The Girl From Over There

by Sharon Rechter

  “So I followed him,” Leah whispered. “A man who was going to die. Our path to Israel was full of twists and turns. The whole time, I wondered why I was there. I thought about Mary constantly. A short time later, we learned that the war had broken out. I was terrified. I knew that Jacob had been right, that we had to hurry to do our work, create a safe place for others, and save our families. I kept hoping it was nothing but a nightmare, that I would wake up burning with a fever in my carved wooden bed at home, with Mary, Jacob, and my mother and father by my side, and my husband wiping the sweat from my forehead with a damp cloth. But no! It was a terrible reality. I was all alone on a treacherous path, on my way to a strange, distant land … far away from my loved ones … from my Mary … from my parents … and I just know they’re all gone now.”

  “Don’t say that,” Dan whispered. “Maybe they’re alive somewhere. Maybe you’ll find them someday.”

  “Maybe? No. There is no maybe!” she said decisively. “I’ve already built enough castles made of dreams. No more. A rock has been thrown and the castle was struck. It crumbled to the ground. For months, I looked for them, and after the war I relentlessly pestered the Search Bureau for Missing Relatives.13 I asked everyone I could about them, and finally word reached me that their house had been looted, and they were taken to a camp—a camp that no child ever came back from.”

  Leah stood up and brushed off her pants. She was different now, distant. “Don’t pay any attention to me. I’m sorry I troubled you with the story of my past. Can I make you something to drink?”

  There was no anger left in Leah’s voice now, just confusion. The only trace left of her words was in her eyes, which were on fire with grief.

  Without waiting for our answer, Leah walked over to the small alcove she used for a kitchen and started to make something. We could tell she was very upset, and not entirely in control. She was quick to get angry and hate herself.

  A few moments later, she brought two cups of steaming tea to the table, forgetting there was nothing Dan hated more than tea.

  Chapter 8

  After Leah’s story, I felt a strange emotion, a kind of regret about what I’d done to Miriam. Now I understood what she had gone through. Besides, she was already a part of the class—and of the kibbutz. I was one of the last ones who still ignored her, through no fault of her own. I knew I had to ask for her forgiveness, and yet a part of me felt it was beneath me, so I put off the awkward moment until nighttime.

  Then at night, I’d make all sorts of excuses for myself, like that I was tired and couldn’t do it properly. I’d say this to myself every night until I fell asleep. One evening I decided that I had to make it happen. So, I stayed up and planned on going to see her; but for some reason, just as I headed out, I had to go to the bathroom. After that, I went back to my bed. Why should I wake the poor girl up from her sleep? I thought. Yet I still felt the need to apologize to her. My heart was heavy with guilt. I got out of my bed again and went over to her bed. I felt a weird sort of coldness welling up inside me. A thousand blankets could not have warmed it. Only Miriam’s forgiveness could do it, I told myself, and with newfound determination, I hastened my steps. But as I approached Yael’s bed, which was right next to Miriam’s bed, I began to slow down. However, even these tiny steps eventually brought me to Miriam’s bed. Her blanket covered her up to her head, and the only sign that she was in the bed at all was her long black hair. I touched it; I’d always wanted such delicate, beautiful hair. I’d braid it during the week, and on the Sabbath, I’d let it down and weave a flower in it.

  “Miriam …” I whispered. She was startled awake, and seeing me, of course, she was alarmed. For the first time, I noticed her eyes shooting darts. She remembered that other night when I stood by her bed, the “Night of the Purple Teddy Bear.”

  “I came to … apologize … to you.” I pushed the words out.

  She looked deep into my eyes, as if she wanted to determine if there was any truth behind my words. Seeing my pleading expression, she put a warm hand on my forehead and whispered with a sigh, “I think you’ve gone crazy.”

  “I really mean it,” I said, practically begging in response to her friendly joke.

  “Let’s go outside,” she said, sensing the awkwardness of our situation.

  It truly was an odd sight: two girls, whose rivalry was known throughout the entire kibbutz, stepping out hand in hand, with blankets on their shoulders, under the moonlight. Even the moon seemed to stare at us in disbelief, and ducked behind a cloud until, convinced of my sincerity, it came back out again. We sat down on the grass, and I couldn’t help but recall all the cruel pranks I’d committed, that this lawn had witnessed.

  We covered ourselves in our blankets and giggled.

  Abruptly, we fell silent. “I’m sorry,” I whispered.

  “Thank you,” she said. “Let’s sleep out on the lawn,” she suggested quickly to spare us the awkwardness of the moment.

  I nodded. We arranged our blankets, spreading mine out on the grass and using hers to cover ourselves.

  We talked and laughed as if nothing bad had ever happened between us. As if we’d always been best friends. And that’s how we felt. We chatted for two hours, and there wasn’t a single person on the kibbutz we didn’t make a funny comment about.

  “You’re a real kibbutznik … you’ve learned how to gossip!” I laughed.

  At that, Miriam suddenly went quiet.

  “Are you my friend?” she asked me, gravely serious. I didn’t know what to say. I wondered if she’d only been pretending, to test my sincerity. “Yes,” I said. “I mean …”

  “I just wanted to be sure that this isn’t a dream, and that tomorrow we won’t….” She fell silent and stared at me again, studying me. Then she said, “You know, it was Rosh Hashanah.”

  “What?” I asked.

  “The night when I was given away.”

  I know that many kids where given away to save their lives, but I had never met one before. I didn’t know that Miriam was given away. My mind was racing with questions, but something in me told me that now was simply the time to listen, and for the first time, not to judge.

  “How do you know?” I asked. “You were really little, weren’t you?”

  “Mama … well, my adoptive mama told me about it, during the terrible, gray days of the war, when we were in the ghetto. It was awful over there,” she emphasized. “I wouldn’t wish that place on my worst enemies.”

  “It was that bad?” I asked, without waiting for an answer, because I’d heard the stories already, though they were hard to believe.

  “Yes,” she replied. “It was bad there. We lived with a few other families in one room, with one bathroom. We weren’t allowed to go outside. Everyone was skinny, a frightening kind of skinny. A painful skinny. Look,” she said to me. “I’m skinny, right?”

  “Yes,” I said. “You might be the skinniest girl in the kibbutz.”

  “There, everyone was much skinnier than I am. They were just bones, like half-people. They’d fall down in the street from exhaustion and hunger. And no one was allowed do a thing. Do you remember when Dan hit his head, and everyone ran over to him, worried?” I nodded. “Well, it made me remember a boy who got hurt in the ghetto by a German solider, and no one was allowed to come near him to save him. And that’s how he died.”

  I tried to hide the look of disgust on my face.

  “Are you sure I should keep telling you this?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Please.”

  “One evening, Mama woke us up. ‘Get up, please, get up quickly and quietly.’ I woke up. ‘Mama,’ I whispered. ‘What’s wrong?’ ‘You’re running away,’ she said, with a tear in the corner of her eye.”

  Miriam was teary-eyed too as she remembered this.

  “‘What? We’re running away?’ I asked her. ‘Just you, children. It’s bad here,’ my mother said. ‘It’s dangerous. And I made a vow that you would go to Israel …’ She wrapped my sister, Zipp
orah, and me in warm clothes, and pulled two embroidered handkerchiefs out from under the wooden plank. ‘Remember us,’ she said.

  “Zipporah started crying. ‘Mama, won’t we see each other again?’

  “‘Let’s hope so, darling. Let’s hope for the best,’ she told us, and hugged us tight.

  “Embroidered handkerchiefs were mama’s favorite. She kissed us while papa rushed us. ‘Go on, children, faster.’ Mama gave Zipporah our two-year-old brother, Moshe. He was sleeping soundly. She gave me a bundle packed for the road. She caressed us. ‘I didn’t want it to be this way,’ Mama whispered, and I didn’t understand why she’d said that.

  “Papa led us to a fence with a hidden hole in it. Now I understood what he’d been doing for the past few days. He said, ‘Run to the woods. You’ll find good people there. Take care of yourselves.’ We hugged one last time, and we went out through the rip in the fence. We came across a red flower. I stopped to look at it, but Zipporah urged me to move on.

  “You see, Michal,” Miriam explained, “the ghetto had no flowers.”

  “What, there were no flowers or plants at all?” I asked, shocked.

  Miriam explained: “Flowers were not allowed there. Even weeds weren’t; we had to rip them out, and sometimes we’d gather them up and eat them.” She continued her story, and I listened. “We ran to the woods nearby. We were tired, and even though Papa had warned us not to, we rested in the shade of a tree near the ghetto. Zipporah and Moshe fell asleep. But I stayed awake and thought about Mama and Papa, who’d stayed behind in the ghetto.

  “When morning came, the sun was bright and warm. Zipporah and Moshe were still fast asleep. I saw that people were stepping out of their houses in the ghetto. The ones who resisted were beaten by German soldiers and fell to the ground. Suddenly I saw that my mother and father were also in the group. They were led right by us, and Papa tried pushing Mama into the woods to save her, but he didn’t see that a German soldier had noticed them. When she tried to run, he shot her.

  “Mama fell on the path, so close to us. If only she’d looked up, she would have noticed us; we were just a few feet away. I wanted to come out of my hiding spot, to pull her into the woods with us. Papa lingered there too; he tried to hoist her on his shoulders, but the soldier began to whip him. Papa didn’t give up. He looked up, and then he saw me. He was frightened for us. His eyes were pleading with me not to come out, to stay in the woods. The soldier kept beating him and dragging him along. Mama was left on the path.

  “After the convoy passed, I came out of my hiding spot. I walked over to my mother, who was bleeding on the ground. She recognized me, though she was barely conscious, her mind in a fog. ‘Miriam,’ she whispered. ‘Don’t tell your brother and sister about this … take care of Zipporah and Moshe … and take my bundle. It’s under my coat.’

  “‘Mama,’ I sobbed quietly. ‘Don’t die. Please …’

  “‘Child,’ she said to me. ‘In a few moments, more cruel German soldiers will get here, and they’ll catch you. Please, run for your lives. You can’t help me any longer.’ Then she rested her head on the ground. After mumbling a few more words, my mother died.”

  I looked at Miriam. Her haggard features paled, and she put her hand on her heart, over the pocket of her pajama top. Her moan-like breaths reminded me of Leah telling her story.

  “Calm down,” I whispered. “Please, stop.” But she needed to keep going. I put my hand on her shoulder.

  “I hid,” she said. “I waited, and another group of Jews from the ghetto were led by. They, too, were beaten and dragged away. Some of them fell down on the path. I wanted to take my mother’s body away from there, and fast, so that Moshe and Zipporah wouldn’t see her. I wanted them to keep thinking what I had thought before this morning, that the people of the ghetto would eventually be set free, that it was some sort of unjust prison. That’s what Papa used to say to us. He may have believed it himself, that the war would end soon. I dragged Mama behind me, far off the path.”

  “Wasn’t it hard for you to do that?” I asked, my voice full of admiration.

  “Michal,” she said, “in times like that, you don’t think about what’s hard, but about what’s necessary. I spent an hour digging a grave with my bare hands under a tree. It wasn’t that deep, but at least Mama got a grave—she was the only one. I carved the word MAMA into the tree above it. I said a prayer, and I went back to Zipporah and Moshe, carrying with me the belongings and jewelry that were in Mama’s coat. I stashed them deep in our bundle. ‘Zipporah, get up,’ I tried rocking my sister awake. ‘It’s morning, and we have to leave this place. It’s dangerous here.’

  “‘Okay,’ she said, and sat up, stretching. ‘I’ll take Moshe,’ I said, wanting to help. I carried him in my arms, and we walked deep into the woods, not knowing where we were headed, or what tomorrow would bring. We walked during the day. In the afternoon, we gathered twigs for a fire. At night we sat by the fire and tried to sleep on an empty stomach. Zipporah often complained that we’d had more food in the ghetto, and that Mama and Papa had probably gone back to their house and become rich again, while we wandered through the woods, starving.

  “It hurt me to hear Zipporah talk about our parents that way. Who knows where Papa is now? I thought to myself, and resolved to keep the horrible secret of what I’d seen happen to Mama and Papa locked in my heart.

  “Sometimes, when the hunger got worse, if we were near a village or town, I’d sell a piece of Mama’s jewelry, even though that put us in danger of being discovered. Sometimes, Zipporah refused to eat, claiming she wasn’t hungry, but I knew she was doing it to save food for us. Sometimes, wandering through the woods, we’d come across other children; we’d travel with them for a few days and then part ways. We met adults, too, but it was dangerous to move in large groups, so they preferred to stay alone and told us to try our luck in the villages, with kindhearted farmers.

  “One day, it was Zipporah’s turn to carry Moshe in her arms. He’d grown and started walking faster on his own by this point, which made things easier, but he still walked very slowly. He was, after all, just a little boy. We were walking in the woods, as usual, when suddenly we arrived at a road where Nazi vehicles were passing. We had no compass and no map, so instead of going straight we’d accidentally veered off toward the road.

  “We hid among the trees immediately and wanted to run back into the woods, which had a thicker cover of trees. But then, Moshe mumbled something. I think he asked for water or food, something basic that every baby boy should be able to ask for—unless he is a hunted Jewish baby. A soldier sitting in one of the cars noticed us and called to his friends to shoot at us. We ran. Zipporah held on tightly to Moshe. The soldier and his friends began chasing us. Their guns and rifles were aimed at us. They fired.

  “Michal,” Miriam turned to me. “I felt like a rabbit in one of Papa’s hunting trips. The soldier fired, and everything went black. But I wasn’t the one who’d been hit. Zipporah was shot in her shoulder. I was terrified. ‘Keep going!’ I screamed at her. ‘Take Moshe,’ she said, groaning in pain. Even then, she still tried to hide her pain from me. I took Moshe, who cried in my arms, and we kept running. The soldier fired again. This time he hit her in the middle of the back, and she went down. I knew she was dead, but there was no time to cry for my sister, so I ran even faster. The bullets whistled over our heads, but somehow we were able to escape them.”

  I was so immersed in Miriam’s story that I hadn’t noticed I’d been holding my breath out of fear for their lives. And now, at once, I let the air out of my lungs in a sigh of relief. Miriam glanced at me and continued her story.

  “I didn’t know, and I still don’t know how long we were in the woods. One cold, gray morning, Moshe and I were sitting in our hiding spot. We knew we were deep into the woods, and we didn’t want to move anywhere. That day, a girl approached us. She’d walked into the woods so quietly that we hadn’t even noticed her.

  “‘Hello,’ she sai
d to us.

  “‘Hello,’ I answered, frightened. She didn’t look like one of ‘us,’ the children who’d escaped.

  “‘Those clothes are small on you,’ she said to me.

  “You have to understand that until then I had paid no attention to it, and now, suddenly, I noticed how worn and torn our clothes were.

  “‘Come,’ the girl said to me.

  “She came closer and repeated what she’d said: ‘Come over to our house to eat.’ I was afraid of her, but we were so tired of running that I said yes.

  “The girl’s mother was alarmed by the sight of us, and she took us into her home with great apprehension. The mother and daughter exchanged a few words in secret, while the mother set the table for us. ‘Eat,’ she urged us. We ate soup and meat. It was the best food I ever had in my life,” Miriam said, smacking her lips, as if she were eating delicacies at that very moment.

  “After that, the woman bathed us and dressed us in her children’s clothes. She agreed to let us live with her ‘for a short time.’ I remember her emphasizing that.

  “While we stayed there, I milked the cow for her and gathered wood for the furnace. We lived with that Polish family for a relatively long time, until one day I sensed something strange about the mother’s behavior. I asked her about it, and she told me we had to leave because the Germans were closing in on their town.

  “We packed our few belongings, and the woman sent us off with a large piece of meat and a small cloth sack with milk. Moshe didn’t understand what was going on or why we had to leave. I couldn’t explain it to him.