Shades of Snow

By C.L. Mullikin

*Shades of Snow*

I am nothing but an automation.

Livestock with a brand seared into my skin.

Reminding me every second–like the shriek of the wind.

Jew. Jew. Jew.

Poland is cold–cold with snow, with frozen tears, with hunger.

Cold with blood.

The chill ran up last September's spine, when the troops' feet drummed up our sepia toned streets, their blue eyes frozen ahead.

November shuddered with the blue stars pinned to our arms, marking us different from the rest of our country as our feet dragged down sepia streets with a flag of surrender on our shoulders. The whispers drilled themselves into our minds.

Jew. Jew. Jew.

Now I watch sleet scrape the sooty window–my armband chaining me to the broken body of the ghetto.

It is 1940 and I, Marzena Lurie, am twelve.

The mothers cluck their tongues and tell me I look eight—As if their own rosy children hadn’t withered away into nothing but bones lurking beneath their soft skin.

The weather cannot make up its mind; not rain, not snow, but sleet.

The rain would bathe the world in some type of freshnes. Snow would smother the grime.

Sleet hurls down at the world with the anger of a great war.

As if we don’t have enough war.

As if my mother’s hands didn’t tremble as she packed our warmest bed clothes and pajamas.

As if my brother didn’t stare at the ground as we passed soldiers with cold eyes.

As if my father wasn’t far far away from us now.

All because we are Jews–

“Marzena!” My mother’s face reflected in the world of my muddy window.

“Yes matka?” I turned back to the dismal wails of children with grimy faces. My ears throbbed.

“We have to get down to the market,” her face stared up at me from the shadows of sleet. Her hair was neatly pinned up. Nothing, not even if the Germans stole every one of her hair pins, could keep her from looking neat.

Her dark hair shone in the gray, like the swirls of the ocean, foaming to her shoulders.

Similar except age–and her eyes, they shine like fire. Mine don’t shine at all, just reflect the world in an ugly sleeting black.

Precisely the same color as a scuttling fat beetle, my friend Alicja told me one spring day, as we walked arm-in-arm towards school.

Her crop of blonde hair shone like candle wax that morning–when we could race down the sidewalk, chipper songs born on our smiling lips.

Before I was branded with a star.

Before Polish girls couldn’t sing with Jewish girls.

I slid through the scanty bodies, taking my mothers wrinkled hand.

Her fingers were scratched with marks from her needle. She sewed together the green crisp fabric for the soldiers.

Father used to call them grasshoppers.

The hallway moaned with drafts, at least fresher than the cramped filth we slept in, where I spent my afternoons with simple mending by my yellowed window.

Mother’s face held a crease between her brow.

“What’s the trouble?”

I relaxed the crease in my own brow, “Nothing.”

“Hmmm,” she flicked her fingers over the collar of her patched brown coat. “You need shoes.”

I ignored how she omitted ‘new’ as I felt the floor through the paper thin soles. The leather left a trail behind me like inky confetti. “They’ll last.”

I’d make them last–a boy had shown me a trick of cramming bits of scrap paper and any old bandages you scavenged from grim corners inside of them.

I tightened my own ratty coat around me as we stepped into the freezing street.

“It’s like ice skating,” my mother flashed her thin lipped smile at me.

Ice skating; the thing full of laughter and sun and heaps of snow like powdered sugar.

Mother was mad to believe this spatter was anything but fossilized gloom, a great mosaic of grime.

Adults can’t believe that the Germans would ever let us have powdered sugar snow. They were daft to imagine I thought it possible.

The street was lined with crumpled figures veiled in ice, their begging lips turned blue in the cold.

I felt my mother’s hand tighten around my own.

In her other hand were our ration slips, gripped protectively as if they were our salvation.

I suppose they were.

“What do we need?” It felt like a heavy sentence on my tongue, what did we need? We needed so many things.

“Bread,” she said simply, “and cabbage.”

The city's streets looked starving, like the grand buildings were clutching their hollow frames, eyes covered in film.

The market hunched its shoulders to the cold as we held our jackets tighter.

“Marzena,” my mother dropped a slip into my hand, “Go see about cabbage please.”

I slid over to the vendor, her face as wrinkled as the puny leaves she sold.

Strange bony hands clutched at my coat– I gaped down at two stunted children.

“One to buy us a loaf of bread–a loaf of sawdust, anything, anything!”

I think it was a boy, he had a swatch of ruddy hair on his head, other than that he was a skeleton, bathed in dirt from the grave.

My fist tightened on the slips.

“We’re so hungry,” the other wailed, her cold hands fingering the sleeve of my coat.

“I don’t have money for you,” My voice matched the icy wind.

“Please–please,” the boy wailed.

I brushed past them towards the stand. They felt like ghosts.

I snatched a gnarled head of cabbage blindly from the table, shivering.

The sleet was coming down harder now, blustering the color out of my face.

I clung to the scanty wall of one of the buildings, eyes flicking for my mother.

A group of huddled ‘grasshoppers’ strutted past my spot, their laughter ringing too loud.

One turned his blue eyes at me–

I nodded sharply.

He winked and flicked something at me.

It was small and round, blinking smartly up at me. A peppermint.

I stared at the ‘grasshoppers'’ retreating backs.

My fists were as white as the sky–

Germans had peppermints.

Outside of the barbed wire–just out of sight were rivers and torrents of peppermints–hoards like dragon's treasure. Germans must eat them for breakfast like porridge.

Peppermints, peppermints, peppermints.

I could see them, smell them, taste them.

Their guns must fire them, their grenades explode rattling candy from the sky, the spice of mints sickening them as they crunched beneath their boots.

Germans had peppermints.

It was almost in my watering mouth–

Germans had peppermints.

My palm was sticky with red and white stripes as I dropped it into the gutter.

“Marzena,” My mother hurried up the street, coat drawn around an odd lump.

I opened my mouth–

She twitched her head sharply as she held out her left hand.

I took one more glance down the gutter.

I didn't really like peppermints anyway.

“Cabbage not so good this week?”

I glanced down at the crumpled leaves cradled in my arms “No–” the pale space on her finger was empty, where a sapphire ring was supposed to perch.

The air was frigid. I stared firmly at the street.

“I don’t need it, Marzena, you cannot eat a ring, you cannot clothe your children with a ring.”

The way she said it stung deep inside of me.

Stung so much that I decided not to ask why someone would buy a ring that didn’t feed anyone in a starving country–or what she’d sold it for.

I knew the first answer, only Germans could afford jewels over bread and shoes.

Behind my eyelids, I imagined the mountains of peppermints she could buy with that stone, like a drop of the night sky.

***

I sat still as stone in the hush.

The weather had finally made up its mind.

It was snowing.

“But what about you?”

“I will be alright Marzena.” My mothers face shone waxen in the dark.

Would she?

Would I?

Would a box carry me out of the ghetto without the grasshoppers finding me?

I could imagine all the sick ways I’d emerge into the grasshopper’s world of peppermints. She had sold her ring for information and a name.

She’d sold her hair comb for an orange.

I held the fruit in my palm.

“You must be careful, and be silent,” she drew my hands into her lap.

I was escaping my home in a box.

“Marzena–” tears pricked at her eyes, like stars.

“Mother?” the orange lulled out of my palms.

Her eyes closed, every fine line in her face casting harsh shadows. “Marzena, there is talk of the camps now, Auschwitz.”

The words sounded like bullets off her tongue.

“They will send us there to die—Marzena, there is talk of safehouses, there are good people who will help you.”
Where were those good people when we’d been thrown into this mess?

“Where?” I glanced down at the orange, it looked so out of place in the pressing darkness.

“Sweden.”

“How will someone in Sweden help me get out of Poland–”

“Marzena.”

“Go to Sweden when you’re here?” I lept to my feet

“Hush,” her eyes darted nervously around.

“You have to come with me–”

“They will help a child before they help me Marzena,” she said gently.

I stared at her like she was a stranger.

“There is no war in Sweden, darling.”

What she meant was people wouldn’t kill me for being a Jew.

I opened my mouth–

“You will not argue with me Marzena Lurie,” her soft face hardened.

The perfume of the orange was making me sick.

“You leave tomorrow.”

All I could do was watch her face.

My mind could not comprehend–How could you let go of someone in a day?

“You will be safe Marzena.”

In Sweden.

The shriveled voice inside of me told the ugly truth–no one was going to help me, not when the whole world was poised for battle.

“I will come back when the war has ended.”
Ended.

How long was that?

A year? Five? Twenty?

A century?

What was the point of sliding through the barbed wire’s teeth into a German infested world, a land swarming with grasshoppers.

There was no real hope, was there?

I wanted to hug her, bury my face in her coat.

She believed that sleet was made of powdered sugar.

My mother was mad.

***

‘Tomorrow’ was a sick shade of gray, clustered with heavy clouds–just the color of the snow coating the ground like a wool sweater.

Now the sky could be electric green for all I knew, mangled limbs crammed into a crate like it was my coffin.

I wondered if death smelt like the mildew from the German uniforms.

I was smothered in the clothes that grasshoppers wore.

Buried in them.

I pressed my hand closer to my mouth–the scent of oranges reminding me not to move–breathe my mother had said, breathe and don’t make a sound, don’t move until the lid is taken off and a man helps you out, helps you to safety.

Safety meant Sweden, where an old woman was taking in Jewish children–giving them homes far from the fighting and the blood.

But my mother was still here.

She was still darning and patching and sewing like a machine every day until the sun went down.

Every odd noise was like a grenade exploding in my ears–they’d find me, they’d crack open the lid and discover a crumpled Jew hidden in their clothes.

Would they shoot me?

A mad thought of peppermints drilling themselves into my skull flickered behind my eyelids.

I’d bleed out strawberry syrup on the powdered sugar snow.

What use was it to escape a ghetto just to die on the streets where I’d ran with Alicja once?

Someone explained to me that getting shot in the head was painless.

I tried to imagine my life ending like a light switching off.

How did you die at a camp?

I tried to imagine something worse than being shot in the head, than your whole life switching off.

A distant buzz of voices like an air raid shocked me back into the freezing world.

My eyes closed as I felt the rumble of Germans speaking to the man who’d laid the crates into the fresh snow–

Fingers clenched between my teeth, I bit hard to not make a sound. The crate creaked nervously as the scent of gasoline filled my freezing nose.

I was in the back of one of the grasshoppers trucks.

There was always talk of prayer in the camps. Talk about talking to God who created us all in his likeness.

In the Bible they speak about God never abandoning his people, but I was alone now. We were abandoned and handed over to the Germans–the Germans who people said were made in the image of God.

I prayed into the silence that God would help me.

Of course it made no difference.

If God turned his back on me, why would he help me now?

“Check the crates Karl,” one man called out.

Maybe God was offended that I hated the Germans that he had made.

One way or another everyone dies anyway.

There was a prick of light–like a star dancing on my cheek.

I could hear his breathing.

My heart was trying to rip out of my ribs–

I could smell the liquor and peppermints on his person.

The crate banged shut.

I was shoved into a corner that smelt of dust.

My heart had stopped beating–I was so numb I wondered if I had died–if my spirit was the only thing left in the crate that would be my coffin. Somewhere someone would open it and find the dead body of a Jew–they’d find my mother, they'd know she’d been the one to smuggle me out of the barbed wire and into their territory.

No, no I couldn’t be dead–I would not be dead.

I pinched my numb hand in the dark, calming at the twisting pain that would leave an ugly purple bruise.

I wasn’t dead.

And the truck was moving.

I lay still as if I was dead, any sniff or sigh could mean a bullet through my head–or a bullet through my mothers head. Both probably.

An orange was supposed to bring you joy. I’d felt so disappointed in myself at how my mother looked at me expectantly as she sliced it into wrinkled quarters.

“It looks like half of the sun,” she said softly, handing it to me.

It looked like a shriveled leather ball. The kind left rotting in the undergrowth of a park.

I gagged down half–begged her to share the rest with me.

She made the orange into a smile.

I stared at her thin hands and remembered once she’d taught me to paint an orange.

It was long ago–so long ago that it might be a dream, a silly mad fantasy that I’d woken abruptly from as I walked through the streets alone one day.

Watching the world pass me by from a pen of barbed wire.

Because I was a Jew.

I was an automation.

An animal.

The man would take me out of the crate and then what?

I could never go back to dreaming, could never go back to imagining.

I could barely even survive.

Vanity, it was all vanity–vanity and madness.

The real world was war and blood and death and hate.

So much hate.

The real world wasn’t powdered sugar snow, it was sleet.

Everything else was playing pretend.

Pretending to be friendly when the second someone says Jews are dangerous, your children don’t bat an eye in their direction. Pretending to wink and be merry–throwing a peppermint at a Jew when you and your Hitler wanted to see her dead.

Pretending like you can free a child from the Ghetto when she’d be eaten up alive in the world swarming with Germans.

We all die in the end.

Hope is supposed to make things less painful.

But it only stabbed me sharper when I was let down. Made me feel the pain inside.

I’d given it up when my father was taken away, after everything became real as the ground or the stars in the sky.

It was much more practical.

Not hoping, I mean.

***

There was no real time in the crate, everything was muddy, but I felt the clanking engine come to a stop.

It was time to hold my breath again.

My nose scrunched at the blistering cold creeping through the cracks–the voices all huddled with the wind.

“Right here–standard procedure and a quick check–”:

My heart dropped out of my chest again.

The man should be here–where was the man–

Boots crunched on the snow as I was hoisted onto German soil.

A minute passed.

The uniforms shifted–like real grasshoppers were twitching inside the folds–peeling back.

I froze like an animal as the blast of cold air hit me full in the face–the sky was a drab gray.

A pair of silver blue eyes stared down at me–a man’s eyes.

A man dressed in green with a green hat on his pale blonde head.

German.

The snow was under my feet–my heart had propelled me like a bullet away from the man, away from the enemy–his strong hands seized my wrists–

“I’m here to help–” he whispered–

But I was gone, racing over the snow–there were blotchy soldiers lingering here and there.

I closed my eyes ready for a bullet–

But I was through into the clusters of sepia buildings like a needle in thread.

The bustling city had never been so void.

A few people dressed like scraggly ravens tripped by with their faces shielded from the snow.

Wind sighed around my ankles–skirt suddenly thin against my frame in the cold. The city loomed around me like an empty shell–staring down at me in bewilderment.

I felt as though a flag was waving above my head–a flag announcing to the world, “Look here! Here is a Jew!”

As I ducked down another street I realized there was one on my arm.

I crumpled the armband in my numb fingers–tasting snow and bile on my lips. If the Germans came now I wouldn't hear them, my breath was too fast.

I rolled it like an ancient scroll, a scroll full of secrets, and crammed it up a gutter.

I stifled my gasping breath as I stared.

What was the point? When I’d just die anyway.

There was no time to think, the thin soles of my shoes worked their way down the streets.

I ran into the howling snowy world of the Germans without any stockings on, with a sweater and a skirt meant for September.

My dark hair whipped around my face in tarnished copper curls.

My last hair ribbon lay limp in the street behind me–but I was too dizzy to care.

The sky stretched above me. I wasn’t caged in by barbed wire–I was running, running like a madwoman without Germans on my heels.

Cold stinging to my bones I slowed.

Where was I going? I was a madwoman, running through the streets of Warsaw with my bare knobbly knees frozen.

It all came back to death.

I escaped the ghetto to die escaping the Germans.

Dying in the streets of Warsaw was better than dying in a pen.

At least there was snow here.

I held a sooty hand to the sky. I might as well have been the only person alive in these shivering streets.

I was alone–I could kick the snow, I could dance on the streets, I could curse the Germans.

I remembered the face of my mother, my mad mother who believed in powdered sugar snow and who hoped for everything.

If they found me cursing the Germans they’d kill me, and my mother would be alone.

Worse, she’d be cut to the bone only to have them come marching for her next.

That’s what it would take for her to stop endangering herself with poisonous hope.

I walked slowly through the streets, chin pointed at that great gray sky clouded above me, turning the world to a black and white photograph.

I hugged my sweater closer around my ribs, wondering vaguely how long it took you to freeze to death.

My feet wandered the streets while my brain wandered through thoughts.

There were no Germans with guns, no Germans rattling peppermints at me.

I walked numbly in the empty world, wishing I had a scraggly coat to blend in with the crows perched here and there in the snow.

Warsaw felt like a shadow of itself, like it might belong to a dream.

I followed eerily familiar twists and turns, keeping to shadows.

The Ghetto was miles away from here–my mother was miles away from me and I was stranded in a winter with nothing but the clothes on my back.

I stopped at the mouth of an alleyway. There was a main road ahead, trimmed with German trucks, far too busy for even a mad Jewish girl to stray down.

Here was the museum.

It stood before me in heavy columns that looked too much like fencing for my liking.

I’d been there before, long ago, in another life entirely. I’d stared up at the face of a sculpture. They were my favorite.

How could a sculptur get something so unyielding as cold marble to bend to their will? To create folds and creases and faces that were real and tangible–that were alive, but cold as death.

I had not looked at something beautiful in a long time–I was walking over the cracked snowy sidewalk before I understood what I was doing.

I wanted to feel brushstrokes under my fingers, run my hands across that cold flesh of a statue.

The snow fell like feathers from fallen angels' wings, I edged towards the museum.

Would someone ever think to paint a Jew?

Would an artist slip into a Ghetto and paint haggard twisting features? Use a beggar as his muse?

My father had told me art was supposed to make you feel something.

Feeling something meant a splash of cold dripping down your back.

Would someone feel something to see the Ghettos? Would they feel hunger and cold? The cold that gnawed you down to your skin and bones, the hopeless, dreadful cold that made one succumb to trains that hauled them to camps?

I wondered what color they would use.

No one would ever paint such an ugly thing, such and unfeeling numbness. Paintings in museums are for looks, they are for imagination, not cold and hunger and fear.

Not for Jews.

I stopped at the sidewalk.

There was no point in seeing something beautiful that wasn’t meant for me.

I turned on my heel and started back–

The snow fluttered about my shoulders.

On the snowy lawn of the museum, crates specked the powder. Crates of art.

The saliva dried in my mouth–there were oil paintings and statues packaged in tissue–nailed shut.

What did the grasshoppers want with art?

I took a step closer, edging around a crate that slid open. The silhouette of blurry children in a garden looked up from the hollow–

A rustle snapped my head up–my knees already sinking into the snow.

Grasshoppers.

Germans were coming down the steps carrying a crate to a truck parked outside. One had a cigar in his teeth.

They laughed as they set the crates inside the truck–their green shoulders angled away from me.

My heart beated like a racehorse as I stared across the snowy lawn, eyes tracing the shadowed columns–looking for a place to escape.

The Germans turned back around, squabbling in the harsh grating words they always spoke in.

I was already in the crate, under the painting, breathing in fresh wood and the sting of oil paint.

It was a familiar smell, I tried not to think as I closed myself in.

I was breathless, packaged into a new coffin. In spite of fear I brushed my fingertips across the texture of the paint, breathing in deeply.

It smelt of a world I had known before cold and hunger were everything.

My father would always follow the strange movements of an impressionist, as if you watched the world through a foggy window–or with tears blotting your eyes.

I said another prayer, forming the words so my lips brushed against the canvas–

The voices came like giants shaking the earth.

I closed my eyes tight and pretended to be invisible.

Housed into the rustling, snowy air I felt like a doll, with an icy china face and glazed eyes for some child decked in tinsel to unwrap.

My eyelids were heavy with frost, but I didn't dare to breathe.

The dark overwhelmed me as the box was laid down gently–the bitter twang of a cigar seeped through the cracks in the pine wood.

The darkness snuffed out my breath as if it was some hand pressing over my nose.

I winced at the defining voices as they continued–

Where was I?

It was warmer here, mothball warm, the shield from the wind that tastes like dust and age on your lips. Was this the museum?

I’d wait for the Germans to leave, and dance around the marble halls in my bare feet, run my hands across the paintings and trace the features of the pretty women’s and men’s faces.

The sob I stifled only showed me how mad I really was.

We have a word in polish that means a raving lunatic, Wariat, that’s what I was.

The voices got louder–a door slammed somewhere–

At last–

A growl of an engine spluttered into the silence–we were moving, moving along with the racing of my heart–

I slid my hands up to the top board, sliding my fingers until it cracked open.

There were more crates in the back–and the noises of two men in the front seats, smoking cigars as we tumbled down the street–leaving the museum behind.

One man started humming a Polish song my father used to sing.

I wanted to claw it out of his filthy mouth as I lay back into the shadows, mummified in art.

***

The bitter cold froze my eyes and lips.

I’d curled against myself as tight as I could get and drowned in a stupor.

A shriveled orange sounded luxurious to the knots weaving through my stomach.

The scent of gasoline dulled my blind senses. The German’s sharp tongues muffled in stillness.

Muffled through the walls were also the distant rumbles and scratches of a train conversing with the wind.

“Wir sind pünktlich,” A man drawled

“Sieben, ja?” a younger voice continued.

“Sechs.”

Their boots crunched on the snow like armies of black beetles were crushed underneath.

I stayed still with my limbs like frozen lead.

Traces of the wind slid through the cracks– louder as the soldiers opened the trunk and heaved the box over their shoulders and onto the snow.

We’d gone north? West?

I couldn’t say–couldn’t even say how long we’d been driving.

I had to escape here, I could hear the train grinding against frozen tracks, I get on that train and it would be done–

There had been a story once about a Jewish boy who leapt off a moving train.

A train that was taking him to the foreign jungle of Auschwitz.

He was only thirteen.

They said he died for honor, died to give us hope.

But hope isn’t what causes people to leap off trains.

Despair is.

Knowing the only thing you have left is your own life.

And you will never let the Germans have the satisfaction of having that.

My fingers hooked the wooden panel–sliding it open.

A swatch of blizzard sky met my dry eyes.

Footsteps crunched closer.

I snapped the lid shut as the steps continued–in time with my racing heart–like a death toll.

“Ich werde das überprüfen.”

I wanted nothing more but to be able to discern the uneasy words.

The painting rested overtop of me, like a shield–

A crack of the gray sky shot through my vision–shadows danced from above the canvas.

I could see his silhouette staring down into the crate.

And then I saw his hands.

Pale, young, and calloused.

And then his face.

I stared blankly up–wishing if I didn’t move I could be invisible.

He had blue eyes like the sky in the painting, silver like water. They widened slightly, blonde brow twitching for a fraction of a second.

"Klar, wo sind die Nägel,” he glanced over his shoulder.

The curtain of the painting fell back over my face as the lid closed.

Sealing me in.

I waited–waited for peppermint bullets to come streaming in, splintering my bones–but nothing–only the sharp bang of nails locking me in.

He was going to lock me into a real coffin–I’d die, I’d starve, I’d suffocate–

I wanted to scream, kick until the splinters lodged themselves deep in my skin–scream so someone would hear, so someone would help.

I knew I was going to die.

The crate, the orange, the snowy streets I raced in, lied to me.

Like a stoned bird lying dead upon the barren earth.

The wicked, cruel earth.

Where Germans shoot you with their sweets.

Because you are nothing.

I clamped my mouth shut against the sobs threatening to trill out of my mouth.

It was all so dizzy, staining my vision with dancing specks of light–my ears with strange sounds.

The train car smelt of straw and cigar smoke–the doors creaking as if they were sealed with rust and mildew.

My brain wouldn’t morph to the reality that he had seen me–blue eyes marking me as prey.

The train car door slammed like the creak of old bones–latches were pulled and fastened strongly, voices minging in a foreign tongue I couldn’t understand.

I would have thought he was blind if not for the tiny flicker in his eyes. Now I was locked inside of a box in a train going who knows where.

My mother thought I was on my way to Sweden.

A burst of morbid laughter almost rang through my lips.

I bit my fist instead.

My body skin and bones and cold hunger, I waited.

Waited until the voices faded and the rush of wind gnashed its teeth through the gaps in the wood. The wheels churned on the frozen tracks.

Then I screamed.

A gravely scratch–like a crow echoed through my throat–there were hot tears singeing my face–I spasmed and kicked and smashed my head against the crate again and again and again.

The anger and the hate were bubbling inside of my stomach like a war–I wanted to escape the damp air that was suffocating me–I wanted to fight and howl like a wounded animal until someone found me.

The world had gone the sick shade of a bruise, blurred at the edges.

My skin was turning blue when I stopped.

I lay there numb to anything but my own misery.

Drowning in it.

I would drown sallow and numb here, and one day a German would pry open the box to find the bones of a Jew inside.

I dreamt it scared them to the pure German bone.

Could they look at my skeleton and know I was Jewish? Know that I had run away from their Ghetto and eaten an orange as my last meal?

Could they find out who my mother was by turning over my pearl white bones in their hands?

It didn’t matter anymore.

I trailed my bleeding knuckles over the surface of the painting, touched the brustrokes with my eyes closed and wondered who had painted it.

In a convoluted way I was dying because of art.

Just like my father.

He died for creating the art.

I would die for trying to escape with it.

I wanted to believe in heaven, believe so I could see him again.

Noble Jews who died making art that bore the truth went to heaven.

Did girls who hid, numb in the snow go to heaven?

Did boys who leapt off of trains go to heaven?

I wasn’t sure I wanted to know.

My raw fingers stroked down the painting like it was a dog culled in my lap, its fur forming pictures.

I wanted to sleep and get away from the numb pain.

Perhaps I’d dream of powdered sugar snow.

Perhaps death was like falling asleep late on Hanukkah, mellow sounds of adults conversing in the background of your visions of velvet ribbons and candles in the menorah. Death coming along with the waltzing piano of your aunts as you lay in a quilted bed.

Maybe a familiar pair of lips presses a stamp on your forehead, marking you for eternity.

Tears frozen to my face as I drifted far away, arms hugging the painting to my chest.

Awaiting a kiss from my mother.

***

Light streamed through my eyelids–the type of weak winter sunlight that bleaches any color from your face but a cherry red flush in your cheeks.

The box was open wide to the splintered roof buckling under flustered wind.

I stayed as still as the dead.

Eyes the color of mist stared down at me, rimmed in scarlet halos. They belonged to a face with sunken cheeks.

I tried to breathe through the slit in my lips–tired to keep my eyes glassy.

“Hello?” the lips said.

He spoke Polish.

He breathed too quickly–matching the rhythm of my racing heart. I prayed he wouldn’t hear it.

His calloused fingers were black and blue, reaching into the box–

I wretched out, into the cold air clawing myself against the seething wall of the car.

He held his hands up–eyes widening at me. Undoubtedly a grasshopper, with his pure blue eyes and pure blonde hair–appearance only marred by freckles on his nose.

“Who are you?” his accent spoke Polish words as though he was amateurly plunking through a piece of Chopin.

“Dead,” I breathed

He stared at me with valleys forming on his German brow. “I do not understand you,” he slowly rose out of his kneeling. I judged him to be in his early twenties.

The wind shrieked behind my ears as the train whirled through banks of snow.

“What is your name?”

I stared.

He reached inside of his jacket and pulled out a knotted handkerchief–a stale smell of old bread surged in my raw nose–

He held it out.

What was he doing?

“Take it,” he took a step forward.

I let it drop into my palm.

And then onto the floor.

We both stared at each other.

He was trying to kill me, kill me the slow agonizing way. What had he laced through that bread?

He opened his mouth, but no words came out.

He’d kill me now.

Put a peppermint through my brain.

Perhaps you could survive jumping off a moving train–

I could smell the peppermints already–

He stood there with his hand outstretched again.

A coin of red and white winking at me.

“Pfefferminze. Don’t know the word in Polish.” His smile faltered. “You don’t like pfefferminze?”

“Miętowy” I said, just to get that ugly German word off his tongue.

“Min-tovuh-eh,” he stammered.

I nodded sharply.

He held it out closer to me, “Brenner Lutz, soldier for the German army,”

The smell was tantalizing, burning through my nose. Tears sparkled at the corners of my eyes. I plucked it out of his hand before I could gather my bitterness.

It was so sweet I wanted to spit it out.

“What are you called?”

I must be a caged animal to him. He could find some brief entertainment before I was nothing other than a useless mouth to feed.

Germans hated children because they were good for nothing other than taking all of their food.

I sank into a pile against the wall–sucking every last trail of sickly sweet sugar from my fingers.

“What is your name?” he tried again

“Why do you want to know?”

He looked as if I’d asked him who Hitler was.

“How do I know what to call a person if I don’t know their name?”

“Jude,” my voice carried every ounce of bitterness I intended it to.

“Not a name,” he scratched his freckled nose. “What I mean is what people call you,’

“Jude,” I repeated.

“Ach du lieber Himmel,” he muttered. “I am Brenner, that is my name, what is your name?”

“You want my name when you’re going to kill me.”

His eyes went round. “Kill you–I have seen–kill you?”

I tried to discern the silence that spread after.

“That is what Germans do to Jews.”

He shook his head.

Was this man not a soldier?

“If you have seen it all then why are you still pretending it isn’t there?” The surge of clammy fury had me submerged in its depths, spitting out things I’d only dreamed of saying.

“I have hope–”

“You said you’ve seen things, people's heads blown off by your own bullets–” my voice crashed with the howl of the wind.

I saw their faces, the starving children in the ghetto, blonde hair, white armbands, stars of David plastering my eyes.

Jew. Jew. Jew.

“Yes–” He looked at me like I was the mad one.

Were all Germans so blind? Could they not grasp what was real, what was true, the horrors? My knuckles went white. Was something wrong with German eyes? Did the blue blind out dirt and blood, staining the world? The bones in the once rosy faces? The freezing squalor we all drowned in again and again and again?

“How can you hope? How can you hope after that–” The rattle in my voice sank deep into my bones.

“If there is no hope what is there to live for?”

My nose stung like someone had hit me across the face “Nothing.” My voice was small “Nothing and you are mad to think there is anything worth–”

He ran a hand across the shadows etching harsh lines into his face.

The grey-blue eyes shone like dolls’.

“You have taken everything from me,” I choked, “My country, my home, my friend, my family–you have taken my hope, you have taken my God–everything but my own life.”

“You cannot take hope,” His voice sounded too small for a soldier’s.

“Hitler found a way.”

He shook his head “You cannot take something that you cannot hold–you cannot steal hope.”

I opened my mouth.

“No thief can hold hope,” he interrupted. “It’s like the wind. We live on hope–without hope I’d be dead in a trench, and if that makes me mad, I’d rather be mad,” he was breathless. “I’d be mad and a fool if that meant I could look at the sky and see more than war. If I don’t have hope I have nothing–If I don’t have hope I’m not human.” Silver tears slid off his hollow cheeks.

I marveled at him like he was a waxwork in a glass case.

“I am tired of war,” the tremors in his voice rose sharply as he slid to his knees. “I am tired of hate and blood.”

There was a weariness in both of our bones, I could taste it in the air, like sleet.

“I’m tired of the Germans.”

A smile cracked on his freckled face. “You are also tired of hate.”

“Tired of the Germans hating me.”

He scratched his nose, stretching his heavy boots before him. “I don’t hate Jews.”

I watched him through slitted eyes. “You’re mad.”

“Is that it?”

“Yes.”

He stared at the wall for a long moment, a moment which I could feel the sighing seconds tick by.

“I’m sorry.”

A squirm snaked in my gut, “What?”

“I’m sorry you have seen such an ugly side of the world.”

“It’s all ugly underneath the surface,”

“I have seen beautiful things inside of ugly things,”

“You sound like my mother,”

“You’re mother sounds wise,” He blinked slowly, “How can you believe there is nothing beautiful when you slid through Warsaw in a crate of art?”

“You were stealing it,” I bristled.

His blue eyes stared down into the darkness of the box, like search lights, “You don’t find this beautiful?”

“It’s just paint on a canvas,” I winced at the way I’d stroked the thing.

“You’ve never seen a picture that made you feel something–”

“Now you sound like my father.”

“Where are they?”

“My mother is in Warsaw–alone, and my father is dead,” I let the harsh words settle like drafts of ice around us.

“Why are you going to Germany?” He hugged his green coat around him.

“I was going to Sweden–but the man never came for me,” I stared down at the red stains still stripping my fingers.

“I’m sorry.”

“I’m not surprised,” My sweater was far too thin in this draft, my knees bruised and dirty, like twigs poking from my skirt.

“How will you escape?”

I blinked at him. “I won’t.”

“You will be killed if you stay on this train–”

“What am I supposed to do? Jump off?”

He sank back into the silence. The train rattled my bones together–along to the tune of my chattering teeth. The cold was the type that bit you, like a dog gnawing.

“Someone told me a story about a boy who jumped off a train–a train to Auschwitz.”

“What happened to him?” Brenner asked.

“He died.”

The icy light stained the train car with the damp smell of snow that made your nose bleed.

“Everyone says that he was brave to do that,” I trained off, watching the shadows.

“I don’t think killing yourself is brave.” He wrapped his arms around his knees, looking like a complacent child lent up to hear a radio show. “It’s very bleak.”

“The world is very bleak,” I copied the way he propped his chin on his fist.

“It is.”

There was no question mark at the end of the sentence.

“So why do you go around hoping for something better?”

“Because I’ve seen better things,” he said like an oath “I’ve seen joy and love and happiness. Have you ever walked in a garden and smelt the ground and thought nothing could be bad when there were so many beautiful things to see?”

“Where are all the beautiful things now?” The painting sat cradled in the box, new red flowers sprung from where my blood had stuck to the paint.

“Yesterday I saw a pile of leaves that looked like a star. There are beautiful things, but they’re hidden, you have to go look for them when they don’t jump out at you.”

I shook my head. “There is nothing beautiful in a Ghetto.”

“There isn’t much on a battlefield.” His eyes glimmered silver. “If I hadn’t seen the darkness, the ugly, the ditch, how would I know what was sun and stars and flowers? How would I know how rich light is if I hadn’t seen war?”

He was just as mad as my mother, my mother who believed in powdered sugar snow and fairies and hope for me, in a land far away, in a land of make believe, a land called Sweden.

“My father believed in that, that’s what got him killed,” I squeezed the lump in my throat deep deep down, back to wherever it came from. I didn’t need to feel that. “He was an artist–” The choke slid out of my mouth shrill and high, like a hiccup.

“You father would want you to hope–”

His face swam in the backs of my eyelids, hope. “He died because he was hoping.” It crept up my skin–that plunge, that ice cold feeling. It was so much easier to spy at the world through a practical lens. “Is it better to die hoping or to live and be realistic?”

Brenner took a moment, closing his long eyelashes–blonde like they were coated in snow. “Are you really living then?”

“Of course I am,” the scoff slid through my lips. “I have a heartbeat, I have blood, I’m breathing.”

He was right there before me, swaddled in green and sitting cross legged like a child, but he looked so far away. “That makes us different from animals. We hope. Animals just survive, they have instinct, but we have something else–”

“What else?”

He ran a hand through his hair. “there's no word–no word I can think of, it’s like–it’s more than instinct. We were made for more than just survival. That is why we make art, that is why we can hope for something better.”

I turned each clunky word over in my hands. We are more than animals. It all kept swimming through my eyes, making me feel very far away too. Living. Living was feeling and loving and creating, living was beauty and richness and sunlight and powdered sugar snow–

“But–but if you die like that–what’s the point of hoping for something else if you die in the end anyway?” My voice sounded very small compared to his silver eyes, fixed on something invisible.

“If you die anyway, wouldn’t you rather die hoping than die just surviving?”

I remembered walking down shining wood floors, smelling the scents of dust and hollow space. Art was on the walls, reflected in children's eyes as they watched guides parade the images, the images created by people, images created by people who were not surviving but living. It shone brighter than the cold winter sunlight around me.

My father was someone who lived.

My mother was someone who lived.

Brenner, this German, this German who used the words ‘we’ and told me I was more than an animal, more than a star pinned to my shoulder, more than an object to be tossed around by big hands.

He was living.

The rattle of the wind, whistling in and out of the train car like one long sigh had never felt so real.

The cold piercing my bones had never felt so unimportant.

The noise of the train had turned to the clatter of ice skates, the glimmers of smiles and hair pins, to a half rotted orange in the dark, to a future, to running down a street bathed in snow, to prospect.

“Why do you care anyway?”

I asked because I cared to know.

Brenner sat back on his hands, staring like the whole ceiling was made of stars only visible to him, “I’ve spent too long in ugliness to leave someone else there.” His breath closed before his mouth, turning his words into something tangible and real.

“You want to help me escape?”

“I want to help the pretty things in the world to be clearer.”

“My father said that he wanted to help the world to see what was real–both sides of the story.”

“Your father sounds like he was a wise man.”

“He was.” My mother was too, with her strength, and her belief that things could get better.

The silence seemed to be full of the prospect of history that hung so heavily over our heads that you could taste it on your tongue.

“Have you been to Sweden?” I broke it.

He shook his head.

“How am I supposed to get there when we’re going to Berlin?”

“All we can do is hope,” he winked.

Hope. That mad thought of powdered sugar in a mosaic of grime, fuel to light that defied the darkness, like the blood in my veins, like the train trekking through a groaning country.

The land of ice and hunger was sliding away, far far away, replaced by a skirt of fir trees and snowy drifts lacing the sky.