Girl with the Red Balloon (The Balloonmakers) by Katherine Locke

Author:Katherine Locke
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
Publisher: Albert Whitman & Company
Published: 2017-08-31T23:00:00+00:00

Chapter Eighteen

FREEDOM IS ANOTHER WORD FOR HOPE

Łódź Ghetto, Poland, March 1942

Benno

When Papa died, I didn’t cry. He simply fell asleep and didn’t wake up. Mama, who woke next to her cold, dead husband, didn’t cry either. He had disappeared from us sometime after the new year, as the calendar turned from 1941 to 1942.

Somewhere beyond here, the war raged on. We only knew its progress from the work we did. Because of my nimble fingers and sewing skills, taught to me by my mother years ago, I sewed with some younger boys and the women. Day after day, I stitched the same six buttons onto the same cut of coats, made at the station before me. Beyond us, bombs dropped. Men and women lived and died, just like here, but the ghetto’s war was fought with disease and hunger. The ghetto’s war was fought in lost minds. Papa stopped going to work. They were going to give him a wedding invitation, as we called the notices for relocation. Relocation, deportation. We began to mix our words. Words lost meaning here in the ghetto. They meant everything and nothing in the same breath.

Papa never got relocated. He simply gave up. His heart stopped when he went to sleep. Over his body, Mama and I whispered the Mourner’s Kaddish (yitgadal v’yitkadash s’hmei raba) because he believed in God and an afterlife, and he would have wanted us to say those words over him. We hugged each other, and then we did not have time to grieve. We went to work, because we needed to take care of Ruth, who had never recovered from her illness in the fall.

Life waited for no mourner. Not here in the ghetto.

When Papa died, I didn’t cry.

When Ruth died, my heart stopped too. She took some part of me across into the other world, wherever the dead’s souls go when they’re gone. I didn’t know I wanted to believe in an afterlife until Ruth was gone. She died, crying of hunger for days and days, even when Mama and I gave up our bread and soup for her, almost doubled over in pain ourselves. She died painfully and without relief. Her body turned stiff so quickly that I imagined she had been halfway to death for a long time. Mama cried too. I remembered when Ruth was born, the way her pink fingers curled in the air, clinging to my fingers.

Those pink fingers in my memory were the brightest bit of color in my life. Everything was cold and gray in the ghetto these days. The cemetery didn’t have room and we didn’t have a headstone, but they found room for Ruth to share with the other children that died that week in the ghetto. I had forgotten, until I was standing there by the fresh dirt, how many people were dying this winter. In Berlin, we had not been comfortable for years. But this—one day, there would be a boy to my left. And the next, he’d be gone.

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