob when the man grabbed my arm.
“Where do you think you’re going?” he snarled.
“Mr. Schwartzbart!” I cried. I banged on the door, hoping he could hear through the open transom. “Mr. Schwartzbart!”
The door swung open. Seated behind Mr. Schwartzbart was as sad-looking a family as I have ever seen; sadder than the homeless family I had seen on the street; even sadder than the pickers on the barge. They did not look at Mr. Schwartzbart; they did not look at one another; they did not look at me. All four kept their gazes locked on their knees.
“Never mind, Danny,” Mr. Schwartzbart told the other man. “Let the girl go.”
Mr. Schwartzbart walked me further up the hall, out of earshot of the people in his office. “What’s this about? Is your father okay? Is your mother sick again?”
“They’re shutting down Barren Shoal. And I need to know where you’re sending them. The family. How will they find us when we’re moved?”
“Do you speak German?” he asked in a hushed voice.
I frowned.
“Yiddish?” he asked.
“A bisl.” A little.
“Come inside.”
The sad family was sitting stone still. They did not appear injured. They did not even appear frightened. They were beyond that. They wore the sadness that keeps people lonely in a room of those who love them.
The only thing Mr. Schwartzbart said that I understood was my name. The parents nodded in my direction; the children did nothing. We all understood that we were to wait while Mr. Schwartzbart stepped out.
He returned moments later with the man named Danny, who said something else in German. The family filed out behind him, but not before the father shook Mr. Schwartzbart’s hand. Mr. Schwartzbart covered the man’s hand with his own, just like he had my father’s hand all those years before. And, like then, he held it for a long moment.
“Sit, young lady,” said Mr. Schwartzbart when we were alone. I took the chair beside his desk, the one where my father sat when they first filled out the papers.
“Did you take a good look at those people?” he asked.
“The ones who just left?” I said.
“They’re Germans. From Berlin. He’s a lawyer. She teaches violin. Very successful. Very charitable. Their parents were Berliners. And their grandparents. Her father was awarded the Iron Cross in the Great War. They had a house on Krausnickstrasse; he had an office with partners; she had a conservatory room at home where she instructed the children of other middle-class Berliners.
“Last year they sold the house and everything in it for pennies, because that’s all anyone would pay a Jew. Thank goodness they began withdrawing from the bank when the troubles started. Thousands of deutsche marks, which they hid in so many places that they had to dig up their whole garden when their papers came through. What did this get them? On a train from Berlin to Paris, then a train to Marseille. From Marseille on a boat to Morocco. From Casablanca a boat to Portugal. From Lisbon a ship to Brazil. From Rio de Janeiro a ship to Canada. From Halifax a boat to Portland, Maine. From Portland a train to Boston. From Boston a train to New York, where they have people. You want to know about your relatives from Zyrmuny? So do I. But I don’t. I wish I did. I wish I could tell you some news, but I can’t.”
“But my money....”
“...is in a pool of money that we use to get out whoever we can, however we can. Maybe even your relatives from Zyrmuny.”
“It was my money!”
I jumped up from the chair.
“Sit down, Marta. Not yours. It was never yours. No one gives $1000 to a poor girl from Barren Shoal.”
“But I gave it to you!”
“Go on, then. Report me to the police.”
I sat down.
“Believe me: I know this is difficult. Do you remember what you said? ‘It’s all the same, whether you help republicans in Spain or Jews in Zyrmuny.’ At this very moment, a thousand dollars can’t get your ten people out of Zyrmuny. But it can help someone. Maybe. We do what we can. When we can. And maybe next time someone else’s money will get to Zyrmuny at the same moment that someone else is willing to sell visas.”
“What if we were rich? Like those people in your office.”
“If they were rich enough they would have left long before. Maybe. Those people aren’t Rothschilds. They spent everything they had getting out. But listen: money is no guarantee. This is the hardest thing you’ll ever learn, so you better start now: there are no guarantees. None at all, financial or otherwise. Zero. Never. Zilch. Do you hear me? No guarantees. Stop searching for them, stop believing in them, stop hoping for them, stop praying for them.”
The furnaces were still cooling on Barren Shoal—they had been burning practically non-stop since the 1850s!—when my mother and I finished packing the towels and linens and the handful of items that went into what we called our wardrobes. Everything we packed was ironed first, including a dress that had been handed down from Marie Dowd to me and from me to Helen. That little wool dress was a dress that Helen had worn. There was also a pair of her small socks. My mother packed Noah’s few remaining things with mine and Helen’s things with her own.
It was impossible to predict the life that was coming, never mind the final moments of the life we were leaving behind. Who would be there to watch us drag our boxes down the sandy road to the dock? Or to pick through what we left behind, the way Noah and the boys had scavenged the books and tools and rowboat from Barren Island? Who would be there to watch our boat pull away the way we watched the ferry leave three years earlier? Who would care about our leaving the way we cared about those people? Who but us cared at all?
Expectation made everyone count and re-count the days as if anyone needed to be reminded that time was running out. For all that I remember, I cannot remember how much time passed between the arrival of the eviction notices and the day we left for good. There were arguments over whether the last day counted as a day when we still lived on Barren Shoal or as a day when we no longer did. But that was like arguing with water running down a drain.
The final day arrived as if everything took place without warning. How many ways can I describe being unprepared? All that matters is that we had to go.
The seagulls were screaming hysterically when the garbage barges did not arrive. They hovered over the ferry in disbelief as the morning sky grew brighter and the big clouds, like a bouquet of pink and blue hydrangeas, were drained of color. The dock stank of rotting things that had been oozing into the pilings for decades. It also smelled of panic.
All those years of planning and hoping and scheming on Barren Shoal had nothing to do with what others had in mind for us, the things we did not even know how to imagine. The people who believed that Barren Shoal was safe after Barren Island was demolished never stopped believing, even when they were dragged onto the ferry by policemen. Other people, including my mother, stopped believing Barren Shoal was safe from the moment they arrived. My mother never thought we were safe enough from anything, safety being a relative term and the thing it was relative to forever shifting. She was right, I suppose, which does not change the fact that she was a little crazy. What kind of way is that to live, afraid all the time as if the only things that matter are the things we are most afraid of? Perhaps she never had the luxury of wondering about that, the luxury I have right here, right now, this very moment.
Our garden was bursting by then with tomatoes and eggplants that we harvested to take along, and so many zucchinis that we had to leave for the rats. The factory—after all that brouhaha over whether or not to have a union and which union was the right union—was already being razed by picks and hammers that we could hear as we crossed the water. Half of us spent the slow ride to Brooklyn watching Barren Shoal disappear behind us. The other half of the people on the ferry—Sof
ia among them—had a view of Brooklyn growing larger.
I barely said a proper good-bye to Sofia, what with all the sorting and packing and crying. Not that we did not talk about what was happening. But as for saying good-bye, every time the subject came up it left us breathless. Literally. What could we say? With what words, in what language, with what meaning? When we docked at Gravesend, there was mostly chaos and crying and time for little more than a hundred quick farewells to people I had known my entire life.
As for Barren Shoal itself, the island disappeared not long after. No exaggeration. The combination of the ongoing landfill project for Floyd Bennett Field and the suffocation of the salt marshes from an oil tanker spill caused irreparable erosion. The tanker made it to the Esso refinery in New Jersey without breaking up, but not before leaking who-knows-how-much crude into the waters off Long Island. With the salt marshes gone, there was nothing left to protect the sandy soil from the tides or the annual nor’easters.
My parents and I moved into an apartment around the corner from Aunt Sara, Uncle David, and Flat Sammy. I slept in what would have been the dining room behind a curtain that my mother hung for privacy. My cousin Ruthie and Sidney lived five blocks away, where they had moved from Rivington St. when they started having children. Brooklyn Heights, where Miss Finn lived, was almost as far away from where we lived now as Manhattan. Not that it mattered. She left for Europe the week before Labor Day, just days before the Germans invaded Poland. Jane Shaw, the Barren Island schoolteacher, died two weeks later, meaning that neither knew what happened to the other, just like millions of people.
The pain of missing everyone and everything took up cold residence in a previously unspoken-for hollow in my chest. I did not know that I had room for more pain after Helen died, and more again after I let Ray break my heart. It turns out there is always room for more.
Hunter College was no longer a possibility for me, not because anyone said I could not go. And not only because the classes sounded like dreary repetitions of the subjects I studied with Miss Finn. I did not go to Hunter because I could not go. I had never been afraid of those kinds of things before, but for a while I was afraid of everything. So much for the courage that came with my short-lived career as a thief. I hear what I am saying: for a time I became as fearful as my mother. Noah was gone, then Miss Finn was gone, the $1000 was gone, and now we were gone as well. Our whole life on Barren Shoal was gone not by choice but by circumstance, which meant it had everything yet nothing to do with us. I had believed that knowing things made knowing about them worthwhile. But to what end? Islands disappear anyway. So do people.
My parents were brokenhearted when I announced my decision to find a job instead of starting school. My father took it especially hard, his hopes for Noah already dashed by the invention of the mysterious James Peck.
“What makes you so certain you’ll find a job anyway?” asked my father.
“What kind of job?” asked my mother.
“A lot of good school did those university boys who burned the books in the Berlin Opernplatz,” I replied.
“You’re not half as smart as I thought if you compare yourself to them,” said my father, who was equal parts disgusted and distraught.
The biggest surprise of all was barely a surprise given who I was and the traceable history of those still around me, however brief and incompletely traceable that turned out to be. I found a job in the garment industry of all places, just like everyone in the family before me, as if some impossible and incalculable force of destiny was in play. Even if I do not believe in providence, which has been my whole point all along.
I was assigned to assist a photographer. I carried dresses and hats and gloves back and forth from the design houses to the studio. My father got a job in the shoe factory on 39th St. as a cutter, my Uncle David having sent word to Mr. Singer on his behalf. It was the first time I knew of that he did not come home smelling of rotting flesh. Now he smelled of boot polish and glue.
I worried for a time about Noah finding us if he ever returned to New York from wherever he was—Oregon, Washington, California, Spain, who-knows-where next. Later I decided this was silly; at one point or another one of my letters would catch up with him, which one finally did. Soon he was sending mail to the new address. My father wrote to the relatives in Zyrmuny as well. It was too late. No one ever heard from them ever again. Not even Mr. Schwartzbart—despite how angry he made me on that terrible day—who tried to save everyone he could. It was not until 1998, almost sixty years later, that we finally learned of their fates. A new, huge directory was now made possible by the Internet. The Nazis and their cohorts kept impeccable records. The relatives who were not killed right away were sent to a concentration camp. They worked as slaves in a Krupp factory, where they either starved to death or died of typhus.
My grandson found a second cousin of my grandfather through the Internet, a clarinetist who returned to Warsaw after the war to look for his parents and who decided to stay, there being plenty of work for woodwinds during the post-war jazz craze. When the Russians moved in, he became a teacher in a conservatory, married a Catholic woman, and kept his survivor stories of barns and cellars to himself. The clarinetist, ten years older than me, was the only one, to our knowledge, who survived. He saw his father beaten to death in the street outside their house when the SS came for the family. His mother and sisters were pistol-whipped and shoved into a truck and gassed. The clarinetist, who was sneaking back from a girlfriend’s house after curfew, took his chances and ran. If only all of those who ran had such good luck. Maybe another survivor will turn up like they sometimes do, squeezing through the otherwise impenetrable weight of the twentieth century. They had better do it fast.
I had been working for two years in the photo studio when Pearl Harbor was bombed and my boss was drafted. He recommended me for his job, explaining that he was entrusting to me temporary custody of his position. He never came back. Not only did he not come back to the studio, but he never made it back from the war. I felt awful about this for a long time, as if his death made my job dirty. For a long time I thought that my supervisor felt awful about it too, which is why my title remained “assistant” instead of “manager.” It never crossed my mind that I did not get the title—or the pay—because I was a woman. I never thought about it until the feminists came along. It took me that long—twenty years—to first wonder.
There was no one who was not touched by the war, no one who did not lose people. Instead of being swept into the vortex of absolute sadness like my mother was yet again, I volunteered, writing letters to troops overseas on behalf of loved ones who were illiterate. I was also an air-raid warden in the building on 39th Street. I had no idea what Ray did; I could only assume he was drafted.
There is nothing to be gained by beating up myself about Hunter. Or about the money I stole. What I did was wrong, even if I did it for the right reasons. And there is nothing to be gained by making my life sound harder than it was. We understood exactly what would become of us if the Nazis came to power in America. Phooey on those Europeans who insist they did not know. It is one thing for a person to try for survival when people all around them are dying. It is not for me to judge; I was not there. It is something else altogether not to notice the very thing at the tip of your nose. Or to pretend. To pretend not to notice the smells that blew in from the death camps at Auschwitz-Birkenau, Belzec, Chelmno, Jasenovac, Lwów, Majdanek, Maly Trostenets, Sobibor, Treblinka, and Warsaw. Or pretend not to notice the stench of the dead at the work camps. Do I have to name them too? Do you want to ask about the smell?
If the residents of Brooklyn could smell the smoke from Barren Shoal and Barren Island, then the people of Germany and Austria and Poland and Croatia and Belarus and Ukraine smelled the stench of the death camps too. They may fool themselves and one another, but they cannot fool me. They might believe their own lies after all this time, but you cannot forgive someone who is unwilling to acknowledge their crimes.
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br /> After the war, when it seemed like everyone wanted to dress their wounds in money and fashion, I got work photographing models. I made a name for myself before all the men returned; I got good enough to earn some real money. That is how I met Walker, who was an art director just back from overseas. Six months later we were married. Sofia, of course, was my maid of honor.
Noah came back from the army in one piece, thank goodness, and moved to an apartment on Grove St. in Greenwich Village, around the corner from Lois and Gray. He jumped on the fashion bandwagon too and soon became the celebrated designer James Peck. Tyson survived the war as well, after being stationed in North Africa where he picked up an intestinal parasite that almost killed him. When he was finally released from the V.A. hospital, Tyson moved into the apartment on Grove St. too.
When I shot Noah a startled look about this news he said, “What about it?”
Once again I stumbled, like I had so many times before. “I just thought that....”
“Don’t think too hard, Marta. Tyson is going to be my personal assistant. It’s the only way they’ll let him in the door, though he’s every bit the designer that I am. The rag trade welcomes our kind, but not if he’s a black.”
“Then how is it you met him in the CCC? I thought the Negroes had their own camps.”
“What do you want me to say? Yes, the camps were segregated. Yes, Tyson was assigned to our camp. We don’t know why and we didn’t ask. We were just glad that they let him alone long enough to get out of there alive. We got split up when we got drafted. He was sent to a black battalion; I was sent with the whites.”
That was the only conversation we had about typecasting homosexuals in the fashion world until many years later, when he asked me where else I thought he might work and not have to always worry about being gay.
“After all,” he pointed out, “working in fashion is a family tradition.”
“Working in a shoe factory isn’t exactly high couture,” I said.
