Felix and Ashasher decided a few days prior to my departure that I’d leave from one of the parks, in the morning, to try to hope I’d land at a time of day that was safe. Sabina fretted still. There was a risk, she and Felix had explained to me out of earshot of Kai, that I wouldn’t land exactly at the right time or day, or in the right place. Magic was an imprecise science. I said as long as my balloon didn’t kill anyone like she promised me, I’d cope with whatever happened. It was worth the risk.
Mitzi, Felix, Sabina, Ashasher, and I walked to the park together, holding a handful of balloons. Mitzi held mine with a gloved hand, a Runner for me today. The others and their balloons were distractions for police. Behind me in the safe house, Kai lay in bed, his arm over his eyes. I left him paper doves covering my old room. He’d watched me fold them over the last few days, one by one, and not one of them fell out of the sky this time.
Mitzi’s hand touched my arm, and I glanced sideways at her. She gave me a small smile. “Scared?”
“A little,” I whispered, gripping her arm tight against me. It was a little bit of a lie. I wasn’t scared at all.
“I think it’s brave,” Mitzi said a few steps later. When I looked at her, she was looking at the sky with a small smile on her face. For once, she wasn’t wearing a hat, and her teal hair flipped around her face in the wind, obscuring her expression for a moment. “Maybe even braver than coming here.”
“Coming here wasn’t a choice,” I reminded her.
“It was,” she teased me. “You heard your Saba’s stories. You knew what would happen. You were dying for an adventure.”
“If I wanted an adventure,” I said, laughing, “I’d take a balloon to Everest. Berlin in 1988? Maybe not high on my list.”
Reaching the park, I had never felt stranger in my life. My heart felt light and my steps lighter. I was the happiest and the saddest I’d ever been. I ached for Kai, but I loved having Mitzi and Sabina and Felix and Ashasher with me. I wanted to go home and I wanted to stay. Mitzi’s arm squeezed mine, and the balloons floated above our heads.
In the park, Felix turned to me and said, “Ready?”
I took a deep breath and nodded, stepping forward to hug him. He whispered, “You’re never alone, wherever you are. You’ll always be able to find one of us, if you need to. Okay?”
I hugged Mitzi and cried, because it was Mitzi. She kissed my cheek. “Be good and be sparkly and flirt with a stranger, darling.”
“I love you. Take care. Be safe.” I whispered, because even if it was a silly thing to say, it felt right.
I hugged Sabina too and wished her luck in London. She hugged me tightly and said, “Thank you for loving Kai.”
There wasn’t much I could say to that. I didn’t know how to tell people they were easier to love than they knew. Ashasher placed his hands on either side of my head and kissed my forehead. “Good-bye, brave girl.”
“Not yet, not yet,” yelled a familiar voice.
I spun, my eyes frantically running over the crowd, looking for him. He was running across the park, his hair flying behind him, both dark and bright in the sunlight. I stepped toward him, my heart beating wild and erratic. He came. He’s saying good-bye. He stumbled against me, wrapped his arms around me, and then kissed me, gently, fingers at the curve of my jaw and under my chin. My eyelashes fluttered closed, and it took me a moment to catch my breath.
“I’m your Runner,” he said simply when I opened my eyes. “This is my job. Besides, it makes sense if your balloon is my last.”
He handed me one of my paper doves. It’d been refolded from my creases, and I could see his neat handwriting on the paper, but I didn’t want to read it now. I wanted to take it with me, home, where I belonged. I tucked it into my pocket, my eyes starting to fill with tears. Then he tugged two gloves out of his pocket and slid them onto his hands over the burn scars. He took the balloon from Mitzi and glanced at his watch. Then he looked up at me and said in that low, quiet way of his that sent shivers through my blood, “Ready?”
“Yes,” I whispered back. An electric shiver ran through me.
Next to me, Mitzi said, “I say this to every Passenger, so Ellie. May your journey be safe and your destination full of freedoms.”
“Now,” said Ashasher, and the others released the balloons they were holding.
The red balloons rose against the fierce blue sky, slowly and then gaining speed toward the sun. I stepped against Kai, rising up on my toes. I closed my eyes when our noses touched. His heart beat against mine. Our lips trembled against each other.
“Good-bye, Ellie Baum,” Kai whispered.
We kissed as I wrapped my hand around the balloon string and he let go.
Author’s Note
One of my favorite authors, Madeleine L’Engle, said in her Margaret Edwards Award acceptance speech, “Often the only way to look clearly at this extraordinary universe is through fantasy, fairy tale, myth.” This line has guided most of my writing and became my touchstone while writing The Girl with the Red Balloon.
To my knowledge, no one escaped death camps or ghettos with magical red balloons. No one escaped over the Berlin Wall with magical red balloons. But people did escape from both concentration camps and death camps, from East Germany and from other places of war and oppression. And they did not do this alone. People in places of war and oppression and terrible crimes face choices, and many ordinary people have made the extraordinary choice to save lives even at the cost of their own. As Kai says in the book, “People never mentioned in history books still made history.”
So what is historically accurate in the book?
The Łódź ghetto was real. Approximately 204,000 Jewish people passed through its gates. About eight hundred remained in the ghetto when the Soviets liberated it on January 19, 1945, and approximately ten thousand Łódź residents survived the Holocaust after being deported to camps, including Auschwitz. Few people escaped Chełmno, but one of the people I read about was an unnamed eighteen-year-old boy. Łódź also housed more than five thousand Romani people, almost all of whom were killed at Chełmno and Auschwitz.
The Romanichal, Kai’s people in England, are very much real. And the Roma of continental Europe who died during the Holocaust, somewhere between five hundred thousand and 1.5 million, were real, as are the Roma who reside there now. Throughout history, the Roma have suffered horrifically at the hands of people in power, and they remain some of the most persecuted people in Europe. Benno uses the word “Gypsy” for the Roma as that was the only word then, but as Kai tells Ellie, the proper word for non-Romani people to use now is Roma or Romani.
After the immediate aftermath of World War II, Germany was carved into pieces for the Allied forces to control. The Soviet Union gained control of East Germany. As the world quickly moved into an arms race and the Cold War, East Germany became the demarcation on a map, and the Berlin Wall was more than just a way to keep people in East Berlin. It was a symbol. People tried to escape East Berlin into the West in a variety of creative ways, including hot-air balloon, hand-dug tunnels, train tracks in the ghost stations, hanging on beneath cars, hiding in trunks. Some of these were successful, and many were not. The fall of the Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989, became the symbolic end of the Cold War.
The world is not as black and white as I saw it when I first dreamed up a girl going over the Berlin Wall with a red balloon.
I don’t have any answers. All the answers I found in the writing of this book led me to more questions. And I’m starting to think that the answering isn’t nearly as important as the asking.
Be a sponge.
Acknowledgments
This book was a labor of love, an exercise in chasing the heart of the story through many drafts, many false starts, and several years. It’s a book, not just a story in my head or on my hard drive, because of some really wonderful people.
Thank you, first and always, to Louise Fury, my amazing agent. Working with you has been my favorite adventure. Than
k you for loving this book like I do.
Thank you to Wendy McClure, Jonathan Westmark, Alexandra Messina-Schultheis, and the entire Albert Whitman & Company team who brought this book to life with your own magic. If you made paper doves, they’d fly.
Thank you to Dr. Ian Hancock for his assistance with the Romani language. Thank you to my sensitivity readers for your advice and patience. Any mistakes in the story and text are mine alone.
Thank you to my high school teachers who probably knew I was writing books in their classes instead of taking notes, and to my Allegheny College professors, especially Professor Howard Tamashiro and Professor Susan Slote, who introduced me to elements of history, politics, and children’s literature that led me to this book.
To my favorite guys: Stephen Mazzeo, my plot guru. I still don’t know how we’re friends, but it’s kind of the best. And of course, Paul Krueger, my optimism proxy. You’re the wurst, but you probably learned that from me. What’s next?
This book would have never happened without my CPs. Thank you to Christina June, Rebecca Paula, Leigh Smith, and Rebekah Campbell for your incredible, unwavering and absolute support for my magicballoonbook, and especially Kai and Ellie. You are the best of the best. MTWBWY. I’m the luckiest writer in the world.
To Nita Tyndall, Tristina Wright, Michella Domenici, Marieke Nijkamp, Lindsay Smith, Nicole Brinkley, Sara Taylor Woods, and everyone who read The Girl with the Red Balloon over the last few years and offered their sometimes tear-stained notes. Thank you forever. Thank you to Meghan Harker, Blair Thornburgh, Dahlia Adler, and EK Johnston for their constant support and love and occasionally validating my righteous indignation.
Thank you to my family for their support, their early reads of this book, their respect and patience with my writing. A special thank you to my brother who read an early version of this book, offered notes, and to whom I dedicate every description of Kai and Ellie’s eyes.
The Girl with the Red Balloon is, and was from the very beginning, dedicated to both of my grandfathers who passed before I began writing it. I would not be a storyteller without them. One of my grandmothers passed not long after this book sold, and her pride in me and my writing meant the world. I am eternally grateful for her love, guidance, support, and the books she gifted me as a child. May their memories be a blessing.
And thank you, reader, for picking up this book. For following Ellie into this world. For feeling so deeply like Benno. For fighting alongside Kai. For believing in the goodness of people like Mitzi. Be brave. Be a sponge. And remember, you too are making history each day. Let’s make a history that lifts up all people, erases no one, and leaves behind nothing but hateful ideology.
KATHERINE LOCKE
lives and writes in a very small town outside of Philadelphia, where she’s ruled by her feline overlords and her addiction to chai lattes. She writes about that which she cannot do: ballet, time travel, and magic. She not-so-secretly believes most stories are fairy tales in disguise. The Girl with the Red Balloon is her young adult debut.
Girl with the Red Balloon (The Balloonmakers) Page 26
