Elaine Wolf - Camp

Otto had friends in the government, acquaintances at the embassies. He had always been popular, my mother reminded me. Otto would get the papers for her and for Kurt and Anna. Yet though he could do that, he couldn’t control the cost. His friends in high places worked slowly. It took money—lots of money—to grease the wheels.

By the fall of 1938, Kurt’s family sold what they could. Then Otto went to work. Though all Jewish passports had been annulled, emigration permits were available—expedited for a price, of course. And the quota for entry to France could be manipulated if you knew the right people, the people Otto knew.

He got documents for my mother and for Kurt and Anna. “Please,” Kurt tried again. “We must go together.”

“But we haven’t much more money, and no place for all of us in Paris,” my mother reminded him. “I have to go first. I have to find a safe place for Anna. And then you’ll come. Just a week or two. That’s all I need.”

November 8, 1938. My mother kissed her husband and her little girl, then blazed the trail she believed they would follow.

“And what happened to Anna?” I asked. I didn’t want to hear, but I needed to know.

“The next night, the storm troopers came. Kristallnacht. Night of Broken Glass.”

It took time for my mother to find out what happened that night, but eventually she did. She heard and she imagined. And she never forgave herself for having left without her child.

Kurt would have carried Anna to the back room when the commotion started, my mother thought. He might have wrapped her in blankets and laid her down gently, her doll in hand.

Perhaps Anna was sleeping when the storm troopers arrived. Kurt might have met them at the door. He would have told them his wife and daughter were away. “There’s no one else here,” Kurt probably said as they pulled him outside and sent the search party in.

But then Anna cried out, my mother believed. The way she pictured it, a Nazi yelled “Who is this?” as he dragged Anna onto the street. “Your daughter? The one who’s gone? Nicht hier ?”

While the storm troopers murdered Kurt, my mother imagined, members of the Hitler Youth kicked Anna like a soccer ball. My mother hoped Kurt had died first. She hoped he wasn’t forced to watch their little girl suffer.

This story hit me hard. I cried for Kurt. I cried for Anna. Mostly, though, I cried for my mother.

“That’s what I see when I close my eyes,” she said. “Boys kicking Anna like a ball. I never should have left her. We all would have gotten out if I had listened to Kurt. We could have left together, and somehow we would have managed.”

“You did what you thought you had to, Mom.” I brushed away tears—hers and my own. “You tried to do the right thing to make her life better.”

We stayed quiet for a while. Then my mother said, “I’m sorry, Amy. I should have told you. But people don’t always do the right thing, even when they think they are. And somehow we just have to forgive them, forgive ourselves.”

I tried to swallow, but sorrow and guilt filled my throat. It was time to tell her about the metal box. It was time to tell her that I, not she, had killed Charlie. My mother had suffered so much, so long. I couldn’t let her carry the blame for Charlie’s death too.

“But it all worked out all right,” she went on before I found my words. “All right. All right. All right.” My mother’s lips trembled. Then a tiny smile. “I came here and met your father. And he was good to me. And I had you… and Charlie.”

“Mom, there’s something I have to tell you. The metal box…”

“I know.” Her eyes closed. She needed to sleep, or wanted to sleep. Maybe in her dreams my mother saw Anna the way I saw Charlie in mine.

“But I have to tell you, Mom. About Charlie. About the accident.”

“I know, Amy,” she whispered. “I know what happened that day. We don’t have to talk about it.”

I exhaled as if I’d been holding my breath for a very long time. So my mother knew the truth after all. I must have left clues: shoes out of order, papers out of place. My mother knew I had breached her privacy. And she knew the price I had already paid.

“I didn’t tell anyone, not even your father,” my mother said. “Certain things are just too hard to talk about. Certain things are meant to stay private.”

My mother stretched out her arm. I wove my fingers with hers. I am Sonia’s daughter , I said to myself. Sonia Kelman Jonas Becker.

I thought about Anna—Anna and Kurt and Mom—as my mother squeezed my hand gently, very gently. And then she did the most amazing thing. My mother said she loved me.

Now I lie awake at night and pray Mom’s cancer’s gone for good. The doctors say it might be.

I picture her at my graduation tomorrow: Mom in her new light blue dress, so much better looking than the other mothers. Dad will escort her to one of those folding chairs in front of the bleachers. She will sit tall, her back perfectly straight again, and wait for me to walk by in my cap and gown. My mother will be smiling. And so will I.

Now I know my mother’s story, and now I understand. My mother could never have bounced me on her knee. That was reserved for Anna’s ghost, the one that slipped into the hospital the day I was born. There was no room for outsiders, no room for hopes and dreams. All my mother had were her memories, the stories she eventually gifted to me. I treasure those images of my mother before her world broke apart. How had she managed to pick up the pieces? What courage, to cobble splinters into a whole new life. So I forgive her for not being able to love me the way I needed her to. Forgave her, in fact, last year as I watched her fight to live.

“Your mother is so proud of you, Amy,” my father told me earlier this evening, while Mom was washing up for bed. Dad had come into my room to congratulate me, for the tenth time, on the scholarship to NYU and on my English award.

“Dad, it’s just high school. It’s not like I’m graduating summa cum laude from college or anything.”

“But it’s still a big accomplishment, honey. I’m just so glad your mother’s here to see this.”

We stayed silent for a moment, both of us probably thinking about Mom—about Charlie too, I was sure. My father and I had never spoken of Charlie’s accident. I hadn’t told him of my guilt. It was my mother I had tried to tell. It was my mother whose burden I had wanted to lighten.

“You know,” Dad went on, “the very first time I saw your mother, I thought she was the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen. And not a day has gone by when I haven’t thought I’m the luckiest man in the world. No one can hold a candle to her, Ame. And you? Well… you look more and more like your mother each day.”

I’d seen it too lately: my mother’s face looking back from the mirror.

“Dad, I need to tell you something.”

“Sure, honey. What is it?”

I shut my eyes and focused on breathing. In. Out. In. Out. No outer world in; no inner world out. “Certain things are just too hard to talk about,” my mother had told me.

Hard, yes. But on this night before graduation, I needed to talk about Charlie, to nudge his ghost off my chest. Scoot, scoot, skedaddle. It was time to tell the truth.

Charlie and Takawanda knotted in my thoughts. “Dad,” I said, my voice catching, “why’d you make me go to camp?”