Sit

by Deborah Ellis

  She squirms in the tiny seat, her seven-year-old legs too long for her two-year-old chair. Her knees press against her tummy. She can’t stretch out because that will make the chair move, and if the chair moves, it will make a noise. Mommy will hear and say she’s being bad and give her more minutes in the chair.

  The sounds of the women’s voices drift in from the porch, mixing with the tick-tick-tick of the kitchen timer.

  Nine minutes.

  Eight minutes.

  Mommy will hear the buzzer go off. She’ll yell, “Bring it to me,” and Macie will have to carry the buzzing timer out to the porch so Mommy can turn it off in front of the ladies, even though Macie is completely capable of turning it off herself.

  Then Mommy will look at Macie and say, “Well, what do you have to say for yourself?”

  Macie will have to say, “I’m sorry I talked back and I’m sorry I didn’t get the napkins when you asked for them,” even though she was reading and just wanted to get to the end of the page before she put her book down. Besides, Mommy says “In a minute” all the time when Macie asks her to do things.

  “And?” Mommy will ask.

  “And I won’t do it again,” Macie will have to say.

  Mommy will tell her, “Well, if you think you can behave, you can join us.”

  Where will she sit? Macie knows how many ladies there are and how many chairs are on the porch. All the chairs are now filled with ladies.

  Mommy won’t let her sit on the porch floor or on the steps in her company dress.

  Mommy also won’t let Macie stay in the house by herself.

  “Who knows what trouble you’ll get in,” she’ll say. “Get out here where I can keep an eye on you.”

  Macie could sit on someone’s lap, but she feels too big for that now and she doesn’t like the feeling of being held in place by someone’s arms. Plus, the ladies are her mother’s friends. They aren’t hers.

  Most likely, Mommy will say, “Bring out another chair.”

  The dining-room chairs are heavy. Too heavy for Macie to move.

  The only chair they have that is light enough for Macie to lift and carry is the chair she is sitting on now. The ugly pink plastic dinosaur time-out chair.

  She’ll be small, sitting low, low, down below the adult chairs.

  The ladies will talk over her head about things she doesn’t understand or care about. If she is quiet, someone will say, “Macie is such a good girl, sitting like a lady.” Or, “Macie, you’re so quiet. Cat got your tongue?”

  If Macie says something, Mommy will say, “Macie, be quiet, the adults are talking.”

  Six minutes.

  I’d like to have a house in the trees, Macie daydreams. Not a tree house in the yard. Mommy would still be able to watch her there from the kitchen window. That sort of house would come with, “Be careful going up that ladder!” And, “Are you behaving up there?” Whenever Macie was bad, Mommy would declare, “That’s it, no tree house this week.”

  Macie’s house would be far away, surrounded by trees. She would make friends with the squirrels and jays and all the other creatures. They would bring her berries and honey to eat, and on cold nights the deer would come into her house and keep her warm.

  One minute.

  Macie is shocked that the time has gone by so fast. Building her house in the trees has taken her right out of the time-out chair.

  But soon the buzzer will sound. Mommy will call for her and Macie will have to sit with the ladies on the porch, feeling small and trapped. Her forest house will disappear.

  The noise of the voices is all outside. Inside, the house is calm and quiet. Macie is alone with her thoughts. She is free. She would like to stay that way a little longer.

  She has an idea.

  Does she dare?

  Macie looks toward the voices on the porch. Mommy can’t see her. No one can see her.

  She inches her hand out toward the kitchen timer.

  She will pay for this later, she knows.

  Mommy will find a reason to be mad at her about it, and for years after she’ll say to her friends, “Let me tell you what my terrible, defiant daughter did.” She’ll tell it as if it was a big joke.

  Everyone will laugh at me, Macie thinks.

  Then she thinks, Maybe I’ll just tell them all to shut up.

  Macie takes hold of the ticking kitchen timer and turns the buzzer off before it can buzz. She puts it gently back in its place.

  In her head, then, she floats up out of her punishment chair, heads deep into her forest house and gives herself a well-deserved time-out.

  3

  The Question Chair

  Gretchen was sitting on a toilet.

  She knew she shouldn’t be. The whole place was a museum. Everyone knows you’re not supposed to sit on things in museums.

  But Gretchen needed to know — not that she ever could know, but she had to try to know — what it had been like. When the others in her class went outside to the train tracks, she slipped away and came back here.

  And sat down.

  Gretchen had never seen a toilet like this before, and she had seen some weird toilets in her travels with her family. She had seen a toilet in Japan that played music. At King Henry VIII’s old palace in England, she saw a fancy box with fur on the seat, placed in the middle of the bedroom. Some unfortunate servant had to wipe the royal bottom.

  This toilet was stranger than all of them.

  It was not one toilet. It was many.

  It was a long row of holes. People would sit facing both ways along it, down the length of the shed. The holes were staggered, like seats in a movie theater. People would sit back to back and shoulder to shoulder.

  Gretchen sat over a hole in the middle of the long toilet and tried to imagine how it had been.

  She tried to imagine the stench. She tried to imagine the tired, hurting, hungry people, shivering in their thin, lice-filled clothes. She tried to imagine the yelling of the guards — “Schnell! Schnell!” — giving the prisoners no peace even in this most basic and universal of human moments.

  It was a latrine with no towels, no tiles, no paper, no door to close. No brushes, no combs, no makeup, no soap. No mirror, no hairdryer, no moisturizer, no gel.

  Just a trough with holes.

  If Gretchen had been one of those prisoners back then, she would have been one gray-striped person among many. Her hair would have been shaved off. She had already seen the pile of human hair in one of the large glass display cases. There was a display case of stolen shoes, too, and eyeglasses and suitcases.

  If she had been a prisoner here, she would have been stripped of everything that was important to her.

  She would be hungry, exhausted and beyond terrified.

  “Would I still feel like myself?” she whispered. “Would the part of me that’s me still be in me?”

  Another thought entered her head.

  I’m not Jewish. I wouldn’t be here.

  Instantly, she felt relief. She breathed a little bit easier.

  Then she had another thought.

  I’m German.

  Gretchen heard the voices of another tour group approaching. She stood up before they got to the toilet shed where she was sitting. She went outside and joined the others in her class on the platform beside the train tracks that ended at the camp.

  “Some people would go one way and be sent directly to the gas chambers,” the tour guide said. “Others who looked like they were strong enough to work would go another direction and have a slower death through starvation, beatings and disease.”

  The tour guide spoke with feeling, even though he must have talked about these things many, many times. But none of it seemed as real to Gretchen as the toilets. The crimes he talked about seemed too horrible to have really happened, like the whole pl
ace was a theme park for a horror movie.

  Maybe it was because the day was so sunny. The sky was blue and the grass was green, and all the photos Gretchen had seen of this place during the war were gray.

  Maybe it was because she had all her classmates with her, the same kids she saw at school every day. And they looked the same as they always did — healthy and well fed and in clean, colorful clothes.

  Maybe it was because she knew the whole thing was just a tour. There was an exit coming up. She could just walk through it and no one would shoot at her.

  Gretchen’s friend Kris poked her in the ribs and held out her phone. It was playing a video of a kitten batting at the long ears of a beagle. The tour guide was talking about Josef Mengele, the Angel of Death. Gretchen did not want to look at the kitten or laugh, but she also didn’t want Kris to think she wasn’t fun. She looked down at the screen and made her face grin.

  Looking up again, she caught the tour guide watching them. He shook his head and led the group to the visitors’ center and the exit.

  “What did you think, Gretchen?” her history teacher asked. They were eating sandwiches in the parking lot before taking the tour bus back to Krakow.

  Gretchen had just taken a big bite of her cheese and tomato on a roll. She shook her head, which could mean, “My mouth is full,” or, “I don’t know what to say.”

  “Where are we going for dinner?” one of her classmates asked. “Can we go back to that fondue place in the old city again?”

  “I don’t want to go there,” Kris said. “It’s too fancy and it takes too long. I just want to grab something quick and then go to that club attached to the hostel. They’re having karaoke tonight. We can show these Poles how it’s done!”

  “We don’t all have to do the same thing, do we?”

  “It’s our last night. Let’s have fun!”

  “Don’t any of you have any reaction to what you saw here today?” their teacher asked.

  “We learned all this in school,” Kris said. “This year, last year, the year before that. You want us to feel guilty? We didn’t do this.” She waved her arms at the gray buildings and barbed wire behind them. “How many times do we need to apologize for what our ancestors did?”

  “So, where are we eating tonight?” someone asked.

  The teacher sighed. “Eat where you want,” she said, and then she climbed onto the bus.

  “Isn’t she supposed to make sure we’ve got all our belongings or do a head count?” Kris asked. “How lazy can you get? And what are you moping about?”

  “I’m not moping,” said Gretchen. “Yeah, she’s lazy.”

  Gretchen went along with Kris to the club. She pretended to have fun and cheered while Kris and others belted out songs, but she found the beat of the music annoying and wished she had stayed on her bunk in the hostel. She felt unsettled and could not figure out why.

  The next morning they all boarded the plane back to Berlin. The field trip was over.

  Gretchen walked into her parents’ apartment on a pretty street not far from the train station. She hugged her mother and her father. She told them she’d had a good time and gave them the Krakow dragon salt and pepper shakers she’d bought at the airport gift shop. She unpacked her bags, then went into the bathroom and closed the door.

  She brushed her teeth in front of the mirror. She looked at the lavender-scented soap in the soap dish, felt the soft, thick towel on the rack. She looked at the door, firmly shut against intruders, and felt a little sick.

  Things got worse for her the next day.

  She saw reminders of the war everywhere. Things she had seen every day for her whole life but had never taken any notice of now seemed to jump out at her.

  Things like a stop on the rail line called Spandau, where the prison used to be that held the head Nazis after their trial in Nuremberg.

  Things like the Reichstag, the German parliament building where Hitler had reigned.

  Things like the highway signs that read Wannsee, 10 km.

  Wannsee was where Reinhard Heydrich, Adolf Eichmann and others planned the extermination of the Jewish people.

  She saw a sign for Sachsenhausen, a concentration camp a few kilometers away.

  How close it was to the city! Didn’t people wonder what was going on there during the war? With all the people who worked there — building the place, guarding the place — surely someone must have talked. People must have known. Had anyone tried to stop it?

  “We’ve always lived in Berlin, haven’t we?” she asked her parents at dinner. It was Italian night. Her father had made his specialty, veal scaloppine. “I mean, I know we have, but your parents and grandparents were also all Berliners, weren’t they?”

  “Our great-grandparents, too, I think,” said her father. “My great-grandfather was a cloth merchant. Imported cloth from France and Italy. Did very well, I’m told.”

  “So …” Gretchen found herself nervous to ask this next question, but she swallowed her nerves. “What did your grandparents do in the war?”

  Her parents dropped their forks at the same time, as if they had rehearsed it.

  Her mother was the first to pick hers up again and resume eating.

  “You went to Auschwitz and came back with questions about the war,” she said. “If you had gone to Switzerland you would have come back asking about chocolate and cheese.”

  That didn’t make any sense to Gretchen. “Well, yeah.”

  “Young people are so self-righteous,” her mother said. “You are so eager to question things, to say that you would have done things better and the people before you were all stupid and morally bankrupt.”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “The war was a terrible time for everyone. What would you know about terrible times? You visit one little concentration camp and think you have a right to question your great-grandparents. Be grateful you do not have to face what they faced.”

  That was all Gretchen’s mother would say. Her father said nothing at all.

  Gretchen skipped school the next day. She went to the chalet at Wannsee where the extermination had been planned. It was now a museum. She spent the day looking at the photos, reading the history and sitting by the lake, trying to make sense of it all. She did not tell her parents. She did not tell anyone.

  Gretchen started to read about Germany before the war and about the rise of hatred. She searched her school library and spent her pocket money in bookstores in the Alexanderplatz shopping district. She read Hitler’s Willing Executioners and memoirs of concentration camp survivors.

  Strange things began to happen to her vision.

  Walking down the street, she saw tall, healthy German men standing in a group talking. They all wore the uniform of the Nazi SS.

  Gretchen wanted to scream out at them, but when she looked again, they were just wearing rugby clothes, grass-stained from a pickup game in the park.

  Her algebra teacher pointed at an equation on the board, but all Gretchen saw was the Nazi swastika.

  She watched the boys at her school, especially the blond ones with blue eyes, the ones eager to participate, eager to build and do and go, and she saw them all in the uniforms of the Hitler Youth.

  In another era, not so long ago, they would have been.

  “You’re no fun anymore,” Kris told her. “Brighten up, will you?”

  Gretchen did not feel like brightening up. She moved through her school days alone.

  The worst night of all was back at her family’s supper table.

  Gretchen’s father — her tall, fit, capable father — was somehow transformed before her eyes into an officer of the Gestapo.

  Would that have been his choice? He was a cultured, educated man. Would he have been different seventy years ago? Would he have worked at Sachsenhausen, as a guard, perhaps, or as an administrator, put
ting numbers and names on pieces of paper and then filing them away neatly as the bodies piled up?

  Gretchen looked away from him and at her mother, a smart, strong, ambitious woman. Today she was a lawyer at a big corporation. Back then? What would a woman like her mother have done? Women joined the Nazi party just like men did. Women went to the rallies. Women hit prisoners and made fun of Jews and did not object when families disappeared in the middle of the night. Her mother loved success. How would she have defined success during the Nazi times? Who would her mother have chosen to be?

  “May I be excused?” Gretchen asked, looking down at her half-eaten meal. “I have a lot of homework.”

  “Rinse your dishes,” her mother said, the same thing she said after every meal. Gretchen rinsed her plate, put it in the dishwasher and went to her room.

  She could not look at her parents anymore.

  I have to move out, she thought, sitting on her bed. Where will I go? She suddenly felt so lonely.

  She realized with great grief that there was no part of her that thought her parents would have been on the right side of things. She knew they would not have lifted a finger to help a Jewish family because they didn’t lift a finger now to help the homeless or the environment or even stray cats. If they did not do that sort of thing now, why would they have done it if they had been alive seventy years ago?

  Heartbroken, Gretchen got ready for bed.

  She went into the bathroom to brush her teeth.

  She looked in the mirror.

  Instead of her present-day self in her sky-and-cloud pajamas and red headband, she saw her l940s self. Her blonde hair was in two tight braids at the side of her head. She wore the uniform of the Bund, the girl version of the Hitler Youth. Her eyes were steel and her face was hard.

  On a band around one arm was a swastika.

  Gretchen realized then the real question she had been avoiding. The question of her life. It was not who would her parents have been.

  It was who would she have been?

  At this moment, she was not sure.