Authors: Kim van Alkemade
As she rode the streetcar back to the comfortable house on Colfax, Rachel imagined where, if not for the agency, she and Sam might have ended up: in back alleys or boxcars, on soup lines near Hoovervilles. Rachel had often wondered how it would have been if the agency lady had found her and Sam a foster home. They might have gotten lucky—a cozy apartment with a nice family, a foster mother kind as Mrs. Berger, a foster father generous as Dr. Abrams. Or maybe not. Who would she have turned to if, in that cozy apartment, lived a boy like Marc Grossman? For the first time, Rachel began to appreciate what she herself had been saved from by the Home.
M
ILDRED
S
OLOMON’S CHEST WAS PRESSED AGAINST
my back; the back of my head rested on her clavicle. She wrapped her arms around me. Our gentle breathing rose and fell in unison. I felt a tug. Was she plucking at my fingers, wanting more morphine? Looking down, I saw a needle threaded with yarn as rough as horsehair poking through the tendons of my hands.
I woke with a gasp, the dream worse than ever. I could actually feel the burn of seawater in the back of my throat. Wiping drool from my mouth, I sat up on the bed and adjusted my wig. Focusing on my watch, I saw it was past midnight. Mildred Solomon moaned and shifted in a fitful sleep. What dreams, I wondered, haunted her? I doubted I was in them.
The room was suffocating, the window closed since the storm. I got up and opened it, wishing I had one of Flo’s cigarettes to pass the time until Dr. Solomon woke again. It wouldn’t be long now.
That talk about concentration camps put me in mind of Sam and the story he told me after returning from the war. I remembered him calling from the pay phone on Amsterdam Avenue, his voice on the line instantly familiar, collapsing the years since he’d
gone to war. I told him I would have met him at the dock if I’d known when his ship was coming in. “It was a madhouse at the harbor,” he said. “I didn’t want you messed up in all that.” Was he worried I’d be grabbed and kissed by a returning soldier, or that my wig would be knocked off in the jostling crowd?
“Did you know they’d turned the Home into a barracks?” he was saying. “I couldn’t believe it when the truck stopped here to let us off. We’re in F3, can you imagine? I never even saw the inside of a girls’ dorm the whole time I lived here. Why don’t you come up and see me?”
I did, running from that old apartment in the Village to the closest subway stop, the Broadway line seeming to crawl uptown as I counted the seconds until I saw my brother again.
I told the guard at the entrance who I was there to meet. Soon enough, Sam emerged from the Castle. It was strange to see him come through those oak doors a grown man instead of a little boy. He walked with purpose, almost a swagger. I’d been so afraid during the war that he’d be wounded or killed, as Simon Cohen had been. But there Sam was, whole and handsome. The rainbow patch of his division was bright on his shoulder, but the washed-out green of the uniform made his eyes glint like steel. Sam lifted me up in a hug that lasted so long, a few other soldiers started to whistle. Embarrassed, we crossed the street and sat on a bench beneath a gingko tree, facing our former Home.
“Can you beat that, Rachel? I run away from this place out to Leadville, hobo up and down the West Coast, end up on an apple farm in Washington State, come back to New York to enlist, get shipped off to Europe, and after all that where do I end up? Right back where I started.” He shaded his eyes to look up at the clock
tower. “Makes sense, in a way. Military barrack’s hardly different from being in the Home. Except back then, I was just a kid. At least in the military, I’m a man. I can stand up for myself.” His jaw tightened, and I saw, beneath his swagger, the wounded orphan who snuck out of the Castle all those years ago.
We didn’t know how to start talking about what we’d seen and done since last we were together. It’s no wonder we struggled to reconnect. It wasn’t just the war—my brother and I had been living separate lives since that agency lady pulled us apart. Other grown siblings had a home to go back to, parents to visit on holidays, grandparents to host the seder. Between us, Sam and I didn’t know how to make a family. Our conversation turned to the pictures from Japan that had come out in
Life
magazine: clothes melted onto naked bodies, skin dissolving into bubbling sores, babies being born deformed. When I read that people who’d escaped the atomic blast were getting sick from the radiation, their hair falling out, I couldn’t help but feel a strange kinship. At the time, all I knew was that the X-rays I’d gotten as a child had made me bald. That night in Mildred Solomon’s room, I wondered if the cancer had been growing in me even then.
To Sam, I said, “Sometimes I ask myself if there’s any limit to the harm people can do to each other.”
“No,” he said. “There’s no limit.” He stared across the street, his eyes distant, as if he were watching a movie projected on the side of the building. “When our division liberated Dachau, it was like we had walked into hell. You’ve seen the newsreels?” I nodded, picturing the skeletal survivors herded into relocation camps, held there until the world could figure out what to do with Europe’s remaining Jews. “Believe me, they don’t show all of it, not by a
long shot. We had to call in a construction battalion to move the bodies, they were piled so high. Imagine that, then add in the smell of rot and shit and smoke.” Sam’s grip on his knees was turning his knuckles white. “No, don’t. Don’t imagine it. I’ll have it in my head long enough for both of us.”
I thought I’d seen the worst of it in the hospital. Soldiers with missing limbs or blown-out eyes. Scars that meandered the length of a man’s body like a map of the Mississippi. But the things Sam was saying made me feel sick in a part of my stomach so deep I hadn’t known it was there. I covered his hand with mine. He turned his palm up to accept the gesture. We sat for a long time like that, not caring anymore if we looked like sweethearts.
“What are you going to do after you’re decommissioned?” I meant for a job; I assumed he’d be staying in New York. I was already planning to invite him over for Friday-night dinners, memories of Shabbat with the Abramses shaping my imagination. Not that I’d attempt to cook—if we wanted anything edible, I’d have to take out a roasted chicken from the deli on the corner—but no matter. We’d manage, this time, to be a real family.
“I wanted to talk to you about that,” he said. “You know, the more I think about it, the more it seems my whole life has been preparing me for just one thing. I mean, after roaming around all those years, when the war broke out I was glad to have a reason to sign up. Good thing I came back here to enlist, though. I heard from my one buddy out west he spent the whole war guarding a Japanese internment camp in Wyoming. What a waste of time that would’ve been. Fighting gave me a purpose, and I was good at it. Kept most of my guys alive, killed a lot of theirs. It’s pretty simple.” Sam paused, let go of my hand to knock a cigarette out of
the pack he pulled from his pocket. He held one out for me, but I shook my head. Still, when he lit it, I inhaled deeply, wanting to remember everything about this moment.
“I’m going to Palestine, Rachel. I’m going to get past those damn British detention camps to join the Haganah. I’m going to fight until we have a country of our own.”
I hung my head, stunned. Sam was leaving me behind, again. My idea of us being a family was a childish fantasy I’d clung to because my brother was the only person in all the world who really, truly, belonged to me. I may have been living like a married woman, but not a single piece of paper existed to attest that she and I were family. No matter how often we swore our allegiance to one another, she could never be more than my friend, my roommate.
Sam was leaving, but at least this time he was telling me where he was going, and why. He talked about the United Nations and the politics of partition with such passion, I knew there was no use arguing with him. Instead I tried to memorize the way his eyelashes fluttered in the sunlight and how his ears wiggled slightly as he talked. I knew it would be a very long time until I saw him again. Thinking back on it that night, as I looked down at the dark city street below Mildred Solomon’s window, it occurred to me I might not live long enough to ever visit my brother, to ever meet my sister-in-law, to ever see my only nephew.
“How about you?” Sam asked, taking my hand. “What’s next for you?”
I took a deep breath. I’d regretted the things I left unsaid when he went to war, had promised myself if I had another chance I’d tell my brother the truth about myself. He flinched when I used
the word
lesbian,
but I didn’t want there to be any misunderstanding. My heart was pounding so hard I felt dizzy. I was afraid he’d be ashamed of what I was, the way he was ashamed of how I looked. I was afraid he’d think this, too, was somehow his fault, the result of his failure to protect me. It took him awhile to meet my eyes, but when he did, he said, “Who am I to judge, as long as you’re happy.”
I hadn’t realized how heavy the unspoken words had been until they were lifted from me. “I am happy, Sam, I promise.”
“There’s something I should have said to you a long time ago, too. I’m sorry, Rachel, about Uncle Max. I shouldn’t have left you with him. I just didn’t know how else to take care of you.”
“Don’t blame yourself, Sam. I don’t. Well, I did at first, but not anymore. We were supposed to have parents to take care of us, but we didn’t. It wasn’t our fault. Anyway, I managed to take care of myself, didn’t I? Just promise me you’ll do the same and try to stay safe.”
“I’m not going to Palestine to be safe, Rachel. I’m going to fight.” Sam squeezed my hand before letting it go to light another cigarette. “I’ll be fighting for both of us, for all of us. No Jew will ever be truly safe until we have a homeland.” It seemed to me Sam was right about that. Without a state, our people were as vulnerable as orphans without a home.
“Liberating that camp changed me, Rachel. We weren’t prepared for what it was like, no one could’ve been. I remember thinking they never would have gotten me in there without a fight.”
“That’s just it, though, isn’t it? Everyone who fought back had already been killed.” I’ve heard people say they can’t understand how the Nazis managed it, the murder of millions, but it didn’t
start with cattle cars and gas chambers. They began it all by reviving the medieval idea of sorting and separating Jews. We were demonized, dehumanized, ghettoized, all before being transported to the camps, the crematoriums out of sight until the last stretch of track. At every step along the way, the ones like Sam who stepped out of line were cut down, an example made of their resistance.
“I guess you’re right.” Sam took a deep drag of his cigarette, smoke seeping out of his nose. “The other guys, they were all wondering, what was it about the Jews that the Germans would do this to them? The further we got into that camp, the more we saw, the Jewish soldiers in our division started looking to me, you know, because I was older, like they were waiting to see what I was going to do about all this. You know what I did? I grabbed one of those Nazis out of the pen where we’d rounded them up. I dragged him out into the mud and put him on his knees. And I said—I wanted to scream, but I said it real quiet, almost a whisper, so he actually tilted his head up to hear me—I said,
Ich bin Jude
. And then I shot him.” Sam dropped the cigarette butt and ground it out under the toe of his boot. “After that, the guys went crazy, started executing Nazis all over the place until some officer showed up and put a stop to it.”
What I feared, while Sam was at war, was that he would be killed, not that he would become a killer. I wasn’t troubled by the thought of him shooting an enemy in battle. That was something he had to do to save himself or his men, to win the war. But what he’d just described was murder, wasn’t it? Yet I wasn’t appalled by his confession. To Sam, that killing was justified by the horrors surrounding him. I was thinking, though, of Sam’s Nazi prisoner, on his knees in the mud. If he had looked around at the piles of
rotting bodies and become conscious of the monstrous magnitude of his deeds, wouldn’t he have welcomed the quick sting of a bullet over a lifetime of guilt and shame? To me, Sam’s shot sounded not like an assassination, but a mercy.
“Smells like rust, all that blood,” Sam said. “That’s what you can’t wash off. Not the blood itself, but the smell of it.”
“I know what it smells like. I’m a nurse, remember?” I looked down at my fingers, folded in my lap. “You’re not the only one who’s ever gotten blood on their hands.”
Sam pulled one knee up on the bench and turned to face me. “Since I saw those camps, all I keep thinking is, that could have been me, you know? Me and you. If we’d been living in Germany or Poland or wherever the hell our people came from, that would have been us. It made me feel like more of a Jew than the Home ever did. Back then, it was all Hebrew this and Hebrew that, marching bands and baseball teams, but that’s not what it’s about. It’s not about God, either, or the Torah. It’s about survival.” There was a defiance in Sam’s eyes I recognized from the night he refused to apologize to the superintendent, a brightness that made the steel glint. If we had been in Europe, me and Sam, he’d have fought to the death before allowing himself to be herded onto one of those trains. That left the people like me. Was it possible the rest of us, like orphans in an institution, were so used to doing as we were told we made it easier than it should have been to round us up?
We said our good-byes, pretending they weren’t forever. I watched Sam disappear through the old oak doors as the Castle swallowed him up. For what he was planning, an official discharge made no difference. He soon shed his American uniform and
boarded a ship bound for the Mediterranean. Since that day, all I had of him fit in the glove drawer of an old steamer trunk: the postcards I’d saved, the letters he’d sent, that one roll of film.
In the dark behind me, Mildred Solomon groaned in her sleep. She had said there was no comparison between her work at the Infant Home and those terrible experiments in the camps, and she was right, of course she was. But did the children on Dr. Mengele’s table feel any differently than I did on hers? No matter her motives, the way she used us was the same. No wonder she couldn’t apologize. It would destroy a person, wouldn’t it, to admit to doing that kind of harm?