23. No!

NO!

As the summer wore on, the boy had begun, if not to enjoy his weekly conversations with the social worker, at least not to dread them. Especially now that they had Operation Rise to talk about. The social worker loved hearing about the residents. When the boy had told him about Lois Stein—who, as a young student at a recently-turned-coed college, had had her "butt pinched so many times each day you'd think I was a rump roast," as she put it, and had gone on to become a university president where she instituted policies that banned any kind of harassment—the social worker had excitedly typed her name into his computer. Then he'd shown the boy a newspaper article about how Lois's groundbreaking policies had been implemented by dozens of other schools. "How about that!" he'd said.

And when the boy had told him about Fred Bocarelli, who had fallen in love with another seaman when he was in the Navy at a time when this kind of love was not remotely acceptable, and had gone on to marry and divorce a woman only to find his first love again fifty years later, the social worker had had to wipe his eyes with a hanky.

On this particular morning the social worker was in an especially good mood. Etta was off bed rest and back at Shady Glen, he said, and she'd called to tell the social worker how much the residents loved talking to the boy.

"She also told me about what you did for Mr. McGinity and Mrs. Koong," the social worker said. "I was surprised you didn't mention it to me before."

"I thought I might get in trouble."

"Possibly. But, Alex, you're putting yourself out there to help other people. You're making a difference. With Mr. McGinity and Mrs. Koong, certainly. And all the other lives you're touching. It's important to acknowledge that. I'm proud of you. I hope you're proud of yourself."

The boy had to stop and think about this. Was he proud of himself? He knew that Operation Rise was making the residents happy, not to mention Maya-Jade, but he wasn't doing anything special. He wasn't risking his life or anything. He was just asking some old people some questions.

"I'm so impressed with the work you're doing that with your permission, I'd like to show it to the judge at your hearing," the social worker continued.

If the social worker had been trying to make him feel good, he ruined it by inserting words like judge and hearing into the conversation.

"I was also thinking," the social worker added, "that in addition to submitting the recordings of residents' stories, we might ask a few of them to write letters on your behalf."

"What for?" the boy asked.

"To submit to the judge. Under ordinary circumstances I would say that your summer of volunteering and your job review would be enough, but as you know, this particular judge…"

Yes, the boy had heard. This judge was tough. This judge liked "setting examples" almost as much as he disliked "wasted opportunities."

"I think if this judge could hear from Josey in particular, it would carry a lot of weight."

"How come?"

"You mean aside from the fact that he broke his silence to speak to you? That he's entrusting his story to you?"

If there were a moment the boy might've felt pride, it was now. Because there must have been something a little bit special about him if I had chosen him. But that was why he couldn't risk it.

"No!" he said.

"No what?" the social worker asked.

"No to asking Josey to write to the judge."

"Might I ask why?"

The boy sighed. Sometimes grown-ups were so stupid. The social worker had promised up and down that he could not tell anyone what the boy had done, that it was against the rules for him to tell anyone. The boy hadn't trusted him at first—social workers, in his experience, said all kinds of things—but had grown to believe him. If the social worker had told, there was no way that Minna or Nelson or Lois would've been nice to him, or let him do their nails or fetch their stamps or help with their crosswords.

As for me? The boy imagined me sitting in my bed, under the portrait of you, and him trying to tell both of us what he'd done to Toby Crawford.

"No!" he said, putting his hands in front of his eyes, trying to unsee Toby, trying to erase what he'd done—oh, how he wished he could—but there was no erasing it, no undoing it, no time machine to let him travel back and stop himself.

"Why don't you give it some thought?" the social worker said.

But the boy didn't need to think. He knew.

"No!" He shouted it this time. "No! No! No!"

"Alex, I understand why this is so scary, but you are doing a good thing. You are helping these people. Why not give them the opportunity to help you?"

Oof , was this the wrong thing to say.

"Opportunity!" the boy scoffed. "I hate opportunities!"

"You hate opportunities?" The normally unruffled social worker was baffled by this. Opportunities, in his experience, were a good thing. He'd had more than a few when he was younger that had changed his life. "Why?"

"Because I'm not stupid. I know what grown-ups really mean when they say things are an opportunity. It just means more trouble!"

"I'm not sure I understand."

"Then you're just dumb!"

"My daughters tell me that all the time," he said, with that maddening smile in his voice. "I rely on them to clue me in. So I really would like to know why you feel this way."

"I'll tell you why!" The words felt like a rocket countdown. Ten, nine, eight… "Because everyone who has promised me an opportunity has just made things worse. When I told the people at my old school about me and my mom, they all congratulated me on doing the right thing. Because now they had an opportunity to get us some help. I thought they meant food ." His voice began to crack, but the rocket was lifting off now, and there was no turning back. "But you know what they did? They made me go live with strangers and dragged my mom to a hospital and told her she'd have to get better if she wanted to be my mom. But if you know my mom like I do, you know she can't stand to be stuck in one place. It's why she moved so much. It's why during the lockdown she got so much worse."

His throat was closing up with shame and sadness about what had happened with his mom, indistinguishable from the shame and sadness about what he'd done to Toby.

"And now no one knows where she is and I'm stuck living with my aunt and uncle, who don't want me at all. No one has ever wanted me, except for Josey and my mom. And I ruined it with her by telling, and I won't ruin it with him."

"Alex, what happened to your mom is not your fault," the social worker said.

"Balderdash!" he shouted, only this time the word brought him no relief. Because it was his fault. And now she was gone. There was no way he was going to risk losing me or the rest of Shady Glen when we found out what he'd done.

So he said no.

Of course, we found out anyway.

THE PLASZOW CAMP WAS BUILT atop the site of two old Jewish cemeteries. A place of death, built on death.

In the center of the camp stood a gallows, where prisoners were frequently hanged for the slightest infraction. Beyond the gallows was a large mass grave where they would dump the bodies that piled up each day as the soldiers used prisoners for target practice, or as the men died of "natural causes," if you could call starvation and deprivation natural causes.

The mass grave was the one mouth in the camp that never went hungry, and part of me longed to be fed into its maw. My parents were dead. My grandmother was dead. And Olka… dead or alive, she existed in a different world from me, one that was impossible for me to reach. Life in the camp obliterated any vision of a future, any memory of a past. It was the equivalent of being dead while still drawing breath.

And so I went to work each day in the quarry, a bone-breaking job that killed heartier men than me, and waited to die. Other prisoners ate every drop of the meager portions we were given and hustled and traded whatever they could for more; I did not finish mine. Already lean before the war, I'd grown skinny in the ghetto. In Plaszow, I became a skeleton, a breathing version of the corpse I soon hoped to become. And would've become. Were it not for Adek.

Yes, Adek, my old enemy, was also in the camp. Whatever energy I had, I poured into hating him. It was the only shred of my old life left to cling to. One morning he sidled up next to me after roll call and tucked a hunk of bread into my hand, imploring, "Eat. You're wasting away." I told him to go to hell and dropped the bread in the mud, where four other men lunged for it.

"Too late, I'm already in hell," he replied. "If you don't gain some weight, you'll be picked for the next selection."

That was my hope. At least I would share the same fate as my parents.

"Leave me be," I said.

"I'd like nothing more," he replied. "But, Josey." He paused. "I cannot."

Josey! Only two people called me Josey: Babci and Olka. One was dead and the other might have well been for all I knew.

"Why did you call me that?" I hissed.

He stared at me with those dark eyes of his, which somehow, even in this hell, bore some of his smug arrogance.

"Because that's what Olka calls you."

Anger rushed through me, quickening in my veins. How dare he speak her name! "What do you know of her?"

"I know she's alive. And I know it's her greatest wish that you stay that way too."

"How do you know this?"

"Josey," he said, tsking. Had we not been surrounded by soldiers and already risking our lives by speaking, I might've punched him. "You do miss the obvious, don't you?" He lowered his voice to a whisper. "We work with Zegota. She and I. We have for some time now."

Zegota. The name of the underground resistance movement. For Adek even to say the name aloud in the camp was tremendously foolish. Which was how I knew he was telling the truth.

Suddenly I saw the two of them huddled together at the factory or speaking urgently in the back room of the Eagle. Olka with her satchel always full of papers. Olka with her bright, watchful eyes.

Olka was a spy for the resistance.

It seemed both unthinkable and at the same time obvious. Wasn't it a hop, skip, and a jump from selling Mother's goods on the black market to ferrying around documents on her bicycle, to couriering medicines, to smuggling out people?

But Adek, who was more spoiled, more entitled than me, he was working for the resistance? I don't think I'd ever hated a person more than I did Adek in that moment.

Except perhaps myself.

Even Adek was rising to the occasion of his life, while I'd squandered the opportunity to save my parents, to save myself. I'd done nothing but stay alive, and even that I no longer wanted.

"Arbeiten!" the guards shouted. "To work!" And Adek disappeared into the crowd.

Finding out that Olka was alive, that some invisible thread still connected us, ought to have made me feel better. But it made everything so much worse. The most dangerous thing in the camp was not the guards, the selections, the commandant's bullets, the disease. It was hope. There is a certain comfort to giving in. But with Olka alive, I could not give in, no matter how badly I wanted to.

A few nights later, Adek slipped into my barracks. Tucked into the waistband of his trousers was a garment. I could tell by the color that it belonged to one of the guards. He handed me a spool of thread and a needle. "Fix it," he ordered.

It was a thick needle, a gauge meant for leather, not cloth, but as soon as it was in my hand, I felt instantly better.

After that, Adek brought me more small sewing jobs for the lower-ranking soldiers. As I completed them, I began to notice that my heels of bread grew larger; my ration of watery soup contained a stringy piece of vegetable, or sometimes a hunk of rancid meat. The guards in charge of the quarry beat me less often. Two selections went by, and though I ran among the slowest, I was not sorted to the side of the weaker men who would be loaded onto trains and sent to Bergen-Belsen or Auschwitz.

One morning at roll call Adek was waiting at my usual spot, though it was dangerous for him to be out of his formation. He nudged me, and I looked down at the dirt, where he had drawn a crude map of the perimeter of the camp, an X marked in the southeast corner, farthest from the guard tower. He looked at it and at me, and I understood I was to memorize the location. I nodded. He erased the map and whispered, "Tonight."

That night I made myself stay awake, watching the sky for its darkest hour before the dawn, when the sleepy guards were most likely to be dozing. I made my way to the approximate spot on Adek's map. Nothing was there, just dirt. I was about to turn away when I saw a small constellation of rocks, stacked as if on a gravestone. Whatever I was supposed to find, it was here.

I began to dig. And there, six inches underground, I found a hefty box. I opened it. Inside were fabrics, sewing shears, a pincushion of needles, and several spools of thread.

I did not yet know what the material was or how it would be used. All I knew was that it was from her, and that I was meant to do the thing I'd asked her to teach me to do, the thing that had started all of this, that had kept me alive, and would continue to keep me alive.

I was meant to sew.