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“No, Gisela.” Jim held my shoulders, stopping me. “Stay here while I go inside to tell them. I’ll be right back.”
We spent the rest of the afternoon wandering around the grounds together as my weary heart absorbed this terrible blow. Sometimes we talked, but most of the time we remained silent. I sensed a deep sadness in Jim, a raw wound that wasn’t healing. Even though we had become close friends, I didn’t know what had caused it. For now, helping me seemed to help him.
“Are you sure you’re going to be all right?” he asked when it was time for him to go.
“Yes, I think so. Thank you, Jim.” He gave me a long hug before leaving.
Strangely, I didn’t cry, even after I returned to my barracks alone. Sam was missing. He might be dead, but he also might be alive. Until I knew for certain, I would keep him alive in my heart.
In the meantime, I wrote to Ruthie and also to Sam’s parents with the news. Sam’s mother and brothers had been like family to us when we’d lived in Antwerp, and my joy when I heard back from them was bittersweet. They were starting a new life in the United States. But where was Sam? And where was home for me?
* * *
As summer came to an end, there was a stirring of activity in the camp as we prepared for the high holy days. Rosh Hashanah celebrated the creation of the world and the beginning of a new year, and every one of us was embarking on a new beginning. Yom Kippur came in mid-September. It was the holiest day of the year, a day for repentance and seeking forgiveness from God and each other. Sam used to approach these holy days with great reverence when we lived in Antwerp, fasting and praying with Vati and the other men in the synagogue on Yom Kippur. The rituals might offer comfort to the others here in camp, but I couldn’t pray to a God I no longer believed in. Sukkot fell at the end of September, and there was great excitement as the men worked to build the outdoor sukkah where we would eat our meals. I remembered the tiny sukkah that Vati used to build on the balcony of our apartment in Berlin. In rainy weather we would put on our coats and laugh as we shivered through our meals. It seemed like a lifetime ago.
I was tending my patients in the camp hospital on the first day of Sukkot when a messenger arrived from the office, saying I had a visitor. The messenger was from Romania and we couldn’t communicate very well, so I hurried up to the office alongside her, wondering who it could be. My racing heart hoped it was Sam. I was stunned to see that it was Ruthie.
My sister stood inside the tiny office looking lost and forlorn. Two tattered suitcases rested on the floor beside her. I cried out with joy and threw my arms around her. She hugged me tightly in return.
“Ruthie! Are you all right?” I asked when I finally pulled back to look at her. “How...? Why...? What are you doing here? What happened?”
“Nothing happened.”
“Why didn’t you tell me you were coming?”
“I was afraid you’d tell me not to.”
“Oh, Ruthie. I would never turn you away. I’ve missed you so much! But you lived in such a nice home in Belgium and it was so beautiful there. And as you can see...” I gestured to the rustic office and bleak compound beyond the open door. “I have nothing here.”
“I changed my mind about staying in Antwerp. I want to be with you.”
My heart soared. “Then from now on, we’ll stay together. Always.” I hugged her again, hoping she wouldn’t regret her decision. I was thrilled to have my sister with me, someone who was my own flesh and blood. Someone who had known and loved the people I’d known. Someone who could help me keep their memories alive. But I had nothing to offer my dear sister except my love. It would have to be enough for now.
The office clerks watched our tearful reunion and volunteered to go to the hospital to explain why I wouldn’t be returning. The afternoon had been a slow one, and I knew that the other nurse on duty could easily cover for me. Every person in the camp understood the exquisite joy of being reunited with a lost loved one. It was what they all dreamed of for themselves.
I carried one of Ruthie’s suitcases as I walked with her to my barracks, listening as she explained how the Jewish agency had helped her travel to Bensheim. “They’re working very hard to reunite families and return us to our home countries, so they were happy to help me,” she said.
“And I’m happy that you’re here. Nearly a thousand people live in this camp, but still, I’ve been very lonely.” I found blankets and an empty cot for her in my barracks and we stood on opposite sides of it to arrange the sheets. I couldn’t stop staring at her. She reminded me so much of Mutti, dark-haired and slender and graceful. And I still saw Vati every time I looked into her dark, sorrowful eyes. “Are you hungry? Have you eaten?” I asked after we’d stowed her things.
“No, Mrs. Peeters’s cook packed a huge sack of food for my trip, enough to eat for days.”
“Then, come. I know a place where we can sit in the shade and catch up.” I had discovered the spot behind the toolshed, beneath one of the camp’s few trees, by accident. It had become my favorite place to go. I could turn my back on the starkness of the DP camp and lean against the wall of the shed and gaze up at the mountains, visible through the leaves. The trees had begun to change color with the cooler fall weather, some of them as bright as flames. I dreaded the winter season when everything would look as stark and empty as death. Maybe winter would be more bearable with Ruthie here.
We sat side by side, and I listened as she talked for a few more minutes before I finally dared to ask the question I’d been longing to ask since the moment I saw her in the office. I approached it slowly, guessing that the reason she was here might be a painful one. “It must have been very hard for you to leave Mrs. Peeters and the children. You said they treated you like part of the family.”
“Yes. I’ll miss them,” she said softly.
“Then... why, Ruthie?”
“Because...” She exhaled. “Because after the war... when people found out I was Jewish... everything changed.” I sensed by her halting voice and by the hurt I saw in her eyes that she had never expressed her reasons out loud until now. She was explaining them to herself as much as to me. “My friends all treated me differently when they found out the truth. They acted as if I had changed all of a sudden. Some of them seemed mad at me because I wasn’t the person I had pretended to be... as if I’d been lying to them. Well, I suppose I had been lying in a way.” I waited while she paused. “And there was a boy I liked at church, and he liked me. His parents told Mrs. Peeters that they didn’t want us to be together, even for a simple walk in the park, until I was baptized and confirmed in the Catholic church.”
“I’m so sorry, Ruthie,” I said, trying to soothe the hurt. “But you can’t really blame them, can you? Vati would have discouraged you from befriending a boy who wasn’t Jewish.”
“I know. But it made me realize that all the time I’d been hiding with them and trying to blend in, I was fooling myself if I thought I belonged there. I was an imposter. Even worse, if I did stay there and I joined their church, I would be a traitor. That wasn’t the life Mutti and Vati would have wanted for me. Everything our family has suffered all these years has been because we’re Jewish. I didn’t want to live the rest of my life pretending to be somebody I’m not.”
I didn’t know what to say. But Ruthie’s words and the difficult choice she had made jolted me out of the numbing lethargy I’d felt ever since arriving at this camp. For her sake as well as for my own, I couldn’t sit by passively and wait until the world decided what to do with us. I needed to start trying to find a home and a future for the two of us.
That very evening, the first night of Sukkot, I made an effort to join in the festivities along with Ruthie and the others. But the celebration brought painful memories of Sam when I remembered how our families had celebrated Shavuot on board the St.Louis. Sam and I had danced until the early morning hours and had glimpsed the Bahamas’ lighthouse before dawn, a beacon of hope on the horizon. I had known Sam for so few years, yet memories of him permeated everything I did.
