Of course she was going to have to ask the goddamn Four Questions. She was a jackass for thinking she’d get out of it, now or ever. She was an only child, she was the youngest cousin. It had been her job since she could read, since she could be trusted to make the table Look Pretty. How is this night different from all others? It’s not, twat.
But when they turned the page, Joanna bracing herself for the indignity of asking, in song, at thirty-one years of age, in front of her boyfriend, with this bogus traditional wonderment, what it was all about, she saw that Ron had supplanted the traditional questions with something new, Xeroxed on fluorescent purple: How Different This Night Is! It was a statement, rendered with full shock and awe. How different this night is! She almost laughed out loud, because this she could sing, this she could relate to her own experience! An exclamation point! This night was goddamn Different, and in more ways than one! Question mark? Feh!
From her own precise location on the map of things, Joanna was going to tell them all how it was. No more asking; she was a woman now. No amiable, broad, open-ended, question-marked wondering! Listen up, motherfuckers!
“Joanna, my darling girl,” Ron said. “Will you do us the honor of telling us how this night is different?” Harris wore an expression of overwrought interest, eyebrows raised, that recalled for Joanna the playground admonition to be careful lest one’s face get stuck that way. She stared at him for a calm moment, then smiled at her father.
“I will.”
The Living
In her backpack for Auschwitz, Shayna Markowitz packs the following: sunblock, a date-nut bar, her passport (it was just smart to have it on her at all times, her parents kept repeating, somewhat menacingly, when they saw her off), the required copy of Elie Wiesel’s Night, and her own crisp, snow white, entirely blank journal (out of which she’s thus far torn nine ill-begun, stupidly written pages and counting).
The morning is freezing cold, and Rabbi Amy goes from door to door, knocking them awake before it’s light out. Knock, knock, knock, Good morning! Knock, knock, knock, Good morning! All down the hallway of the Hotel Continental.
“Today is Auschwitz,” she writes in the journal. It is terrible that this will be her first entry — they’ve been in Poland for two days already — but nothing she’s attempted to put down yet has been remotely worthy. She thinks for a minute, reads that sentence over, then goes on: “(well, actually, it’s Tuesday, but you know what I mean).” But that won’t do either, not at all, and Shayna goes to town on the binding and rips out the page, eradicating her pathetic words. Another blank page stares placidly up at her. “Today we go to Auschwitz,” she ventures, but regrets immediately writing “go to” in place of “tour,” which makes it sound eerily like a journal entry of someone in a cattle car in 1943, and which Shayna fears is sort of disrespectful.
Breakfast is a somber affair: some waxy bagels, rock-solid cubes of cream cheese, and yet more of the same pale, half-frozen honeydew they’ve been served at every meal.
“This is so nasty,” says Jessica Berman.
“I know,” says Jamie Ziegler. “I’m starving, and I only have like three Power Bars left.” Shayna makes a mental note to offer Jamie some of her date-nut bar later, at an especially crucial, emotionally pitched moment. At the crematoria, maybe.
“I heard there’s a snack bar there,” Jessica says. “Seriously. I heard that.” But then, catching herself—Auschwitz! — she sets her mouth into something of a grimace and loads up a plate without another word. It is the spring of their eleventh-grade year. They are bus three of the northeastern delegation of We Are the Living.
“How you doing, Shay?” asks Jonah, making Shayna’s whole chest collapse and then expand hugely within about two seconds (the mysteriously linked words “finger” and “bang” ricocheting around, uninvited, in her brain).
Jonah is friends with Shayna’s older brother, Max. They came on this trip together five years ago and now Jonah is back to help lead it. Shayna has been snooping around in Max’s room since she could walk, and aside from a particularly sour-smelling, dog-eared stash of soft-core porn, her greatest find had been Max’s embossed leather journal from his time in Poland, which she’s read cover to cover a number of times. She knows whole sections of it, she’s finding, by heart. So in a way she feels like she’s already been here.
“Auschwitz,” Max had written, “has changed my whole entire outlook on life. I will never be the same.”
“Fine,” she says brightly. She knows Jonah beyond what he knows she knows. She knows, for instance, that he had gone out with a girl named Carolyn, and had been much envied by Max for his ability to hold Carolyn’s hand at Treblinka.
Jonah gives her a friendly shove. “Can you believe you’re here?”
She shrugs, smiles, hopes he’ll touch her again.
They had arrived in Kraków two days earlier, tumbling off the plane and into the airport like a bunch of actors playing refugees: energetically bewildered, much too quiet, the bloom off the rose of the trip already, their polar fleeces rumpled, their faces imprinted with the stiff folds of airline-issued pillows.
“Baggage claim four, everyone!” Rabbi Amy had yelled somewhat maniacally, counting and recounting heads. Shayna had been aware only of what felt like dozens of Polish eyes on her (did they know who she was? Did they know why she was here?), and wished Rabbi Amy would keep it down a little. She knew what all the Poles would be thinking: that there was a group of Jews at the airport and they were loud, they took over the space, they smelled funny, like the insides of two airplanes. It was so unfair, Shayna thought, shouldering her backpack and hitching her foot up onto a plastic row chair to double knot her shoelace before falling back in line with the herd: These people only knew about Jews in groups.
When the carousel at baggage claim four remained empty and motionless, Ari Freed had patiently explained the situation to Jessica, who seemed somehow to have become his girlfriend over the course of the flight.
“Things are different here, babe,” he’d said, fingering the waistline of her stretch flare track pants, a wavy lock of his hair falling delicately over one eye. “They’re not as efficient, or whatever.” Then Jessica and Ari had embraced, fortifying themselves against the myriad cruelties — past, present, and still to come — of Poland. “I hope my guitar’s okay, though,” he said, suddenly, stricken. “Seriously.”
Rose-Ling Horowitz and Jamie joined up with Jessica and Ari in a circle on the cracked linoleum airport floor, and Ari dealt them all cards. Shayna sat on her backpack and hugged her knees.
On the bus they took seats that Rabbi Amy — too late! — informed them would be theirs for the entirety of the trip. Shayna’s was a window seat in the middle, on the right-hand side. Next to her was Zoe Fischler, who seemed nice enough but who had hardly said a word so far. Zoe’s grandmother was a survivor, which Shayna knew because when she turned to Zoe to say “hey” that first day, Zoe had continued staring straight ahead, offering, only, in a monotone: “My bubbe’s a survivor.” Shayna deduced that this meant she was not to talk to Zoe about anything commonplace, not to try and commiserate about what snotty bitches Jamie and Jessica and Rose-Ling were, not to intrude with the profane.