Elisa Albert - How This Night Is Different - Stories

“Hey there, little Markowitz! What up? The lady rabbi is kicking my ass here.”

“Hi,” Shayna said. “Just wanted to say good night.”

“Shayna is Max Markowitz’s little sister,” Jonah explained to Rabbi Amy.

Rabbi Amy lit up, took a better look. “Oh! Wow. Funny. Yeah, I can see it. Your brother is the coolest.”

Shayna stood there seething, not wanting to get into it, the How do you know Max and the hilarious and touching anecdotes that would follow, the ongoing canonization of her brother, the coolest. Did they know how much porn he had stashed under his bed? Did they know how much he liked to torment the family cat? Did they know that, at Majdanek, he’d gotten a boner from physical contact attained in ostensibly comforting some girl named Jen Miller? Did they know he’d once given Shayna a concussion by hitting her over the head with the remote when she wouldn’t surrender it in the middle of 90210 ? Did they know that he hadn’t even finished Night ? Did they know that on his breaks from college he could not be bothered to visit his elderly, ailing grandparents? Did they know that he called his parents “the Assholes” behind their backs?

“Okay,” she said. “So good night.”

“Night, hon.”

“See you tomorrow,” Jonah said, with a cheerful wave she could feel in her pants.

Shayna went back to 412 and got into bed with her journal. Jamie was gone, the social/sexual chips having fallen where they may. She got under the thin, scratchy wool blanket, clutching her pretty, blue, empty journal like a stuffed animal. Ow-Shhh-Wits. She thought about how familiar and therefore comforting the word was. As a prerequisite for the Living, she’d been through a class called Basic Holocaust at synagogue for the last couple of months. She thought about barbed wire, dirty striped uniforms, a yellow cloth Juden star, piles of skin-on-bones bodies, mouths hanging open as though gasping for breath or trying to say something, one last thing. She drifted off to sleep wishing she had a piece of one of those images to paste into her journal, that she might then be off the hook by simply opening to a page, any page, and pointing at it.

There’s a bonus round of Where You’re At after breakfast.

“Thank you for sharing that,” Rabbi Amy stage-whispers about a dozen times. “That’s a very important and very universal feeling.” Even Heather gets in on the act.

“Honestly?” she says when it’s her turn. “I was kind of freaked out getting dressed this morning.” She’s wearing her usual excessively scuffed combat boots, a black broomstick skirt, and a once-black T-shirt out of which most of the black has been washed.

Rabbi Amy works hard to present a face that’s more curiously amused than irritated. “What do you mean, Heather?”

“It’s just really fucked up to think about being in that exact place, you know? With the same dirt and air and leaves and buildings and molecules and whatever. I’m just anticipating never wanting to wear these clothes again.” Jamie is wearing her forest green tracksuit today, and Jessica is wearing a powder blue one, and this, from the stricken looks on their faces, is not something that had occurred to either one of them. Shayna thinks about offering to take a thus soiled tracksuit off Jamie’s hands.

They go back to their rooms one last time, and Shayna grabs her backpack, holding out hope that her journal will prove a viable commodity once she’s there (though she can’t yet rightfully consider it “her” journal. It’s just “the” journal, “a” journal, someone’s journal, it doesn’t matter whose, and since it’s fucking blank couldn’t be distinguished anyhow), that today’s the day her very being cracks wide open and spills over for sorting through.

She swallows two of Jamie’s Zolofts with water from the tap on her way out, and instantly feels fortified and capable of dealing. The third, she figures, she’ll pop on the way back.

Outside, before they get on the bus, Jonah orders them to take off their standard-issue Living windbreakers.

The cold is different, somehow, from the cold at home. Colder. The wind whistles, the sky flat and endless. A few kids comply and stand shivering; most hesitate and look at their shoes.

“Do you want to feel what they felt?” Jonah barks, pacing. “Do you want to begin to understand what it was like to have to leave everything and everyone you love and be cold and alone and not say good-bye and never come back?”

“No thanks,” Heather whispers.

Sonja the survivor stands along the edge of the group, looking absent but resolved, her name tag still, rightfully, proclaiming her aliveness.

Then Darcey starts crying again, and Rabbi Amy goes over and hugs her and explains that it’s okay, that she doesn’t really have to take off her jacket, that it’s just an exercise, that we can empathize without necessarily going through the exact same things.

But Jonah stares them all down as if it’s a dare. After a few minutes they go ahead and board the bus.

As they drive, Shayna sees the wooden railroad tracks all overgrown with grass and weeds, racing alongside the bus. She reaches for the journal, some fragment germinating about these juxtaposed, parallel methods of transport, about the busload of windbreakered Living on their voluntary way alongside crumbled train tracks to the death camp, but she vetoes it as soon as that now-familiar hovering pen-shadow appears over the white page. They’re on their way to Auschwitz, idiot! Genocide, Holocaust, Hitler, Jewish History, Continuity. These are words that begin with capital letters, for fuck’s sake. The stakes grew ever higher, and the fact that the journal was still empty meant that the opener needed to be especially brilliant. Lowercase thoughts — train tracks! — would not do.

Max had written a poem on the way to Auschwitz. “So Many Lives,” it was called. “So very many lives were lost / of them all what is the cost?” it had begun. It was beautiful. He’d read it aloud to Shayna and their parents upon his return, and everyone thought that he should seriously publish it.

At the entrance is a sign in several languages. Before she locates the English, Shayna half expects to see a height minimum, like for a roller coaster. “The place you are about to enter,” it begins, “is a site of extreme terror.” Shayna finds it nuts that people might not know where they were. Like after being forewarned in this manner someone might go, “You know what? I’m not really up for extreme terror today. Why don’t we go check out some kiddie rides somewhere instead?” Zoe, Aaron, and Rose-Ling snap picures of this sign. Jessica and Ari ask Jamie to take one of them together. “Move over that way,” she tells them, shuffling her hand to the left. “Your head is blocking the words.”

They pass by the double rows of barbed wire and under Arbeit Macht Frei. She’s seen pictures of this gate; it’s famous. It reminds her of the new mall promenade in downtown Philadelphia, which also has pretty wrought-iron arches.

“Shopping makes you free,” her dad always says whenever they go there.

The parking lot is a mess of tour buses, and there is, indeed, a snack bar. The place is hopping. Vibrant, even. Shayna feels around for any feeling at all. It’s actually not unlike the time she made out with Michael Rand in the tenth grade. She’d been way behind all her friends in getting that far, and had spent the entire nine minutes of her interlude with Michael thinking, alternately, I can’t believe this is happening, and Oh my God I’m making out with Michael Rand, and This is actually happening right now, and Allie says it feels like Jell-O and it’s true! So when Allie had asked how it was, Shayna found that she had no fucking idea how it was, and could only answer that, well, it was .