21. Operation Rise

OPERATION RISE

"Deported? Why? Where did they take him?" the boy cried, interrupting my story. He hadn't seen this coming, though if he'd been paying attention, he would have, just as if I'd been paying attention, I would have.

"To the gas chamber," Maya-Jade replied matter-of-factly.

"The what chamber?"

"To Auschwitz." Maya-Jade turned to me. "Is that what happened? It happened to a bunch of Mim's relatives."

"I don't know what you're talking about," the boy cried. He felt all churned up inside because he didn't like stories where parents disappeared just like that. And he didn't like stories that other people understood and he didn't, especially since he was supposed to be the one catching Maya-Jade up on the parts she'd missed, not the other way around. He was beginning to regret inviting know-it-all Maya-Jade with her technically three mothers to hear my story in the first place.

"We're talking about the Holocaust, Alex," Maya-Jade said gently.

"The hall of cost?" the boy asked.

"The Ho-lo-caust," Maya-Jade repeated, enunciating each syllable like a kindergarten teacher. "In World War II, Hitler murdered six million Jews. He built these horrible gas chambers where they would shove a bunch of people in—babies, even—and turn on poisonous gas until—" Maya-Jade cranked her head to the side and stuck out her tongue to, I suppose, mimic being dead.

"Not just Jews," I added. "Clergy, communists, Romani, intellectuals like poor Professor Palansky… all of them were killed."

"Also gay people and disabled people," Maya-Jade chimed in.

"And your father?" The boy's voice broke. There had been nearly seventy years between my father's death and his birth, but he felt the loss as if it were his own.

"And my father," I agreed.

The boy stood up and did something he'd never done before. He left my room before the story was over.

The boy was outside in the courtyard, violently yanking out chunks of sod, when Maya-Jade found him. She had two cups of ice cream she'd gotten from Leyla: one chocolate, the boy's favorite, and the other strawberry, hers.

"Hey," she said, squatting down next to him as he hurled a hunk of grass. "What did that lawn ever do to you?"

He didn't answer. Just ripped another chunk and threw it.

"Well, Mom always says if you can't beat'em, join'em." Maya-Jade grabbed a handful of grass and tossed it. "Wow. That is really satisfying." She grabbed another. "Mim's always trying to get me to garden. Says weeding is therapeutic. And I was like, ‘Yeah, sure,' but I think she might be right. Though don't tell her I said so."

"Hmph," the boy said. He looked at the bald spot he'd made in the lawn, an ugly eyesore, and stood up to retrieve the sod patches and pat them back down. When he was finished, it looked wonky, but better. And with Maya-Jade's quiet company beside him, that was a good description of how he felt.

"I'm sorry about before," Maya-Jade said. "Like, part of being Jewish is learning about the Holocaust, and because I don't really know anything about my Chinese relatives…" Here she tapped herself on the chest. She was wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with SMASH THE PATRIARCHY . "I kind of went overboard in learning Mim's. Anyhow, I know a lot of kids don't know about it. It seems like ancient history, but for Mim, it was her grandmother's stories. And for Josey, it's his story."

The ice cream cups came with little wooden spoons, and she unwrapped them both and handed the boy one. He scooped out a sliver and let it melt on his tongue. The ice cream was cold and so sweet. In that moment, with so much bitterness thrumming inside him, he needed this sweetness.

"It's amazing that Josey has this story in him, and that he can remember it so well." Maya-Jade swirled her spoon around the ice cream.

"I know," the boy said. "His story and Olka's, too." He felt it was important to say that aloud. To say your name. You, Olka, who started all this.

"It makes you wonder how many residents have stories to tell."

"Lots of them," the boy replied. "Nelson Lippincott dropped out of college for two years to help run his family's farm when his father died. And Mozelle Davidson opened her own restaurant when everyone in her family told her it was stupid, and it went on to become a chain."

"How do you know all of this?"

"I dunno. People tell me stuff when I visit them."

"That's because people here like you." Maya-Jade's voice was tight.

"People here like you, too."

"No, Alex, they don't." She paused. " You didn't."

"You didn't like me, either."

"Only after you didn't like me. I was really excited that another kid was volunteering here for the summer. I thought we might be friends." She paused to take another bite of ice cream. "Are we?" Her voice sounded like a kitten's, so tender and vulnerable. It made the boy's insides ache, but in a strangely nice way, like how it felt to hold a kitten.

"I think so," he said. "Yeah."

"Good!" Maya-Jade's voice returned to its normal confident chirp.

"I wonder—" The boy stopped abruptly. "Never mind."

"No, tell me."

"I wonder if we interviewed people together if they might talk to both of us."

"Ohmygod! That would be amazing!"

"Would you still get credit for your"—he paused to remember the words—"bat mitzvah project if we did it together?"

"I don't see why not. I mean, most films have a director and a producer. The director is like the one who coaches the actors and stuff—that could be you—and the producer is the one who sets stuff up behind the scenes. That could be me."

He liked the idea of coaching the actors, or the residents. He felt like he'd be good at it.

"And I'll bet you could get credit for it at school," Maya-Jade added.

"Uh, yeah," he managed. The truth was he was not officially in school at the moment. After the Incident, he'd been expelled from his middle school. If the judge decided to send him to a special home, he would go to school there. If he didn't, he'd have to go to a different school here. Neither prospect sounded very appealing. School was not something he wanted to think about. So he changed the subject.

"Who should we interview first?" he asked.

Vivian agreed to be filmed on camera but told them they had to come back when she was in "full hair and makeup."

When they arrived for the shoot, she was wearing a sequined gown, her black hair up in a bun, her lips painted the same red as her dress.

As Maya-Jade set up the tripod, Vivian began rolling her shoulders and then puffing out her lips. Then came the trilling. "Me, me, me, me, me," she sang.

"Nana, what are you doing?" Maya-Jade asked.

"My warm-ups," Vivian replied as if it were obvious.

"But you're not singing. It's just an interview."

"Don't interfere with my process," Vivian scolded.

Ten minutes later Vivian sat down in a chair, adjusted her bracelets, and said, "I'm ready for my close-up."

Oh brother, the boy thought, and he could tell Maya-Jade was trying hard not to laugh.

"Okay," the boy began. He was experienced now at asking the residents about their lives, but Vivian was still intimidating. "Do you have any interesting stories to—"

"It was the fall of 1957 and I was nineteen years old," Vivian said, interrupting. "I'd been performing with the Cincinnati Opera, but only as a member of the company and the understudy to the understudy to the star soprano, whose name was, I kid you not, Felicity Roses. A ridiculous stage name, but she was everyone's darling. Utterly beloved. If you ask me, she was a bit past her prime, but she was a hometown girl, and the audience ate out of her hand.

"She had become famous singing Violetta in La Traviata , but that had been decades before, mind you. When she was getting close to retiring, the opera decided to reprise her role one last time. And, oh, it was all anyone could talk about: Felicity Roses singing Violetta. The entire run sold out in days.

"Opening night arrived. Everyone who was anyone in Cincinnati society was coming, and wouldn't you know it, Felicity got sick. Completely lost her voice. So the role went to the primary understudy, but she refused to go on. ‘They're all coming for Felicity,' she cried. ‘They'll boo me offstage.' She wasn't wrong. And then, as if to prove her point, she vomited. Stage right. I can still see the chunks."

At this, Maya-Jade and the boy exchanged a gagging gesture.

"It was a disaster! The director wanted to cancel the opening; it was one thing to lose Felicity, but to lose her understudy? He couldn't possibly put me on. But the producers said it was too late now and something about the insurance and the show needing to go on.

"So there I was. New to the company, a lowly understudy to an understudy. Nobody wanted to see me onstage. All of Cincinnati had come out to hear Felicity Roses, not little old me.

"But I knew that I was every bit as good as Felicity, and I was going to show them. When people filed in and saw the notice of the understudy in their programs, many of them left, so by the time the orchestra played the first notes of ‘Libiamo ne' lieti calici'—that's the opening duet—the theater was half-empty. If I didn't wow them, the theater would be completely empty after intermission, and my opera career would've ended before it began.

"Well, let me tell you," Vivian continued, her posture growing more erect as she recounted the story, "by the time I finished Violetta's aria at the end of act one, you would have thought I was Maria Callas."

She cleared her throat and stood up and began to sing:

Nasca il giorno, o il giorno muoia,

Sempre lieta ne' ritrovi

A diletti sempre nuovi

Dee volare il mio pensier.

When she finished, the boy and Maya-Jade applauded. Vivian bowed. "I got three standing ovations that night," she said. "And the newspapers ran stories about the little upstart diva who stole the show. And that launched my career."

"Nana, that was amazing. How come you've never told me that story before?" Maya-Jade asked.

Vivian shrugged. "I have. You just never listened."

Outside in the hallway, they replayed the interview. Vivian's singing sounded really good.

"You know," the boy began, "in a way Vivian's story is about being better than people thought. Like Olka's in a way."

"Oh, Alex, you're so right," Maya-Jade said.

"What if we asked the other residents about a time in their lives when they did something like that? Beat the odds. Accomplished something they didn't think they could. When they"—and here, finally, he began to understand what this phrase meant—"rose to the occasion of their own lives. We could even call it something like, I dunno, Operation Rise. Unless you think that's stupid."

There was a moment of silence, and he thought Maya-Jade was going to say it was stupid or suggest a better name. But she did neither. She threw her arms around the boy and hugged him. This time, he didn't worry about boobs or cooties or anything. He just let himself be hugged.

AFTER FATHER WAS TAKEN, OLKA no longer asked me to consider escaping. She demanded it. She had already arranged it with a network of trusted people who would help us, transporting us via a series of safe houses to the eastern front and into Russia. I no longer argued. I could not let my selfish stupidity cost me Mother now that we'd lost Father.

But now it was Mother who refused to leave. She didn't share Father's fear of the communists or hold out hope that we might escape to France (now under Nazi rule) or England (which, even if it did not suffer the same fate as France, still had strict quotas for how many Jews it would take in). Mother was now clinging to the belief that Father would come back.

A few weeks after he was deported, another group of ghetto residents was rounded up and marched to the train depot. This was no longer unusual at all, but what was unusual was that days later, many of them returned. They told us how they'd ridden in crowded cattle cars for several days but then, suddenly, SS soldiers swung open the doors and forced everyone out, ordering them to disperse to the nearby settlements. They warned them that they would be killed if they returned to Krakow, but when you live with the threat of death all day every day, it loses its potency. Which is perhaps why so many came back. Back to the prison of the ghetto. Back to the danger of the SS soldiers who patrolled it. Back to their loved ones.

You see, I was not the only person who did foolish things for love.

We never learned why the Nazis opened that train car. It was not an act of mercy; there was no mercy for us. And it was the kiss of death for Mother. Because if those people had come back, who was to say that Father wouldn't? She insisted we stay.

"Just wait a few weeks," I told Olka. "Once he doesn't return, she'll accept it and agree to go."

But she did not. She sank further into denial, losing her grip on reality. She began having long conversations with Father in Yiddish, speaking a language she had once despised to a man who no longer existed.

After two months passed, when I pointed out that Father had been gone much longer than the Jews who had returned, she said that he'd probably gone to see Babci. But Babci was dead. We'd had word from Karl that she had been taken by pneumonia, a better fate than so many others. I reminded Mother of that.

"No," she told me. "Your father is with her. And soon they will come back here together. We must be here. Otherwise how will they ever find us?"

The noose tightened. The deportations continued and the ghetto began to seem like a ghost town. It felt like a miracle that I had not been deported to a work camp, though I later learned that Julius Madritsch, the owner of the factory where I worked, intentionally made workers stay late when there was word of a new deportation. Yet another example of how sewing saved my life.

Death became commonplace, whether from the rat-a-tat sound of gunfire signaling another execution or the disease that swept through the squalid ghetto like wildfire. No one was spared. Adek lost his parents and his two sisters within the space of a month. I wish I could say my pity dissolved my hatred of him, but it did not. I needed to hate him. It was too dangerous to hate the Nazis. If they so much as smelled insolence, they would beat you, or worse. But Adek? What could he do?

"You must leave!" Olka implored. "If you leave now, only your mother dies. If you leave later, you both do." Maybe this sounds heartless, but it wasn't. Olka loved Mother like she was her own. But if I didn't leave, Olka would lose us both. If I went, she would lose only Mother. Either way, she would lose. We all would.

"I cannot leave her," I said.

"I know you can't," she replied.

"I love you," I said.

"I know you do," she replied.

"I'm sorry," I said.

"I know you are," she replied.

Two months later, the Nazis deported all remaining Jews from the ghetto. At the final selection, I, along with all the other able-bodied souls, was shunted to one side, headed for the newly built Plaszow forced-labor camp. Mother was sent to the other side. She was smiling, believing at last she would be reunited with Father and Babci.

She was not wrong.