The Belief in Angels Read online

  I knock on Moses’s door. He doesn’t answer, and when I peek in, he isn’t there. I step inside and snoop around.

  Although I cherish my privacy and guard it with small weapons, I’m nosy and often sneak into the stuff that belongs to the rest of my family.

  Moses is seven and, like me, small for his age. This makes him seem a bit younger than he is, but his eyes are the eyes of an ageless person. Wise and sad. His eyes are navy blue, not muddy brown like Howard’s, Wendy’s, and David’s. No one else in our family has blue eyes except our Grandfather Samuel. But I know he isn’t our real grandfather because of Wendy’s adoption.

  Somehow, despite all the meanness in our family, Moses remains remarkably sweet in nature. He idolizes David, almost six years his elder, and spends too much time and energy trying to win his approval. He does most everything David asks, including regular runs to the local grocery for David’s junk food desires.

  But Moses did figure out how to profit from David’s laziness: he developed a financial deal involving a percentage split and transportation allowance for any errands he runs for anyone, including myself, Wendy, and Jack. I admire his business sense. Moses is a whiz at saving money. He buys himself expensive items for a young kid, like bikes, with the money he saves. He also loans the money he saves back to us (with interest, of course). I think Moses is going to grow up to be a multimillionaire or something.

  I wonder where he could be. Moses has one friend-—a school friend who lives on another part of the island. He doesn’t see him outside of school unless his friend’s mom arranges to drive him back afterwards. Wendy doesn’t drive us around anymore, and she doesn’t arrange carpooling. This would mean a call to another parent, which she avoids. No doubt she finds it too parental. She calls stuff like that “suburban rituals.” As a result, we walk, ride the bus, or ride our bikes everywhere.

  Moses hasn’t mastered the bus schedule yet. His choices are to play by himself or to hang around our neighborhood. But our neighborhood harbors an unusual demographic for an Irish-Catholic town, where Catholicism and the rhythm method usually produce an abundance of girls. Our neighborhood has an army of boys—and tons of them are David’s age, but none are Moses’s age. He sometimes tags along with David, though the arrangement is less than desirable for David.

  I close my eyes for a moment in Moses’s room, savoring its peacefulness. It smells like Nilla wafers and old pennies. His room, the smallest, was originally the nursery. Moses never got the upgrade David and I enjoy. But it stays warmer than the rest of our rooms. Wendy used the maroon remnants of the downstairs rug to carpet it. It’s also the quietest.

  Moses’s space amazes me. His shoes are lined up under his perfectly made bed, with a faded old race car bedspread Wendy purchased years before during the “Sloane Sales Master Charge Buying Spree.” Stacked and labeled shoeboxes and milk cartons line the walls, displaying his various collections of matchbox cars, trains, action figure heroes, and Tinker Toys.

  I walk toward the large bureau pushed up against one wall. I brush my fingers over the dinosaur models, glass figures, and small pebbles and feathers decorating the top of his bureau. I know he hides large, lidded coffee cans on the floor of his closet that he’s stuffed full with pennies, nickels, and dimes.

  His unicycle leans against the wall. He told me he asked for the unicycle because he thinks he might never grow taller, and if he doesn’t he’ll be able to make a living in the circus, riding his unicycle. He’s preparing for that career path. For the same reason, he taught himself to juggle.

  While turning off the power on one of the walkie-talkies he shares with David, I notice a small shoebox next to one of the milk crates on the floor. After a moment’s hesitation, I open the lid. Inside, a small, furry fake mouse lays in layers of grass. I let out a sigh of relief and pick it up with my other hand. As I examine it, a banded garter snake winds up out of the grass and across the mouse in my hand, flicking its tongue at me. I let out a loud yelp and slam the lid of the box on the snake’s head, pushing it down and back into the box. The fake mouse lies on the floor by the box. Breathing hard, I inch open the lid a bit and squeeze the mouse back inside. Standing up, I shoot one last glance at the box, open the door, and step into the hallway.

  There is almost always something living in Moses’s room besides Moses.

  Of all Moses’s collections, there’s one I especially love: his collection of sea glass, stored in one of his shoeboxes. Older sea glass has a white frosted glaze over it, a sand tattoo that, over time, rounds the rough edges.

  Sea glass, more than anything else, reminds me of Moses.

  I still have the box. It reminds me of our childhood here by the ocean and how the ocean, with time, transforms broken glass, something capable of causing injury, into something touchable. The ocean makes glass precious. Something you can keep.

  Thirteen

  Samuel, 39years | Spring, 1950

  BROOKLINE, MASSACHUSETTS

  I, SZAJA, AM now called Samuel. Samuel Trautman.

  At thirty-eight years of age I finally arrived in America to reunite with my family. Two years later I sat in a Brookline, Massachusetts apartment I shared with my sister Rose and her second husband, Mocher.

  This story tells of the night I arranged a marriage with my first wife, Yetta. It is a night I referred to later as our first date. This is a small joke between us. In another time, in another household, it could have been a date. If it could be called this then it is the first date of my life.

  My sister Reizel, now called Rose, lit the festival candles for Seder and placed a bottle of Manichevitz on the table with what I knew is her best linen. I can still remember the fabric: light blue cotton printed with a woman and man dancing in the middle of ladies’ fans.

  Rose also put out the Seder plates and silverware and the crystal glasses my parents brought all the way from Zhytomyr. Given to Rose for her wedding to Mocher, they are one of the few remnants of our lives from that time. Although I valued the beauty and craftsmanship of the delicate design, they brought nothing but pain to me. If the glass had been broken into shards and stuck into my eyes, the pain would not have matched the pain I felt in my heart looking at them.

  “Please, zay azoy gut, Rose, take the glasses off the table,” I say when I find her folding napkins in the dining room.

  “Why, why Samuel? They’re made for such an occasion as this.”

  “Rose, the table is fine-looking, and I know you’re trying to be kind, but the woman is going to think I’m a faygeleh with all this.”

  Rose laughs, and as usual, she gets her way.

  Rose has been calling me Samuel since I came to live with her and Mocher in Brookline. I am glad to leave that name, that boy—Szaja. My assimilation to American culture is made easier with the new name. Samuel could be anyone. He could be a Jew, a Catholic, or an Englishman. Samuel could be a man with nothing bad in his past. But I know that Samuel is not who I truly am. I am Szaja, a Jew who has survived the wars by forgetting I am a Jew. Now I will spend my life remembering.

  Foter and Mater had written to us a few weeks before we are attacked on the farm, and Reizel corresponded from the camps in the Ukraine to let the family know about the tragedies and where we had been sent.

  After the attack, Reizel, Oizer, and I spent time working in the Ukranian camps. Reizel learned to be a seamstress, Oizer and I became apprentices to a tailor. We learned to sew as well. After six years of finding ways to work and stay together as the work camps became more and more regimented by the Red Army, we are ultimately separated in 1930.

  It had been impossible for us to save money in the camps. They didn’t pay you for the work, only gave you food and shelter, and my Foter still had no money to send for us. They are struggling with the American Great Depression. There are many mouths to feed and not much job opportunity for Foter, a cherry picker.

  Oizer and Reizel are selected for a work camp near Cyprus, Turkey, where they would live a better life under
the British rule. There are actual wages for their work there, and a huge community of Jewish settlers. They are jubilant. Life in the Ukranian camps is a desperate one. Any way out made a better life possible. When we got the news, we knew that they are one step closer to being reunited with our family in America.

  On the same day, I am recruited by the Red Army. They told me it would be a year before I could join Reizel and Oizer in Cyprus. Within a few days of my recruitment, I am sent back to work near Zhytomyr, on the border between the Ukraine and Poland, where they are building railroads and army headquarters. It seemed impossible to me that I would be returning to the place from which we had traveled so far away. I worked four days’ travel away from our farm and yet I never visited. I would not have been able to bear it.

  It is difficult and dangerous work, and until the day I am arrested and sent to the prison at Majdanek I found it impossible to remember and honor my heritage.

  The Russian soldiers forgot that I am a Jew as well.

  Rose tells me that they tried to contact me several times. All their efforts are futile, and I never tried to contact them. It is s better that way. I had cut off communication with my family in America as well. I still held deep shame for not preventing the deaths of Idel, Berl, and my sisters. I also had shame for my predicament as a member of the Red Army, their murderers, and I thought it best to pretend I had no family and travel alone in the world.

  My life is a shadow.

  It took Rose and Oizer eight years to save the money for the ship to America from Turkey in 1938. Rose is thirty-two at the time. It had been almost fourteen years since we are attacked at the farm. Oizer had turned twenty-six.

  They emigrated before President Roosevelt made his proclamation on immigration quotas, which limited immigration based on race and a person’s place of origin. A mere two months after their immigration, the annual quota for Turkish immigration is reduced to two hundred and twenty-six people.

  While on the ship that carried them to America, Rose fell in love with Mocher, a tailor eight years younger than her. In Mocher, Rose had found her bashert. He joked and teased her into a contagious happiness she had never known before. When they stepped off the ship to meet the rest of the family, Rose introduced Mocher as her new husband—they’d been married by the ship’s captain. Our parents insisted they have another wedding with their rabbi.

  Meantime, my years as a soldier dragged on. 1944 marked twenty years since the murder of my family. I couldn’t tell you what triggered my decision, but I decided I would escape. In the middle of the night I left the tent camp on the border of Poland where we had built an army outpost. I simply walked away and into the forest. Three days later, lost and sleeping under an oak tree, I am found by the Germans, and as I have no papers and I am dressed in uniform, they assumed I am a Russian defector.

  They put me on my knees in front of the oak tree and pointed a gun at the middle of my forehead. I don’t remember feeling anything. No surprise. No fear.

  “Is that the Sturmgewher?” I ask in German. We have recently heard stories about this assault rifle and its frightening ability to shoot multiple rounds.

  The soldiers break into laughter.

  “I’m about to kill you and you want to know what kind of gun I will use?” the soldier asks.

  I nod.

  “Where is your gun?” he asks.

  “I have no gun. Kill me.”

  “You’re a filthy Russian deserter.”

  I give no response.

  “You amuse me. I won’t kill you today,” the soldier says.

  Instead, they arrest me. If the Russians had found me first they would have taken a leg, as they do with all defectors. As they did to Pieter. The Germans spare my leg but send me to Majdanek.

  It is the final months of the war. We are among the last trains full of people to arrive at the Lublin station outside the camp. The train is filled with Byelorussians—that is their name for the White Russians—and members of the Polish Home Army.

  First they line us up and separate us according to our religion and race. I am still wearing my Russian uniform when I am captured, and I am sent to the Russian POW quarters. When we are questioned about our skills, I decide not to tell them about my talent as a tailor. The Jews are tailors. I tell them instead that I farmed an orchard before I became a soldier. When the German guards choose men to work in the prison fields, cultivating the fruits and vegetables, I am selected.

  In April of 1944, a few months before the liberation, they line us up and march most of the prisoners away. They tell us they are taking them to another camp. I am told to stay. I think this will be my last day on earth. Someone has discovered I am a Jew and they will shoot me in that moment. Instead, I am given another job for the last three months of my imprisonment.

  It feels the same as being dead, this job. It is the job where Pieter and I make our deal.

  After the war, the Romanian Rescue Mission offers to send me to Palestine, but while I recover I write to my parents at the last address I kept for them in Brooklyn, New York. Miraculously, it reaches them. They respond with a telegram with instructions to contact a man in Paris who will help me to immigrate to America to join them. They send the man money to be used as payment for my passage to America. They also send me money, the last of their savings, to arrange my travel to France.

  I spoke no French, and the man my parents have arranged for me to connect with turns out to be a shyster—he steals my parents’ payment and puts me to work in a Paris sweatshop sewing ladies’ fur coats.

  Taking advantage of Jewish refugees has become its own industry. They know we are desperate.

  This sewing skill I learned in the Ukranian work camps has become my new trade. As I learned in the camps, to have a trade means life. I work in the sweatshops for two years, and then find a job working in a huge Parisian couture house on the rue Matignon, off the Champs-Élysées, sewing ladies’ gloves for their collections. I save my money and wait to see my family in America.

  One day—I’ve only been working a month or so in the couture house—a finely dressed older man approaches my workbench and stands peering over my shoulder, watching me work. He smells like coriander. I am nervous, thinking I will be fired. Everywhere in Paris people point fingers towards those who did not protect the Jews, yet still there is hatred for our people here.

  “You have very fine stitching. Where did you learn to sew this way?” he asks me.

  I look up into a most startling pair of ice-blue eyes.

  “In the work camps in Cyprus, and then …” I pull up my sleeve to show him the numbered marks on my arm. I have no idea why I do this. I had never shown the shameful tattoo to another soul.

  “I would be grateful if you would teach this skill to others,” he says. “I am honored to have you here”

  “I am honored to work for you,” I respond. “I would be happy to share whatever skill I possess.”

  This man turns out to be the great fashion couturier and parfumier Lucien Lelong, who stood up to the Germans when they tried to force the Paris ateliers to move to Berlin. His former wife, a Romanov princess, lost her father and brothers to the Bolshevik murderers.

  Only a few years later, M. Lelong closes the doors to his family business and retires. Luckily, having worked and taught for one of the most renowned designers in Paris, I have no trouble securing work with another atelier.

  Always there is another goal: to be reunited with my family. But besides the money required for my travel, I have encountered another obstacle. Immigration to America has been tightened. Quotas put in place. Eventually, however, I am granted the right to immigrate because of the enactment of the 1948 Displaced Persons Act. This allows a select number of Jewish immigrants—Nazi death camp survivors, those who have family members who are American citizens, or those who can offer trade services needed in the US.

  I fit all the categories.

  I am one of 400,000 people who are allowed to immigrate in those last fe
w years. President Truman made sure we are allowed entrance. The day my letter from immigration arrived, I saw an ad for Air France plane travel to New York. I had never been on a plane and I am terrified by the idea, but it seemed my best option, as it proved more difficult for me to think about boarding a ship again. It is unbelievable to think I could see my family within twenty hours of getting on the plane, although the ticket cost me a fortune. I flew to America from Paris in 1948, nearly four years after gaining my freedom from the camp, at thirty-eight years of age.

  The sole detail I remember about my flight is that a button on my coat popped off as I bent to sit in my airplane seat, and one of the hostesses is kind enough to find me a needle and thread so I could sew it back on during the flight. In those days, the airplane hostesses are trained nurses because the idea of taking a flight is dangerous. People worried about altitude sickness and other, more serious disasters. When she returned with a needle, this hostess, this nurse, noticed my skin pallor and asked me questions about my health. She suggested I see a doctor in America. As it turned out, my years in the army and camps had left me sick with anemia and malaria. I had been suffering with these diseases for years without being diagnosed and treated.

  When I first arrived, I settled in Brooklyn with my foter and mater. They had been living in the same Crown Heights apartment since 1924—a miracle that allowed me to find them after all those years.

  When they arrived in 1923, there are more than 75,000 Jews living in the Crown Heights neighborhood alone, yet my foter found his friend Mendel in the “village” of Brooklyn—another miracle. Mendel helped him find occasional work as a machinist in the factories, and my mater washed and sewed clothing in the Brooklyn brownstone they shared with Mendel and his family.