“Thank you.”
I manage to find the manners to see Mrs. Wójcik out the door, and I lock it once she’s through so nobody else can barge in.
I need to reset myself again, stop my brain from circling. The walls are buzzing with the memories of vagrants, who came in and burned my family’s things for firewood because it was cold, because they had no place to live, because they were vagrants. So they burned my family’s things, and so the walls are buzzing.
No. Stop it.
I go back to my room, stand in the doorway. I was doing something before Mrs. Wójcik came. What was I doing? Mrs. Wójcik came in, and I was—the box in the corner of the closet.
It’s a hope chest. Polished maple, a flower carved on the lid. Aunt Maja’s? I have the faintest memory of something like this tucked under her bed, filled with linens and handkerchiefs, her initials already stitched onto all the fabric next to blanks meant for her future husband’s. The latch is rusty and takes careful jostling. But eventually the lid comes off, and I gasp.
Inside is what remains of my life.
When my family was forced out of this apartment and into the ghetto, we were allowed to take only what we could carry. Only clothes that were practical, only enough dishes to eat out of. And photographs. Photographs were precious enough that we took them, slipped out of their frames and pressed between paper, so I already know there will be none left in this trunk.
But other things are here. Layer after layer, folded between tissue, is what we couldn’t carry and couldn’t stand to give away. Mama’s wedding gown. The dress I wore to my thirteenth birthday. All of it kept by the “friendly German couple,” who were most assuredly Nazis. Is this the kind of gesture that passes for kindness if you are a Nazi?
In the Chomicki & Lederman clothing factory, Baba Rose was most famous for her beautiful embroidery, but I could handle a needle and thread, too. I would have been better than her in a few years. Machines assembled most of the clothes, but we sewed the labels and embroidery by hand. It made the pieces feel custom-made, Baba Rose said; it made customers feel cared for: Chomicki & Lederman, in fine, stitched cursive.
When I made my own family’s clothes, sometimes I sewed in something special. Something hidden, tucked beneath the label or in a seam. Maja’s name, in royal-blue thread, along with a line from a romance novel she wasn’t supposed to lend me. Baba and Zayde’s wedding date, stitched into the tablecloth we gave them for an anniversary.
Now, when I unpack my old school uniform, I can run my fingers over the hem, where I know the names of all my friends have been embroidered on a secret piece of cloth. Now, in the lining of my mother’s old winter coat, I know there are a few hidden lines from a poem about spring. Nobody could see it; that wasn’t the point.
When we first moved into the ghetto, Abek got lost. He wandered off and was missing for hours; he didn’t know the new address. My mother loved him, of course; she loved us both. But when Abek was born, she was sick in her room for a long time—fragile, my father and grandparents said. It was hard on her body. I took care of him when he was small. And on the day he got lost, when he was returned hours later by a helpful passerby who had wandered the streets until Abek recognized our building, it was me he ran to, crying. And it was me who promised him nobody would ever have trouble returning him home again.
I sewed his name into the label of all his shirts. His name and address, the real one and then the ghetto one, and our parents’ names and mine.
And then I started to sew more. Whole stories in the tiniest handwriting on the thinnest pieces of muslin. I folded the cloth half a dozen times and sewed it inside the label.
There was a story in his jacket the day we all went to the soccer stadium. It was a birthday gift from me to him, my best work yet. The story of our family, told in the alphabet:
A is for Abek.
B is for Baba Rose.
C is for Chomicki & Lederman, the factory we own, and D is for Dekerta, the street we attend synagogue on, even if only on the high holidays.
H is for our mother, Helena; M is for Aunt Maja; Z is for Zofia.
Something like that. I can’t remember all of it. All the way from A to Z, some of the letters given whole paragraphs, and some just a few words. At the last minute, when we were getting ready to go to the stadium to get our new identification photographs, I took that story, which had been hanging on the wall, and I sewed it into his jacket, and I made him put that jacket on.
I must have known.
I must have known what was going to happen to us.
That’s the thought I came back to later. I thought it when I was starving in Birkenau, and when I was operating the loom in Neustadt—this girl can sew, the guard said, plucking me from death, sending me to work—and when the cold ate through my toes on the 140-kilometer winter march to Gross-Rosen because the SS evacuated the factory, and when I collapsed in the women’s barracks because the Red Army had finally come to liberate the camp and the Nazis had already fled. I must have known we weren’t just summoned to the soccer stadium to have new identification made. Otherwise, why would I have made Abek wear that jacket? It wasn’t seasonal. It barely fit anymore. What kind of person sews a family history inside a coat?
Either I knew something bad was going to happen or I was already crazy.
I have to find my brother.
I have to find my brother because the war is over, but I still don’t feel safe. I don’t think he is, either.
I didn’t think any of you would be back. That’s what Mrs. Wójcik said. But she didn’t say it with gratitude in her voice. She didn’t mean it like, I am so relieved to see you. Her voice didn’t sound happy. Her voice sounded disappointed. What she meant was, I thought they killed you all.
DIMA IS TRIUMPHANT WHEN HE KNOCKS ON THE DOOR A few minutes later. Through the crack made by the latched chain, he holds up a paper parcel. “Lunch,” he says. “Sausages.”
I unlock the door but am at a loss once he’s inside. “I don’t have any fuel for the stove, though.”
“Cooked already!”
Now I can see oil leaking through the paper, and it makes my mouth water. “I don’t have anything to put them on, either,” I apologize. I meant, I don’t have a table, but as soon as I say the words, I realize I don’t even have dishes.
Dima reaches into his coat and pulls out a cloth wrapped around something bulky. “Plates. Picnic.” Another bundle: “Potatoes.”
Having emptied his pockets, he looks around the big parlor, curious but polite. “This is your home?”
“It looked different when I lived here. The furniture is gone.”
“Today we sit on the floor. Tomorrow I find you some furniture.”
He raises his eyebrows in the direction of the dining room, visible through French doors, and I nod that this is where we should eat. Once there, he confidently settles onto his knees, opens the parcel, and begins to slice the sausages with a pocketknife.
“My commander says he comes for dinner?” Dima says after I’ve sunk to my own knees and accepted the plate. “He would like to meet, learn more about the city.”
“That’s fine.”
“I told him he can come tonight.”
“Tonight?” I protest. “There’s no food in the house. It’s my first day back.”