While We’re Far Apart

by Lynn Austin

  We still live in Uncle Baruch’s apartment in the ghetto, but nearly two dozen people now crowd into it along with us. Aunt Hannah, her two cousins, and other relatives have been separated from us and forced to live in another apartment, but I am still with my mother and Fredeleh. Aunt Hannah is very sick with coughing and a fever, but there is no medicine or doctors, and we are banned from the hospitals.

  We all know what is coming next. The Jews who escaped into Hungary from Poland told us what the Nazis did to them there. The Nazis have condemned us to death, like our enemy Haman of old. What we don’t understand is why they hate us so much. And why the world stands by and allows it. Why doesn’t someone come to our rescue? And the biggest question of all is why does Hashem allow it?

  A few people who have fled to Budapest from the countryside have told us that the Nazis have rounded up all the Jews in the provinces and small villages like the one we came from. Long trains of boxcars are arriving in Hungary every day, but they aren’t bringing the food and supplies we so desperately need. They are arriving empty. They have come to deport us all to labor camps in Poland.

  If the reports are true, our families back home in the village may already be gone. My sister and three brothers and their families, my aunts and uncles, Avi’s relatives, your relatives, all of them gone. I cannot stop weeping for them. If only they had come to Budapest with us when Avi begged them to. We have heard terrible rumors from those who have escaped, saying that these are not labor camps at all but extermination camps. I don’t want to believe that it’s true. And so I worry and pray and wonder what has become of my family and my Avraham and if I will ever see them again. If help doesn’t arrive soon, we fear that when the Nazis finish deporting everyone from the provinces, they will come for us here in the city. The horror and fear are too much for me, as they are for everyone. No one knows what will happen tomorrow.

  If only I had hidden little Fredeleh in the Christian orphanage months ago. I should have brought her there right after Avraham was taken from us. Now it has become too dangerous to go out into the streets with so many Nazi soldiers. We are not supposed to leave the ghetto. The Nazis can stop us and ask where we are going and demand to see our identification papers. And so I am begging Hashem to forgive me for not hiding her there sooner and pleading with Him for a way to take her there now. I can’t bear the thought of the Nazis coming for her.

  I know you are praying for us back home in America, and that Avraham is praying, too, wherever he is. I find it harder and harder to pray when my prayers seem to go unanswered. Once again, the book of Tehillim is my only comfort:

  “Hear my prayer, O Hashem; let my cry for help come to you. Do not hide your face from me when I am in distress . . .”

  May He deliver us from our enemies and bring all of us together soon.

  With love,

  Sarah Rivkah and Fredeleh

  CHAPTER 30

  ESTHER’S OVERNIGHT VISIT to her grandmother’s house had seemed to last forever. She had tried to learn more information about her mother from Grandma Shaffer, but she hadn’t been helpful, insisting that she didn’t know anything else. Esther wished her father had never arranged for her and Peter to stay there on the weekends. She told him so in her letters, but Daddy said Penny deserved to have some time off. Now, as she boarded the bus to return home, Esther decided to sit beside Penny instead of riding in the back where she and Peter usually rode.

  “Penny, do you remember my mother?” she asked.

  “I remember when your parents got married,” Penny said. “Your grandmother gave a little party for them out in her backyard. She invited me and my parents.”

  “So you knew Mama?”

  “Not really. Just as a neighbor, watching from a distance.” It seemed like an odd reply to Esther. And Penny’s voice sounded sad. “I remember how pretty your mother looked the day they got married,” Penny said. “And how happy she was. Your mother couldn’t stop smiling – and neither could your dad.” Esther wondered why Penny seemed so sad about Mama if she never knew her.

  Esther gazed out the bus window, watching the storefronts and office buildings and tenements go slowly by. The city looked dreary in these weeks of waiting before spring arrived. The snow had melted but the trees were still bare, the grass brown. Everything reminded her of death, and she didn’t want to be reminded. First Mama had been killed. Now Daddy was in danger. Mr. Mendel had collapsed and nearly died. And Esther worried that if Grandma Shaffer got sick and died, there would be no one left to take care of her and Peter. Esther had thought about it a lot lately, which was why she was determined to find Mama’s family. Finding her grandparents would be a way to hang on to a little piece of her mother’s memory, too.

  She turned to Penny again. “Mama was pretty, wasn’t she?”

  Penny nodded. “I remember what a tiny little waist she had. Your father could have wrapped his hands right around it with his fingers touching.”

  “Remember you said you would help me find out more about her family? Can we start today? When we get home?”

  “We can try.”

  Esther had wondered if she would feel like a traitor asking Penny for help. She had resented Penny’s interference in her life at first and had fought against Penny’s efforts to get close to her. But something had begun to change at Christmastime when they went to Times Square together and later when they decorated the tree. Esther’s attitude had changed even more on the night that Mr. Mendel had gone to the hospital and Penny had comforted Esther and wept with her. Or maybe it had happened earlier that same evening as they had celebrated Purim. Ever since Daddy left, Esther had been angry with God for leaving her all alone – but she wasn’t alone. He had sent Penny.

  “Mr. Mendel said we could start by looking for your mother’s birth certificate and marriage license, remember?” Penny said. “That way, we can find out what your mother’s maiden name was and maybe the names of her parents. Do you know where your daddy keeps important papers like that?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe in the storage closet upstairs where the Christmas decorations were?”

  When they arrived at the apartment, Esther and Penny spent more than an hour dragging everything out of the upstairs closet, searching through boxes of baby clothes and old toys and outgrown clothing. They didn’t find any papers. Esther surveyed the mess they had made in disappointment. “The only other place I can think of is in Daddy’s closet,” Esther said.

  Penny winced. “I would feel funny snooping through his things.”

  “Please? I’ll look in there myself if you don’t want to. I need to find Mama’s family. It’s important. Remember what Mr. Mendel said? We should search the whole world to find them.”

  “I don’t know, Esther. You said your mother’s family didn’t want anything to do with her. Maybe it’s not such a good idea to look for them. They might turn their backs on you, too, and I would hate to see you and Peter get hurt.”

  Esther hadn’t considered that. She had imagined herself running into their open arms, happy to be reunited at last. But by rejecting Mama, her grandparents had rejected her and Peter, as well. Even so, Esther wanted to know why.

  “Wouldn’t you want to talk to your real mother and father if you could?” she asked Penny. “Even though they gave you away? Don’t you want to know why?”

  Penny gazed into the distance, looking thoughtful. “Yeah, I guess I would,” she finally said. “But let’s put all this stuff away before we go rooting through any more closets.”

  Esther closed the flaps on one of the boxes and shoved it back into the closet. When they had put the boxes away again, Esther led Penny into Daddy’s bedroom. Penny’s clothes took up a very small space in the closet, as if she knew that this room didn’t really belong to her and that she wasn’t staying forever. Or maybe Penny didn’t have very many things. Esther wondered where Mama’s clothes had gone. She couldn’t remember Daddy packing them up and taking them away, but he must have.

  �
�Before we start,” Penny said, “let’s try to remember how everything looks so we can leave it the way we found it, okay? I don’t want to mess up any of your daddy’s things.”

  “Okay. But I don’t think he’ll notice. He isn’t very neat.”

  They moved his shoes and slippers out of the way and found a dust-covered box buried in the back of the closet. Esther pulled it out and yanked open the flaps, hoping to find what they were looking for – and found something even better.

  “These things belonged to Mama!” Esther remembered seeing them on her mother’s dressing table. She pulled them out and examined them, one by one: her silver vanity set with the mirror, comb and brush, her perfume bottles and talcum powder.

  “Daddy cleared off her dressing table after she died,” Esther said. “It was too hard to look at them every day and be reminded of her, he said. I’m glad he didn’t throw them away, though.” She lifted a perfume bottle to her nose and sniffed. Her mother’s scent brought tears to her eyes.

  “You should have these, Esther. It’s not too hard to look at them now, is it? Wouldn’t your mother want you to have them?”

  “I don’t know. I wouldn’t want to make Daddy sad again.” She remembered his reaction when she’d played Mama’s piano for him when he was home on leave. But Esther longed to have these small tokens of her mother.

  Penny laid her hand on Esther’s shoulder. Her eyes looked soft in the dim light of the closet’s single light bulb. “You’re becoming a young woman now, you know. We should think about rearranging a few things.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, for starters, you and I could share this bedroom. Two girls together, you know? You would have more privacy than sharing a room with your brother.”

  “Won’t he be lonely all by himself?”

  “We could ask him. Let Peter decide. You’re not going to be a little girl forever. You’re growing into a woman. You and your friends will want privacy to talk about girly things.”

  Esther didn’t have any friends. Only Jacky Hoffman and Mr. Mendel. Jacky kept inviting her to go to the movies with him, again and again, but she and Peter always had to go to their grandmother’s house on Saturday.

  She returned to the contents of the carton and found a collection of Mama’s scarves and gloves and purses. Beneath one of Mama’s Sunday hats, Esther found the jewelry box that Daddy had given Mama for Christmas one year.

  Esther glanced up at Penny before opening it. Ever since they’d found the carton of Mama’s things Penny had been sitting back, allowing Esther to look through it by herself. “Go ahead.” Penny nodded. “Open it.”

  Inside were necklaces and bracelets that Esther remembered her mother wearing. Mama had never worn a lot of flashy jewelry like bangles and rings – just her wedding band and a pearl necklace and a few other simple pieces. The rest of her jewelry was for special occasions.

  At the bottom of the jewelry box were three old black-and-white photographs. “This is Mama!” she said, examining the first one. “She looks a lot younger. I don’t know who these people are with her.” There was an older woman with snowy hair and two young men. Esther peered closely. It was hard to see their faces. Were they Mama’s boyfriends? Or did they look a little bit like Mama – her brothers, maybe?

  In the second photograph, one of the young men from the first picture posed by himself. The third photo was a portrait of a stern-faced couple and three small children, two boys and a girl. Could the little girl in dark ringlets be Mama?

  “This is so frustrating,” Esther said with a sigh. “I want to know who these people are and why Mama kept the pictures.”

  “You should show them to your father when he comes home. He might know.”

  There was one more item in the jewelry box, a small, black velvet bag with a drawstring. Esther untied the string and let the item drop into her palm. It was a small brass box with strange lettering on it.

  “Let me see that,” Penny said, reaching for it. “This looks like the little box that Mr. Mendel has on his door, only smaller.”

  “I wonder why Mama has it?”

  “Mr. Mendel owns this apartment, right? Maybe it was on the door when your parents moved in, and your mother removed it.”

  “I guess so,” Esther said with a shrug. She began putting her mother’s things back in the box, disappointed that they hadn’t found her birth certificate.

  Suddenly Penny struck her forehead. “I’m such a scatterbrain! I just remembered seeing a drawer full of papers in the dining room. I was looking in the buffet for napkins and a tablecloth and saw a bunch of papers in the bottom drawer. I thought it was a funny place to keep papers.”

  They left the contents of the closet strewn on the floor and hurried downstairs. Penny pulled the drawer all the way out of the buffet and set it on the dining room table. “See?” she said. “This looks like a copy of the lease for this apartment . . . and here are your old report cards . . . and look, Esther! Your birth certificate!”

  She took it from Penny’s hand and sank onto a dining room chair to read it. Father’s name: Edward James Shaffer. Mother’s name: Rachel Rose Shaffer. Maiden name: F ischer.

  Esther stared and stared at it while Penny continued searching through the drawer. “Here’s their marriage license,” she said. Esther scanned the page with her. Rachel Rose F ischer had married Edward James Shaffer on June 10, 1930. Mama’s parents’ names were David F ischer and Esther F ischer.

  Esther gaped in surprise. “Mama named me after her mother! She couldn’t have stayed mad at them or she never would have given me the same name, would she?” Seeing the names neatly typed on the official-looking document made Mama’s family seem real to Esther. She imagined them looking just like the couple in Mama’s photograph, only older. David and Esther F ischer. Her grandparents.

  “Well, we know their names,” Penny said. “Now what? F ischer seems like a pretty common name.”

  “We could ask Mr. Mendel what he thinks we should do.” Esther stood, ready to race downstairs to ask him.

  “You should wait until tomorrow. Don’t bother him now. He might be resting.”

  Esther sank back onto the chair with a sigh. Now that she was one step closer to finding her family, she didn’t want to wait.

  “Hey, you have a birthday coming in another month,” Penny said, studying her birth certificate. “You’ll be how old? . . . Thirteen? How do you want to celebrate?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “How do you usually celebrate birthdays? Dinner at your grandmother’s house? A party with some of your friends?”

  Mama had made birthdays fun when she had been alive, but nobody had celebrated them since. Esther didn’t have any close friends from school. She used to play hopscotch and skip rope with a group of neighborhood girls, but everything had changed after Mama died. Esther had been sad for such a long time that no one wanted to play with her anymore – and she had wanted to be left alone. Besides, the girls all acted as if their mothers might die, too, if they got too close to Esther.

  “Mama used to bake birthday cakes for us,” Esther finally said. “But I don’t want to eat it at Grandma’s house. It’s so cluttered in there that I can’t breathe. If I could have my wish, I’d like to have cake with Mr. Mendel.”

  “I don’t think he can eat our food. He said it has to come from special Jewish stores, remember?”

  “There’s a Jewish bakery across the street from the fruit stand where . . .” Esther paused. It was across from where her mother and Mrs. Mendel had died. Esther had always avoided that block and the bad memories of that day. But she would gladly make an exception for Mr. Mendel’s sake. “I’ll bet he could eat the cake if we bought it at the Jewish bakery.”

  “Are you sure that’s all you want? Just to have cake here at home?”

  “Well . . .” She thought of Jacky Hoffman. “Instead of staying overnight at Grandma’s that weekend, could I please go to the Saturday matinee with my friends? I kno
w that means you won’t get the weekend off, but – ”

  “That’s okay. I don’t have any place special to go. Your birthday is much more important. You can go to the movies with your friends that Saturday and come back here for cake with Mr. Mendel. How would that be?”

  “Could I go to the movies without Peter?” she asked in a whisper. “Just my friends? I don’t want him to feel bad, but . . .”

  “I understand. I’ll get him to help me with something here in the apartment.”

  “Thanks, Penny.”

  As the time for her birthday approached, Esther grew more and more excited about her trip to the movies alone with Jacky. It would almost seem like a grown-up date. She was thirteen years old after all, and she had seen kids from school holding hands as they stood in line for their tickets. She might even agree to sit upstairs in the balcony this time. Only the little kids like Peter sat downstairs.

  When the day finally arrived, Esther nearly danced with happiness as she walked to the movies alone with Jacky. “Are you going to let me pay for your ticket this time?” he asked, flashing his roguish grin.

  “If you want to . . . It’s my birthday, after all. I’m thirteen now.”

  She was a little disappointed when Jacky didn’t hold her hand as they waited in line. But he led the way upstairs to the balcony and put his arm around her shoulder when the lights went low. His arm was really around her shoulder, too, not just on the back of the chair. She saw the couple in front of them smooching during the newsreel, but she was relieved that Jacky didn’t try to kiss her. Their hands brushed as they shared the popcorn and candy, and it was so exciting to sit close to Jacky and feel grown up that Esther could barely follow the plot of the film they watched.

  Afterward, Jacky finally reached for her hand outside the theater and held it all the way home. He even took the long way home so they could be together longer. “Can I give you a birthday kiss?” he asked when they halted in the alley behind Esther’s apartment building. She hesitated, then shook her head. She didn’t have quite enough courage for a first kiss, especially in broad daylight where the neighbors might see them. Her heart already pounded harder than it ever had in her life.