The Belief in Angels (21 page)

I close my eyes for a moment in Moses’s room, savoring its peacefulness. It smells like Nilla wafers and old pennies. His room, the smallest, was originally the nursery. Moses never got the upgrade David and I enjoy. But it stays warmer than the rest of our rooms. Wendy used the maroon remnants of the downstairs rug to carpet it. It’s also the quietest.

Moses’s space amazes me. His shoes are lined up under his perfectly made bed, with a faded old race car bedspread Wendy purchased years before during the “Sloane Sales Master Charge Buying Spree.” Stacked and labeled shoeboxes and milk cartons line the walls, displaying his various collections of matchbox cars, trains, action figure heroes, and Tinker Toys.

I walk toward the large bureau pushed up against one wall. I brush my fingers over the dinosaur models, glass figures, and small pebbles and feathers decorating the top of his bureau. I know he hides large, lidded coffee cans on the floor of his closet that he’s stuffed full with pennies, nickels, and dimes.

His unicycle leans against the wall. He told me he asked for the unicycle because he thinks he might never grow taller, and if he doesn’t he’ll be able to make a living in the circus, riding his unicycle. He’s preparing for that career path. For the same reason, he taught himself to juggle.

While turning off the power on one of the walkie-talkies he shares with David, I notice a small shoebox next to one of the milk crates on the floor. After a moment’s hesitation, I open the lid. Inside, a small, furry fake mouse lays in layers of grass. I let out a sigh of relief and pick it up with my other hand. As I examine it, a banded garter snake winds up out of the grass and across the mouse in my hand, flicking its tongue at me. I let out a loud yelp and slam the lid of the box on the snake’s head, pushing it down and back into the box. The fake mouse lies on the floor by the box. Breathing hard, I inch open the lid a bit and squeeze the mouse
back inside. Standing up, I shoot one last glance at the box, open the door, and step into the hallway.

There is almost always something living in Moses’s room besides Moses.

Of all Moses’s collections, there’s one I especially love: his collection of sea glass, stored in one of his shoeboxes. Older sea glass has a white frosted glaze over it, a sand tattoo that, over time, rounds the rough edges.

Sea glass, more than anything else, reminds me of Moses.

I still have the box. It reminds me of our childhood here by the ocean and how the ocean, with time, transforms broken glass, something capable of causing injury, into something touchable. The ocean makes glass precious. Something you can keep.

Samuel, 39years | Spring, 1950

BROOKLINE, MASSACHUSETTS

I, SZAJA, AM now called Samuel. Samuel Trautman.

At thirty-eight years of age I finally arrived in America to reunite with my family. Two years later I sat in a Brookline, Massachusetts apartment I shared with my sister Rose and her second husband, Mocher.

This story tells of the night I arranged a marriage with my first wife, Yetta. It is a night I referred to later as our first date. This is a small joke between us. In another time, in another household, it could have been a date. If it could be called this then it is the first date of my life.

My sister Reizel, now called Rose, lit the festival candles for Seder and placed a bottle of Manichevitz on the table with what I knew is her best linen. I can still remember the fabric: light blue cotton printed with a woman and man dancing in the middle of ladies’ fans.

Rose also put out the Seder plates and silverware and the crystal glasses my parents brought all the way from Zhytomyr. Given to Rose for her wedding to Mocher, they are one of the few remnants of our lives from that time. Although I valued the beauty and craftsmanship of the delicate design, they brought nothing but pain to me. If the glass had been broken into shards and stuck into my eyes, the pain would not have matched the pain I felt in my heart looking at them.

“Please,
zay azoy gut,
Rose, take the glasses off the table,” I say when I find her folding napkins in the dining room.

“Why, why Samuel? They’re made for such an occasion as this.”

“Rose, the table is fine-looking, and I know you’re trying to be kind, but the woman is going to think I’m a
faygeleh
with all this.”

Rose laughs, and as usual, she gets her way.

Rose has been calling me Samuel since I came to live with her and Mocher in Brookline. I am glad to leave that name, that boy—Szaja. My assimilation to American culture is made easier with the new name. Samuel could be anyone. He could be a Jew, a Catholic, or an Englishman. Samuel could be a man with nothing bad in his past. But I know that Samuel is not who I truly am. I am Szaja, a Jew who has survived the wars by forgetting I am a Jew. Now I will spend my life remembering.

Foter
and
Mater
had written to us a few weeks before we are attacked on the farm, and Reizel corresponded from the camps in the Ukraine to let the family know about the tragedies and where we had been sent.

After the attack, Reizel, Oizer, and I spent time working in the Ukranian camps. Reizel learned to be a seamstress, Oizer and I became apprentices to a tailor. We learned to sew as well. After six years of finding ways to work and stay together as the work camps became more and more regimented by the Red Army, we are ultimately separated in 1930.

It had been impossible for us to save money in the camps. They didn’t pay you for the work, only gave you food and shelter, and my
Foter
still had no money to send for us. They are struggling with the American Great Depression. There are many mouths to feed and not much job opportunity for
Foter,
a cherry picker.

Oizer and Reizel are selected for a work camp near Cyprus, Turkey, where they would live a better life under the British rule. There are actual wages for their work there, and a huge community of Jewish settlers. They are jubilant. Life in the Ukranian camps is a desperate one. Any way out made a better life possible. When we got the news, we knew that they are one step closer to being reunited with our family in America.

On the same day, I am recruited by the Red Army. They told me it would be a year before I could join Reizel and Oizer in Cyprus. Within a few days of my recruitment, I am sent back to work near Zhytomyr, on the border between the Ukraine and Poland, where they are building railroads and army headquarters. It seemed impossible to me that I would be returning to the place from which we had traveled so far away. I worked four days’ travel away from our farm and yet I never visited. I would not have been able to bear it.

It is difficult and dangerous work, and until the day I am arrested and sent to the prison at Majdanek I found it impossible to remember and honor my heritage.

The Russian soldiers forgot that I am a Jew as well.

Rose tells me that they tried to contact me several times. All their efforts are futile, and I never tried to contact them. It is s better that way. I had cut off communication with my family in America as well. I still held deep shame for not preventing the deaths of Idel, Berl, and my sisters. I also had shame for my predicament as a member of the Red Army, their murderers, and I thought it best to pretend I had no family and travel alone in the world.

My life is a shadow.

It took Rose and Oizer eight years to save the money for the ship to America from Turkey in 1938. Rose is thirty-two at the time. It had been almost fourteen years since we are attacked at the farm. Oizer had turned twenty-six.

They emigrated before President Roosevelt made his proclamation on immigration quotas, which limited immigration based on race and a person’s place of origin. A mere two months after their immigration, the annual quota for Turkish immigration is reduced to two hundred and twenty-six people.

While on the ship that carried them to America, Rose fell in love with Mocher, a tailor eight years younger than her. In Mocher, Rose had found her
bashert.
He joked and teased her into a contagious happiness she had never known before. When they stepped off the ship to meet the rest of the family, Rose introduced Mocher as her new husband—they’d been married by the ship’s captain. Our parents insisted they have another wedding with their rabbi.

Meantime, my years as a soldier dragged on. 1944 marked twenty years since the murder of my family. I couldn’t tell you what triggered my decision, but I decided I would escape. In the middle of the night I left the tent camp on the border of Poland where we had built an army outpost. I simply walked away and into the forest. Three days later, lost and sleeping under an oak tree, I am found by the Germans, and as I have no papers and I am dressed in uniform, they assumed I am a Russian defector.

They put me on my knees in front of the oak tree and pointed a gun at the middle of my forehead. I don’t remember feeling anything. No surprise. No fear.

“Is that the
Sturmgewher?”
I ask in German. We have recently heard stories about this assault rifle and its frightening ability to shoot multiple rounds.

The soldiers break into laughter.

“I’m about to kill you and you want to know what kind of gun I will use?” the soldier asks.

I nod.

“Where is your gun?” he asks.

“I have no gun. Kill me.”

“You’re a filthy Russian deserter.”

I give no response.

“You amuse me. I won’t kill you today,” the soldier says.

Instead, they arrest me. If the Russians had found me first they would have taken a leg, as they do with all defectors. As they did to Pieter. The Germans spare my leg but send me to Majdanek.

It is the final months of the war. We are among the last trains full of people to arrive at the Lublin station outside the camp. The train is filled with Byelorussians—that is their name for the White Russians—and members of the Polish Home Army.

First they line us up and separate us according to our religion and race. I am still wearing my Russian uniform when I am captured, and I am sent to the Russian POW quarters. When we are questioned about our skills, I decide not to tell them about my talent as a tailor. The Jews are tailors. I tell them instead that I farmed an orchard before I became a soldier. When the German guards choose men to work in the prison fields, cultivating the fruits and vegetables, I am selected.