Trajectory by Cambria Gordon

Author:Cambria Gordon [Gordon, Cambria]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scholastic Inc.
Published: 2024-01-04T00:00:00+00:00

I have an hour before my first day of training class. I can’t very well walk in there representing Carl Norden feeling unsure of myself. Helen mentioned the base library. That sounds like the perfect place to calm myself and gather my wits.

Except it’s not quiet inside. There’s a radio playing loudly. An older, gray-haired man is pinning military patches on a bulletin board in neat rows. It’s a small space, just an anteroom with two wooden armchairs for reading, and then beyond that, the stacks. If you could call five bookshelves that amount to one-eighth the size of the Jenkintown Public Library actual stacks.

The man gives me a nod. “Help yourself to any of the books. If you need something just holler. The name’s Anderson.”

The books are arranged in categories, not by the Dewey decimal system. There’s a whole wall of nonfiction: biographies, American history, world history, science, and sports. The fiction section, however, is slim pickings. It’s mostly pulp novels with illustrations of women in the throes of passion or danger on the cover.

I choose an old Reader’s Digest instead and take a seat. One article stands out, reprinted from a science newsletter, about children reared by wild animals. It claims that there’s scientific evidence of two wolf children in Midnapore and someone called Lucas, the baboon boy of South Africa. I start to laugh, excited to escape into the ridiculousness and not think about math for a short while.

It’s hard to concentrate with the voices on the radio, but I don’t have the heart to tell Anderson to turn it down. Something tells me the radio is his only companion in here.

“This is my favorite show,” says Anderson. “Soldiers of the Press.”

I put down my magazine. It’s clear I’m not going to get much reading done. “What kind of program is it?”

“War correspondents on the front lines interview someone new every week.”

Two men are talking on the show. One has a heavy Eastern European accent. He sounds like Aunt Roza. Szmul Zygielbojm is his name. I know just how it’s spelled, with z’s and j’s in strange places. He’s probably Polish. The other man, with a British accent, can’t pronounce the Pole’s name correctly. Szmul doesn’t try to correct him. The message is important, not the messenger.

How did you get to London?

I used to work for Polish government. How you say, now I’m exile? Left in ’39 when we still could.

How did you come by this information?

I gather eyewitness accounts. From secret network across Poland.

Tell us what you know.

They use mobile gas chambers.

What are those?

Death machines with wheels. To slaughter innocent Jews. One thousand gassed every day. And not only gas. Bullets. Entire villages massacred. My wife, Manya, my son, Tuvia, are prisoners in Warsaw ghetto. It is horror.

How many Jews have been killed thus far?

Seven hundred thousand.

I look at Anderson. “Did you hear that?”

“Unfortunately, yes.”

“That can’t be right. The number’s too big. He doesn’t know how to say it in English. It must be seven hundred. Which is bad enough.

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