Sunday January 22, 2023; 7:44 PM EST
- I have left a pebble on her tombstone more than once, but we never met. The other day, in the office, a friend and I slowed way down, retold each other what we knew of that part of her story, to try to understand how this played out for her. We knew that her brother was a tailor. His clothes were dazzling, sharp lines, fabrics pressed, symmetries and curves and elegance. His face was alert and alive. He'd pull a hard candy from behind his niece's ear. The thought of him doing so, and handing over the candy, made her smile seven decades later.#
- After the Nazis came into Czechoslovakia, the family must have been careful, must have been reading the tea leaves and pondering their choices and their chances. He never came home one night. The family figured out later that he'd been criticizing the new rulers, thinking he was among friends, but he was mistaken somehow.#
- There was no sign of him, and then there was. A man's body, beaten to death, thrown in the river. Tradition called for the observances and the burial to be prompt. The next day his sister boarded a train north to a town where their mother lived in an old folks home. She would deliver the terrible news. #
- It's one thing, and it's more than enough, to take the news of a son's death to an aging mother in a home. It's another to bring news of murder, and another still to bring news of the kind of murder. The keen violence, and the hatred and the domination of an entire people that the murder implied, as so many other things did in those days too. It's another thing to bring that sort of news.#
- Perhaps she might have talked herself into softening the circumstances in the telling to their mother, and even to herself. Yes, these were bad times, but maybe this was just a bad seed or two that her brother had run into. An exception. Maybe she talked herself into this version of the truth, who knows, but if she did, that version of the story would soon enough disintegrate before her eyes.#
- Upon arriving at her destination, she took herself to the old folks home. It was empty, no elders, no caretakers, no sign or note, nothing. She went from door to door on the block, knocking. Some doors, nobody would answer--they pretended not to be home. A couple of doors, opened a few inches. Her question, Where are the elders from the home? To that, a shrug, quickly turning away, closing the door. One or two accepted a slip of paper with an address from her. Please send a letter if anything is known about the elders missing from the home.#
- She turned back to the train station and headed south toward their river town. If she had by chance talked herself into thinking that her brother had been unlucky, had run into a couple of thugs, now the story would not hold. The threats were not accidents and bad luck in an angry, hateful time. The threats were comprehensive. Anyone might disappear now. Nobody was safe. The idyllic farm fields passing at the train window might as well have been poisoned. There would be no harvest sustaining enough to matter, to have a hope of healing in this new kind of world.#
- At the end of the train car, the door opened. In the shadow there for a second, a man in uniform. Was this someone coming to take her ticket or someone coming to take her life. In the first flash of any new human contact, now and going forth, she would not know. Each time a new face appeared, now and going forth, she would not know.#
- My friend and I pieced together this understanding from what we knew of her story. There is a great deal more to tell, a lot more is known, and from what is known more can be deduced and understood. Her daughter in her eighties remembered her mother, the sister of the tailor, as struggling with depression much of her life. At the end of the war, when most of the family's survivors starting looking for a new country to settle in, she remained behind, waiting for the return of their elderly mother, looking for traces of her path if any traces remained. None were ever found, but given where they were living, odds are the journey took her towards Theresienstad, and from there toward the death camps in the east. Eventually, she gave up waiting and looking and rejoined family members in North America.#
- I never met her, but I have heard enough of her life story and have deduced and understood from there more than enough. When I walk through the gates of that cemetery, I pass through a patch of pebbles that are meant for our use. I admire the tradition of placing a pebble on a gravestone as a part of a cemetery visit. Look around you, see the work of reflection and remembrance indicated by all these humble pebbles on stones as far as you can see. At the entrance, I pick up several, mostly for people I knew and respected, and one for her, who I have come to know this way and who I never met.#