One of the older boys jumped into the ring and raised my glove, the conquering champion. Herr Sollemach patted me on the back. “This,” he told the others, “is the face of bravery. This is what the future of Germany looks like. Adolf Hitler, Sieg Heil!”
I returned the salute. So did all the other boys. Except my brother.
With adrenaline pumping through my veins, I felt invincible. I took on contender after contender, and everyone fell. After years of being punished for letting my temper get the best of me in school, I was being praised for it. No, I was being exalted.
That night, Inge Sollemach gave me a medal, and fifteen minutes later, behind the athletic center, my first real kiss. The next day my father called on Herr Sollemach. He was very disturbed by Franz’s injuries.
Your son is gifted, Herr Sollemach explained. Special.
Yes, my father responded. Franz has always been an excellent student.
I am speaking of Reiner, Herr Sollemach said.
Did I know this brutality was wrong? Even that first time, when my brother was the victim? I have asked myself a thousand times, and the answer is always the same: of course. That day was the hardest, because I could have said no. Every time after that, it became easier, because if I didn’t do it again, I would be reminded of that first time I did not say no. Repeat the same action over and over again, and eventually it will feel right. Eventually, there isn’t even any guilt.
What I mean to tell you, now, is that the same truth holds. This could be you, too. You think never. You think, not I. But at any given moment, we are capable of doing what we least expect. I always knew what I was doing, and to whom I was doing it. I knew, very well. Because in those terrible, wonderful moments, I was the person everyone wanted to be.
Aleksander had been working for me for a week now. We exchanged pleasantries, but mostly, he arrived to bake just as I was going to sleep; when I woke up to take the loaves to market, he was untying his white apron.
Sometimes, though, he stayed a little later, and I left a little later. He told me that his brother had been born with a caul over his face; that he hadn’t had enough air. His parents had died in a plague in Humenne, Slovakia; he’d been taking care of Casimir for a decade now. He explained that Casimir’s disorder, as he called it, led him to eat things that he shouldn’t—stones, dirt, twigs—which was why he had to be watched all the time he was awake. He told me of the places he had lived, some with stone castles that pierced the clouds and others with bustling cities in which there were horseless carriages that moved as if pulled by ghosts. He did not stay long anywhere, he said, because people felt uneasy around his brother.
Aleks took to the baking like a natural, something that my father had always believed was the mark of a contented soul. You cannot feed others if you are always hungry, he used to tell me, and when I said this to Aleksander, he laughed. “Your father never met me,” he said. He was always modest in his long-sleeved white shirt, no matter how hot it grew in the kitchen, unlike my father, who used to strip down to his undershirt in the sweltering heat. I complimented him on his rhythm. He moved with grace, as if baking were a dance. Aleksander admitted that he had been a baker once before, a lifetime ago.
We spoke, too, of the toll of the dead. Aleks asked me what the villagers were saying, where the new casualties had been found. Recently, the attacks had come within the perimeter of the village walls, not just on its outskirts. One of the ladies of the evening was found with her head nearly torn from her body in front of the doors of the saloon; the remains of a schoolteacher who had been walking to class were left on the steps of the statue of the village founder. It was as if, some people said, the beast responsible was toying with us.
“They are saying,” I told him one day, “that maybe it’s not an animal.”
Aleks looked over his shoulder. He had the peel thrust deep in the belly of the hearth. “What do you mean? What else could it be?”
I shrugged. “Some kind of monster.”
Instead of laughing, as I expected, Aleks sat down beside me. He picked at a chink in the wooden table with his thumb. “Do you believe that?”
“The only monsters I have ever known were men,” I said.
SAGE
“Here,” I say, handing Josef a glass of water.
He drinks. After nearly three hours of talking nonstop, his voice is pebbled, hoarse. “This is very kind of you.”
I don’t respond.
Josef looks up at me over the lip of his glass. “Ah,” he says. “You are starting to believe me.”
What am I supposed to say? Hearing Josef talk about his childhood—about the Hitler Youth, with a level of detail that could only have been gleaned from someone who lived it—makes me certain that yes, he is telling me the truth. But there is still a substantial disconnect for me, to see the Josef this community knows and loves recounting a time when he was someone completely different. It is as if Mother Teresa confessed that, in her girlhood, she had set cats on fire.
“It’s a little convenient, isn’t it, to say that the reason you did something horrible was because someone else told you to,” I point out. “That doesn’t make it any less wrong. No matter how many people are telling you to jump off a bridge, you always have the option to turn around and walk away.”
“Why didn’t I say no?” Josef mulls. “Why didn’t so many of us? Because we so badly wanted to believe what Hitler told us. That the future would be better than our present.”
“At least you had a future,” I murmur. “I know of six million people who didn’t.” I feel my stomach turn over as I watch Josef in his chair, drinking his water as if he had not just told the beginning of a story of abject horror. How could anyone be that vicious to others, and not have the aftereffects bleed out in tears, in nightmares, in tremors? “How can you want to die?” I blurt out. “You say you’re religious. Aren’t you afraid of being judged?”
Josef shakes his head, lost within himself. “There was a look in their eyes, sometimes . . . They weren’t dreading the trigger being pulled, even if the gun was already pointed at them. It was as if they ran toward it. I could not fathom this, at first. How could you not want to draw breath one more day? How could your own life be such a cheap commodity? But then I started to understand: when your existence is hell, death must be heaven.”
My grandmother, had she been one of those who would walk toward the gun? Was that a mark of weakness, or of courage?
“I am tired,” Josef sighs. “We will talk more on another day, yes?”
What I want is to wring information out of him, until he is dry and brittle as a bone. I want him to talk until he has blisters in his throat, until his secrets litter the floor around us. But he is an old man, and so instead, I tell him that I will pick him up tomorrow for our grief group.
On the car ride home, I call Leo and tell him everything that Josef just told me.
“Hmm,” he says when I am done. “That’s a start.”
“A start? That’s a ton of information to work with.”
“Not necessarily,” Leo says. “After December 1936, all non-Jewish German kids had to join the Hitler Youth. The information he’s given you corroborates other things I’ve heard from suspects, but it doesn’t implicate him.”
“Why not?”
“Because not all members of the Hitler Youth became SS men.”
“Well, what have you found out?” I ask.
He laughs. “It’s only been three hours since I talked to you in the bathroom,” Leo says. “Plus, even if I did have detailed information, I couldn’t share it with you, as a private citizen.”
“He says he wants me to forgive him before he dies.”
Leo whistles, a low, long note. “So now you’re supposed to be his assassin and his priest?”
“I guess in this case he’d prefer a Jew—even a self-renounced Jew—to a priest.”
“It’s a nice, macabre touch,” Leo says. “Asking the descendants of the people you killed to l
et you off the hook before you shuffle off that mortal coil.” He hesitates. “You can’t, you know. For the record.”
“I know,” I say. There are dozens of reasons why not, starting with the very base fact that I am not the person who was wronged by him.
But.
If you turn the request just slightly, if you let it hit the light of reason from another angle, what Josef has asked isn’t the empty plea of a murderer. It’s a dying man’s wish.
And if I don’t grant it, doesn’t that make me just as heartless as he is?
“When are you talking to him again?” Leo asks.
“Tomorrow. We’re going to grief group.”
“All right,” he says. “Call me.”
As I hang up I realize I’ve missed the turnoff to my house. And more to the point, that I already know where I am headed.
• • •
The word babka comes from baba, which in Yiddish and Polish means “grandmother.” I cannot think of a single Chanukah celebration that didn’t include these sweet loaves. It was an unwritten assumption that my mother would buy a turkey the size of a small child, that my sister Pepper would get to mash the potatoes, and that my nana would bring three loaves of the famous babka. Even as a little girl I remember grating the bittersweet chocolate, terrified I was going to shred my knuckles in the process.
Today, I send Daisy home early. I’ve told her I am here to bake with my grandmother, but really, I wanted the privacy. My grandmother butters the first loaf pan as I roll out the dough and brush the edges with an egg wash. Then I sprinkle some of the chocolate filling inside, and start to roll the dough tight as a drum. I twist the logs quickly, five full turns, and brush the top with egg again. “Yeast,” my grandmother says, “is a miracle. One little pinch, some water, and look at what happens.”
“It’s not a miracle, it’s chemistry,” I say. “The real miracle is the moment someone looked at fungus for the first time and said, Hmm, let’s see what happens when we cook with it.”
My grandmother passes me the loaf pan so that I can put the dough inside and press the streusel topping down. “My father,” she says, “used to send messages to my mother through babka.”
I smile at her. “Really?”
“Yes. If the filling was apple, it was meant to tell her the bakery had had a sweet day, lots of customers. If it was almond, it meant I miss you bitterly.”
“And chocolate?”
My nana laughs. “That he was sorry for whatever had gotten him into trouble with her. Needless to say, we ate a lot of chocolate babka.”
I wipe my hands on a dishcloth. “Nana,” I ask. “What was he like? What did he do, when he wasn’t working? Did he ever call you a special nickname or take you somewhere unforgettable?”
She purses her lips. “Ach, again with the biography.”
“I know he died in the war,” I say softly. “How?”
She makes a big production of furiously buttering the second loaf pan. Then finally, she speaks. “Every day, after school, I would come to the bakery and there would be a single roll waiting for me. My father called it a minkele, and he only made one a day. It had the flakiest crumb to it, and a center of chocolate and cinnamon so warm it slid down your throat, and I know he could have sold hundreds, but no, he said that this was special just for me.”
“He was killed by Nazis, wasn’t he?” I ask quietly.
Nana turns away from me. “My father trusted me with the details of his death. Minka, he would say, when my mother read me the story of Snow White, make a note: I do not want to wind up in a glass case with people looking at me. Or: Minka, make a note: I would like fireworks, instead of flowers. Minka, make sure I do not pass in the summertime. Too many flies for the mourners to deal with, don’t you think? It was a game to me, a lark, because my father was never going to die. We all knew he was invincible.” She takes one of her canes from where it is hanging on the counter and walks to the kitchen table, sitting heavily on one of the chairs. “My father trusted me with the details of his death, but in the end, I couldn’t manage a single one.”
I kneel down on the floor in front of her and rest my head in her lap. Her hand, small and birdlike, nests in the crown of my hair. “You’ve held this inside you for so long,” I whisper. “Wouldn’t it be better to talk about it?”
She touches the scarred side of my face. “Would it?” she asks.
I pull back. “That’s different. I can’t pretend this never happened, no matter how much I want to. It’s written all over me.”
“Exactly,” my grandmother says, and she pushes up the sleeve of her sweater to reveal the numbers on her forearm. “I talked once about it, when I was much younger, to my doctor, who saw this. He asked if I would come to speak at his wife’s class. She was a history professor at a university,” she says. “The talk went well. I got over my stage fright enough to deliver it without throwing up, anyway. And then the teacher, she asked if there were any questions.
“A boy stood up. Truth be told, I thought it was a girl, there was so much hair, down to here. He stood up and he said, ‘The Holocaust never happened.’ I did not know what to do, what to say. I was thinking, How dare you tell me this, when I lived it? How dare you erase my life just like that? I was so upset that I could barely see straight. I muttered an apology and I walked right off that stage, out the door, with my hand pressed up against my mouth. I thought if I didn’t hold it there, I would start to scream. I went to my car and I sat inside until I knew what I should have said. History tells us that six million Jews disappeared during that war. If there was no Holocaust, where did they go?” She shakes her head. “All of that, and the world didn’t learn anything. Look around. There’s still ethnic cleansing. There’s discrimination. There are young people like that foolish boy in the history class. I thought for sure that the reason I survived was to make certain something like that would never happen again, but you know, I must have been wrong. Because, Sage, it still happens. Every day.”
“Just because you had some neo-Nazi stand up in that classroom doesn’t mean that it’s not important for you to tell your story,” I say. “Tell it to me.”
She looks at me for a long moment, then silently stands with her cane and walks out of the kitchen. Across the hall, in the first-floor study she has converted into a bedroom so that she doesn’t have to climb stairs, I hear her moving things around, rifling through drawers. I get up, slip the loaves into the oven. Already, they’re rising again.
My grandmother is sitting on her bed when I come in. The room smells like her, like powder and roses. She is holding a small leather-bound notebook with a cracked binding.
“I was a writer,” she says. “A child who believed in fairy tales. Not the silly Disney ones your mother read to you, but the ones with blood and thorns, with girls who knew that love could kill you just as often as it could set you free. I believed in the curses of witches and the madness of werewolves. But I also mistakenly believed that the scariest stories came from imagination, not real life.” She smooths her hand over the cover. “I started writing this when I was thirteen. It is what I did when other girls were fixing their hair and trying to flirt with boys. Instead, I would dream up characters and dialogue. I would write a chapter and give it to my best friend, Darija, to read, to see what she thought. We had a plan: I would become a bestselling author and she would be my editor and we would move to London and drink sloe gin fizzes. Ach, we didn’t even know what sloe gin was back then. But this is what I was doing, when the war came. And I did not stop.” She hands the volume to me. “It is not the original, of course. I don’t have that anymore. But as soon as I could, I rewrote from memory. I had to.”
I open the front cover. Inside, in small, tight cursive, words crawl across the page, packed end to end without any white space, as if that were a luxury. Maybe, back then, it was. “This is my story,” my grandmother continues. “It’s not the one you’re looking for, about what happened during the war. That’s not nearly as
important.” She meets my gaze. “Because this story, it’s the one that kept me alive.”
• • •
My grandmother, she could have given Stephen King a run for his money.
Her story is supernatural, about an upiór—the Polish version of a vampire. But what makes it so terrifying is not the monster, who’s a known quantity, but the ordinary men who turn out to be monsters, too. It is as if she knew, even at that young age, that you cannot separate good and evil cleanly, that they are conjoined twins sharing a single heart. If words had flavors, hers would be bitter almonds and coffee grounds. There are times when I’m reading her story that I forget she was the one to write it—that’s how good it is.
I read the notebook in its entirety, and then I reread it, wondering if I have missed a single word. I try to absorb the story, to the point where it is one I can play back to myself syllable by syllable, the way my grandmother must have done. I find myself reciting paragraphs when I am showering, washing the dishes, taking out the trash.
My grandmother’s story is a mystery, but not in the way she intended. I try to pull apart the characters and their dialogue to see the skeleton beneath that must have been her real life. All writers start with a layer of truth, don’t they? If not, their stories would be nothing but spools of cotton candy, a fleeting taste wrapped around nothing but air.
I read about Ania, the narrator, and her father and hear my grandmother’s voice; I imagine my great-grandfather’s face. When she describes the cottage on the outskirts of Łód, the town square crossed by horse-drawn carts, the forest where Ania would walk with moss sinking beneath her boots, I can smell the peat burning and taste the ash on the bottom of their bread. I can hear the footsteps of children striking the cobblestones as they chase each other, long before they ever had anything or anyone to really run from.
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