My Family for the War Read Online Free Page B

“We have to fix you up a little bit before we call your mama,” Frau Seydensticker murmured with a wonderfully rolling
r
. She wore a wide, brown housecoat and had a cloth wrapped around her head that fell down her back. She became embarrassed when she noticed how I was staring at her, and I turned bright red, mortified by my bad behavior and, yes, by the poverty around me.
    In fact, the room I found myself in appeared to be not only the kitchen, but also the bedroom and living room for the entire family. The cooking area, the table with a bench and chairs, and a large cupboard took up almost the entire space, but there was still a stack of several mattresses against the wall.
    Ruben’s little sister shyly brought me some fruit. “My name is Chaja,” she whispered, and took two steps backward, gazing at me steadily in astonishment.
    “Hello, Chaja,” I murmured, and closed my eyes, the apple held in my hand.
    It grew quiet. A few ugly pictures still flashed through my memory. I tried to remember the early part of the morning, when I had woken up and still had no idea what this day would bring me. That wasn’t so long ago.
    I pulled off the wet cloth that covered my entire face and found Ruben, who had made himself comfortable on one of the chairs. “Leave it on,” he said. “You look pretty rough. But Richard Graditz does too, if that’s any consolation. I think his nose is broken.”
    On his way home, he had literally run right into the three boys who came shooting out of the entryway without lookingleft or right. Other than the typical “Bug off, Jew boy!” they didn’t bother him, but to be on the safe side he had still waited a few minutes before he peeked around the corner into the courtyard.
    I told him what had happened. Since my swollen lip had already gone down some, I even embellished the heated chase through the cellar to my advantage a little. The longer I told my story, the more energetic I got. I had escaped. They only caught me because there were three of them. If I had been with Bekka, the story would have ended entirely differently!
    “You are completely crazy, Ziska,” Ruben announced, as if I had spoken my last thought out loud. “You can’t win against them. What if Richard’s nose is really broken? What if his parents file a complaint against you?”
    “They won’t do that. I know them. The most they’ll do is give him another good slap for beating up a girl. Richard is much worse than his parents.”
    “May he find a horrible end,” Ruben answered ceremoniously.
    Half curious and half shy, I looked at him. Ruben sometimes said things that I didn’t know how to answer. He was the only one in his family they sent to school, probably because he was so clever, they couldn’t stand having him at home all the time.
    “What language is that your parents speak?” I wanted to know. “Is it Dutch? Are you all going to Holland? Last week we put in our application to go to Shanghai! But we haven’t even started learning Chinese yet.”
    Ruben shook his head in disbelief. “You must have heard Yiddish before.”
    “Yiddish?” I repeated. “Where would I have heard that? No one in my family knows Yiddish.”
    “But that’s our language, Ziska, it has been for hundreds of years. Your ancestors definitely used to speak Yiddish too.”
    “How would you know that?”
    “Yiddish is a mixture of Hebrew and old German. It’s a language Jewish people all over Europe use to communicate.”
    “Is that true? Then they didn’t have to learn English or something like that?”
    I was fascinated. Ruben looked at me with compassion. “You’re being persecuted and you don’t even know who you are,” he said.
    I was about to argue, but Ruben looked genuinely sad at the moment, as if he felt sorry for me. “And? Who are you?” I asked him with a bit of a challenge in my voice.
    He smiled. “I was born here, but my family comes from eastern Poland. My mother is Beile, my father is Jakob.