How This Night Is Different by Elisa Albert

Author:Elisa Albert
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2006-10-06T04:00:00+00:00

The Living

I n 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.

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