by Alan Gratz
It hadn’t always been this way. Just four years ago, their home city of Aleppo had been the biggest, brightest, most modern city in Syria. A crown jewel of the Middle East. Mahmoud remembered neon malls, glittering skyscrapers, soccer stadiums, movie theaters, museums. Aleppo had history too—a long history. The Old City, at the heart of Aleppo, was built in the 12th century, and people had lived in the area as early as 8,000 years ago. Aleppo had been an amazing city to grow up in.
Until 2011, when the Arab Spring came to Syria.
They didn’t call it that then. Nobody knew a wave of revolutions would sweep through the Middle East, toppling governments and overthrowing dictators and starting civil wars. All they knew from images on TV and posts on Facebook and Twitter was that people in Tunisia and Libya and Yemen were rioting in the streets, and as each country stood up and said “Enough!” so did the next one, and the next one, until at last the Arab Spring came to Syria.
But Syrians knew protesting in the streets was dangerous. Syria was ruled by Bashar al-Assad, who had twice been “elected” president when no one was allowed to run against him. Assad made people who didn’t like him disappear. Forever. Everyone was afraid of what he would do if the Arab Spring swept through Syria. There was an old Arabic proverb that said, “Close the door that brings the wind and relax,” and that’s exactly what they did; while the rest of the Middle East was rioting, Syrians stayed inside and locked their doors and waited to see what would happen.
But they hadn’t closed the door tight enough. A man in Damascus, the capital of Syria, was imprisoned for speaking out against Assad. Some kids in Daraa, a city in southern Syria, were arrested and abused by the police for writing anti-Assad slogans on walls. And then the whole country seemed to go crazy all at once. Tens of thousands of people poured into the streets, demanding the release of political prisoners and more freedom for everyone. Within a month, Assad had turned his tanks and soldiers and bombers on the protestors—on his own people—and ever since then, all Mahmoud and Waleed and anyone else in Syria had known was war.
Mahmoud and Waleed turned down a different rubble-strewn alley than the day before and stopped dead. Just ahead of them, two boys had another boy up against what was left of a wall, about to take the bag of bread he carried.
Mahmoud pulled Waleed behind a burned-out car, his heart racing. Incidents like this were common in Aleppo lately. It was getting harder and harder to get food in the city. But for Mahmoud, the scene brought back memories of another time, just after the war had begun.
Mahmoud had been going to meet his best friend, Khalid. Down a side street just like this one, Mahmoud found Khalid getting beaten up by two older boys. Khalid was a Shia Muslim in a country of mostly Sunni Muslims. Khalid was clever. Smart. Always quick to raise his hand in class, and always with the right answer. He and Mahmoud had known each other for years, and even though Mahmoud was Sunni and Khalid was Shia, that had never mattered to them. They liked to spend their afternoons and weekends reading comic books and watching superhero movies and playing video games.
But right then, Khalid had been curled into a ball on the ground, his hands around his head while the older boys kicked him.
“Not so smart now, are you, pig?” one of them had said.
“Shia should know their place! This is Syria, not Iran!”
Mahmoud had bristled. The differences between Sunnis and Shiites was an excuse. These boys had just wanted to beat someone up.
With a battle cry that would have made Wolverine proud, Mahmoud had launched himself at Khalid’s attackers.
And he had been beaten up as badly as Khalid.
From that day forward, Mahmoud and Khalid were marked. The two older boys became Mahmoud’s and Khalid’s own personal bullies, delivering repeated beatdowns between classes and after school.
That’s when Mahmoud and Khalid had learned how valuable it was to be invisible. Mahmoud stayed in the classroom all day, never going to the bathroom or the playground. Khalid never answered another question in class, not even when the teacher called on him directly. If the bullies didn’t notice you, they didn’t hit you. That’s when Mahmoud had realized that together, he and Khalid were bigger targets; alone, it was easier to be invisible. It was nothing they ever said to each other, just something they each came to understand, and within a year they had drifted apart, not even speaking to each other as they passed in the hall.
A year after that, Khalid had died in an airstrike anyway.
It was better not to have friends in Syria in 2015.
Mahmoud watched as these two boys attacked the boy with the bread, a boy he didn’t even know. He felt the stirrings of indignation, of anger, of sympathy. His breath came quick and deep, and his hands clenched into fists. “I should do something,” he whispered. But he knew better.
Head down, hoodie up, eyes on the ground. The trick was to be invisible. Blend in. Disappear.
Mahmoud took his younger brother by the hand, turned around, and found a different way home.
It was like they were invisible.
Josef and his sister followed their mother through the crowd at the Lehrter Bahnhof, Berlin’s main railway station. Josef and Ruth each carried a suitcase, and their mother carried two more—one for herself, and one for Josef’s father. No porters rushed to help them with their bags. No station agents stopped to ask if they needed help finding their train. The bright yellow Star of David armbands the Landaus wore were like magical talismans that made them disappear. Yet no one bumped into them, Josef noticed. All the station attendants and other passengers gave them a wide berth, flowing around them like water around a stone.
The people chose not to see them.
On the train, Josef and his family sat in a compartment labeled J, for Jew, so no “real” Germans would sit there by accident. They were headed for Hamburg, on the north coast, where his father would meet them to board their ship. The day they had gotten Papa’s telegram, Josef’s mother booked tickets for all four of them to the only place that would take them: an island half a world away called Cuba.
Ever since the Nazis had taken over six years ago, Jews were fleeing Germany. By now, May of 1939, most countries had stopped admitting Jewish refugees, or had lots of official applications you had to fill out and file and pay for before they would let you in. Josef and his family hoped to one day make it to America, but you couldn’t just sail into New York Harbor. The United States only let in a certain number of Jews every year, so Josef’s family planned to live in Cuba while they waited.
“I’m hot,” Ruthie said, pulling at her coat.
“No, no,” her mother said. “You must leave your coat on and never go anywhere without it, do you understand? Not until we reach Cuba.”
“I don’t want to go to Cuba,” Ruth whined as the train got under way.
Mama pulled Ruth into her lap. “I know, dear. But we have to go so all of us will be safe. It will be an adventure.”
Ruthie would have started kindergarten that year if Jews were still allowed to go to school. She had bright eyes, wild brown hair cut in a bob and parted on the side, and a little gap between her two front teeth that made her look like a chipmunk. She wore a dark blue wool dress with a white sailor’s collar and carried her white corduroy stuffed rabbit, Bitsy, everywhere she went.
Ruthie had been born the year Adolf Hitler was elected chancellor of Germany. She’d never known any other life except this one. But Josef remembered how it used to be. Back when people saw them. Back when they were Germans.
They had gotten up early and it had been a stressful day, and soon Ruthie was asleep in Mama’s lap, and Mama dozed with her. As he watched them sleep, Josef wondered if anyone would really be able to tell they were Jews if they weren’t in a Jewish compartment, wearing armbands with the Star of David on them.
Josef remembered a time in class, back when he was allowed to go to school. His teacher, Herr Meier, had called him to the front of the room. At first Josef thought the teacher
was going to ask him to do a math problem on the board. Instead, Herr Meier lowered a screen with the faces and profiles of Jewish men and women on it and proceeded to use Josef as an example of how to tell a real German from a Jew. He turned Josef this way and that, pointing out the curve of his nose, the slant of his chin. Josef felt the heat of that embarrassment all over again, the humiliation of being talked about like he was an animal. A specimen. Something subhuman.
Without these stupid armbands, without the letter J stamped on his passport, would anyone know he was Jewish?
Josef decided to find out.
He left the compartment quietly and walked along the corridor past the other Jewish families in their compartments. Beyond the next door was the “German” part of the train.
Heart in his throat, skin tingling with goose bumps, Josef took the paper armband with the Star of David off his arm, slid it into the inside pocket of his jacket, and stepped through the door.
Josef tiptoed down the corridor. The “German” train car didn’t feel any different than the Jewish car. German families talked and laughed and argued in their compartments, just like Jews. They ate and slept and read books like Jews.
Josef caught his reflection in one of the windows. Straight brown hair slicked back from his pale white forehead, brown eyes behind wire-frame glasses that sat on a short nose, ears that stuck out maybe a little too far. He was about average height for his age, and he wore a gray double-breasted pin-stripe jacket, brown trousers, and a white shirt and blue tie. Nothing about him actually matched the pictures on Herr Meier’s presentation on how to identify a Jew. Josef couldn’t think of any Jewish people he knew who did look like those pictures.
The next car was the dining car. People sat at little tables, smoking, eating, and drinking as they chatted or read the newspaper or played cards. The man at the concession stand sold newspapers, and Josef took one and put a coin on the counter.
The concession stand man smiled. “Buying a paper for your father?” he asked Josef.
No, thought Josef. My father just got out of a concentration camp.
“No. For me,” Josef said instead. “I want to be a journalist one day.”
“Good!” the news agent said. “We need more writers.” He waved a hand at all the magazines and newspapers. “So I have more things to sell!”
He laughed, and Josef smiled. Here they were, talking like two regular people, but Josef hadn’t forgotten he was Jewish. He hadn’t forgotten that if he were wearing his armband, this man wouldn’t be talking and laughing with him. He’d be calling for the police.
Josef was about to leave when he thought to buy Ruthie a piece of candy. Money had been tight since their father lost his job, and she would enjoy the treat. Josef took a hard candy from a jar and fished in his pocket for another pfennig. He found one, put it on the counter, and paid for the candy. But when he’d removed the coin, his armband had slipped out too. It fluttered to the floor, the Star of David landing face up for all the world to see.
A fist closed around Josef’s heart, and he dove for the armband.
Stomp. A black shoe covered the armband before Josef could grab it. Slowly, shakily, Josef lifted his eyes from the black shoes to the white socks, brown shorts, brown shirt, and red Nazi armband of a Hitler Youth. A boy about Josef’s age, sworn to live and die for the Fatherland. He stood on Josef’s armband, his eyes wide with surprise.
The blood drained from Josef’s face.
The boy reached down, palmed the armband, and took Josef by the arm. “Let’s go,” the boy said, and he marched Josef back through the dining car.
Josef could barely walk. His legs were like lead, and his eyes lost their focus.
After Herr Meier had called him in front of the class to show how Jews were inferior to real Germans, Josef had returned to his seat next to Klaus, his best friend in the class. Klaus had been wearing the same uniform this boy did now. Klaus had joined the Hitler Youth not because he wanted to, but because German boys—and their families—were shamed and mistreated if they didn’t.
Klaus had winced to show Josef how sorry he was that Herr Meier had done that to him.
That afternoon, a group of Hitler Youth were waiting for Josef outside the school. They fell on him, hitting and kicking him for being a Jew, and calling him all kinds of names.
And the worst part was, Klaus had joined them.
Wearing that uniform turned boys into monsters. Josef had seen it happen. He had done everything he could to avoid the Hitler Youth ever since, but now he’d handed himself right over to one—and all because he’d taken off his armband to walk around a train and buy a newspaper! He and his mother and sister would be put off the train, maybe even sent to a concentration camp.
Josef had been a fool, and now he and his family were going to pay the price.
Isabel opened her eyes and lowered the trumpet from her lips. She was sure she had just heard the sound of breaking glass, but cars and bicycles kept streaming by under the bright sun on the Malecón like nothing had happened. Isabel shook her head, convinced she was hearing things, and put her lips back to her trumpet.
Then suddenly a woman screamed, a pistol fired—pak!—and the world went crazy.
People rushed out of the side streets. Hundreds of them. They were men, mostly, many of them shirtless in the hundred-degree August heat, their white and brown and black backs glistening in the sun. They yelled and chanted. They threw rocks and bottles. They spilled into the streets, and the few policemen on the Malecón were quickly overwhelmed. Isabel saw the glass window of a general store shatter, and men and women climbed inside to steal shoes and toilet paper and bath soap. An alarm rang. Smoke rose from behind an apartment building.
Havana was rioting, and her father and grandfather were somewhere right in the middle of it.
Some people fled from the chaos, but more people raced toward it, and Isabel ran with them. Car horns beeped. Bicycles swung around and pedaled back. People were as thick on the ground as sugarcane. Isabel weaved in and out among them, her trumpet tucked under one arm, looking for Papi and Lito.
“Freedom! Freedom!” chanted some of the rioters.
“Castro out!”
“Enough is enough!”
Isabel couldn’t believe what she was hearing. People caught criticizing Fidel Castro were thrown into jail and never heard from again. But now the streets were full of people yelling, “Down with Fidel! Down with Fidel!”
“Papi!” Isabel cried. “Lito!” Her grandfather’s name was Mariano, but Isabel called him Lito, short for Abuelito—Grandpa.
Rifles boomed, and Isabel ducked. More police were arriving by motorcycle and military truck, and the protest was turning bloody. The rioters and police traded rocks and bullets, and a man with a bloody head staggered past Isabel. She reeled in horror. A hand grabbed her, making her jump, and she spun around. Lito! She threw herself into her grandfather’s arms.
“Thank God you’re safe!” he told her.
“Where’s Papi?” she asked him.
“I don’t know. We weren’t together when it started,” her grandfather said.
Isabel thrust her trumpet into his arms. “I have to find him!”
“Chabela!” her grandfather cried. He used her childhood nickname, like he always did. “No! Wait!”
Isabel ignored him. She had to find her father. If he was caught again by the police, he’d be sent back to prison—and this time they might not let him out.
Isabel dodged through the crowds, trying to stay away from where the police had formed a line. “Papi!” she called. “Papi!” But she was too short and there were too many people.
High above her, Isabel saw people climbing out onto the big electric sign hanging from the side of a tourist hotel, and it gave her an idea. She worked her way to one of the cars stuck in the riot, an old American Chevy with chrome tail fins, still around from before the Revolution in the 1950s. She climbed up the bumper and onto the hood. The man behind the stee
ring wheel honked his horn and took the cigar out of his mouth to yell at her.
“Chabela!” her grandfather shouted when he saw her. “Chabela, get down from there!”
Isabel ignored them both and turned this way and that, calling out for her father. There! She saw her papi just as he reared back and threw a bottle that smashed into the line of police along the seawall. It was the last straw for the police. At a command from their leader, they pushed forward into the crowd, arresting rioters and hitting them with wooden batons.
In all the turmoil, a policeman caught up with her father and grabbed him by the arm. “No!” Isabel cried. She leaped down off the hood of the car and pushed her way through the pandemonium. When she got to her papi, he was balled up on the ground and the policeman was beating him with his nightstick.
The policeman raised his truncheon to hit her father again, and Isabel jumped in between them. “No! Don’t! Please!” she cried.
The policeman’s eyes flashed from anger to surprise, and then back to anger. He reared back again to hit Isabel, and she flinched. But the blow never came. Another policeman had caught his arm! Isabel blinked. She recognized the new policeman. He was Luis Castillo, Iván’s older brother.
“What do you think you’re doing?” the older policeman barked.
Luis didn’t have time to answer. A whistle blew. The police were being summoned elsewhere.
The angry cop yanked his arm free from Luis and pointed his nightstick at Papi. “I saw what you did,” he said. “I’ll find you again. When all this is over, I’ll find you and arrest you, and they’ll send you away for good.”
Luis pulled the angry policeman away, pausing just long enough to give Isabel a worried look over his shoulder.
Luis didn’t have to say anything. As her grandfather arrived and helped Isabel get her father to his feet, she understood.