“Huh?” She turned to look at him, noticing the hard line of his jaw.
“Us. We’re the ghosts of Poland. All gone.” He jutted his chin toward the empty synagogue with its proliferate plaques. Hasids and Living milled about, taking pictures.
“Can I have a piece of gum?”
He gave her one, and Shayna rooted around in her bag for a pen and a paper scrap on which to make note of this notion — the ghosts of Poland! It would be excellent, original journal fodder.
“Man,” Jon Abrams said at Where You’re At that night. “It was weird seeing those Hasidic people around all day.”
“How so?” asked Rabbi Amy.
“Well, at first I thought maybe they were Polish or something, you know? Like maybe there were still Jews left here. But then when I realized they were just tourists, like us, it made me kind of angry, you know?” He shook his head. “Weird.”
Dumbass, Shayna thought. Max had beaten Jon to the punch on that one six years ago: “How weird to think that now we tourists are the only Jews here at all.”
“Yeah,” said Robbie Altschul, nodding. “Totally.” Jamie was sitting on his lap, which solved the mystery of where she had been the night before. She shivered, and he wrapped his arms tightly around her.
They met their survivor, Sonja, who would be accompanying them to Auschwitz. She had a We Are the Living! name tag affixed to her cardigan, which seemed pretty redundant, given that she had survived, that she was, in fact, still alive, truly Living. Sonja had been in Auschwitz; her whole family had died there. She had survived, she told them, her voice shockingly steady, because she had gotten a job as a maid for an SS officer and his family.
Heather wrote “euphemism?” on her binder and held it out for Shayna to see.
Rabbi Amy passed around a handout entitled “Guardians of the Past” and then they talked about tomorrow. This is what they called it: “Tomorrow.” Not “Auschwitz.” They were supposed to let it all flow through them, she said. Express whatever they needed to express. Feel what they were feeling. Max had feared the worst: not feeling enough, not feeling at all. Which would, he speculated, make him a monster.
“It’s gonna be intense, you guys,” Jonah said. “Really emotional.”
Shayna raised her hand before she realized what she was doing, and all eyes were on her.
“What if we go, and I don’t feel emotional enough?” she asked the group, emboldened by the sound of her own voice. Max had wondered similarly, so of course this query would bring Shayna the support and empathy of all and sundry. “Like, what if it’s, like, ‘Da-da-daa, Auschwitz, whatever’?”
“Thanks for sharing that, Shayna,” said Rabbi Amy slowly. “Anyone else feeling anything along those lines?” Jamie shook her head disgustedly. Others looked confused, horrified. Jessica, who was leaning back into Ari between his outstretched legs, playing with a lock of his hair, sat up straight.
“My bubbe’s a survivor,” Zoe said incredulously, after an interminable pause. Even Heather, eyebrows raised, wouldn’t make eye contact.
Then Darcey Feingold broke down, sobbing. “I — feel — the — opposite,” she hiccupped when she’d managed to pull it together. There were sympathetic nods all around. “It’s just so…intense!” Here Darcey let loose again, and Where You’re At fairly disintegrated.
“We’re all here for you,” Jessica told Darcey, stroking her hair. “We’re all in the same boat.”
“It’s going to be okay,” said Rabbi Amy. “You’re going to be just fine. It is intense.”
“We’ll get through it together,” said Ari, giving her a victory sign.
“You are so fucked up,” Heather mouthed at Shayna, grinning.
Rabbi Amy told them all to get a good night’s sleep—“You’re going to need it”—but they stayed up late, then later, reluctant to allow it passively to become “Tomorrow.” People gathered along the hallway and in rooms with open doors, practiced their grimaces, said things like, “It’s so weird we’re going Tomorrow” and “Can you believe we’re going Tomorrow?” Darcey was an ersatz celebrity, wan and pale and sniffling for hours. People took turns holding her hand, hugging her. Only Zoe seemed perkier than usual, holding court on the top bunk in room 410, telling of her bubbe’s narrow escape from the gas chamber.
Shayna wandered up to Jonah’s room and knocked on the door. She would try to explain herself via estrangement from her journal — that was justification enough, right? — he’d empathize, say something wise like, There’s nothing new to be said about this place so just give voice to your own singular experience, and then spoon her, maybe, for like an hour. When she heard “Come in,” she opened the door to find Jonah and Rabbi Amy sitting on the floor playing gin. Rabbi Amy was laughing.
“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?”