The Right Thing to Do Read Online Free Page B

operating, it had bypassed her. Time to get out of here—oh, no, not time enough, the stampede had picked up its pace and was charging straight at her.
    Running, shouting, waving cudgels and iron bars, some of them singing the Horst Wessel song.
    They barreled down on her and she leaped out of the way, tripping on the curb and tumbling back down to the street.
    The horde ran past her. Except for one skinny boy at the end who saw her and returned, laughing, and shoved her hard when she tried to get up so that she was back on the cobbles, terrified eyes fixed on her assailant’s face.
    As if engaging him could save her.
    Skinny, young, but already balding. A gap-toothed smile.
    He said, “Yid scum,” and kicked her ribs.
    She kept silent, not wanting to risk inflaming him further.
    “Jewish sow,” he shouted. “What are you cooking in your fat belly? A hunk of kosher pork?”
    Laughing, he raised his boot. Brought it down hard on her abdomen.
    By the time he was back with his comrades, the cramps had begun.
    —
    Two months later, they’d left everything behind, but for cash secreted in money belts and hidden suitcase compartments and jewelry sewn into coats and jackets. Nothing that amounted to much; they’d already exhausted most of their savings on bribes to ease passage, had been forced to walk away from the house and the business. The house after the Levines’ once proud townhome next door burned to the ground, a victim of arson. The business, a more subtle defeat, “appropriated” by city officials on grounds of “code violation.”
    A series of coaches and trains got them to Holland, where they lived off diminishing savings for two years and Siggy had the time of his life pretending to dive into canals.
    Blessedly, Uncle Doctor Oskar had abandoned his optimism a full year before their departure, traveling to America and finding a position at a hospital in Rhode Island because his surgical skills were deemed unique.
    It took a while as he pulled strings but on November 9, 1937, three Blausteins trudged through a long queue at Ellis Island, presented their papers, and waited to be granted a new life.
    Stating their names and not realizing until later that the aloof, rubber-stamping customs official had waxed creative.
    Blaustein was now Bluestone, Wilhelm, William.
    Their beautiful, overactive boy, seemingly unscathed by exile or journey, had bounced up and down at the booth, shouting over his father as Willy stated, “Sigmund.”
    Asserting his childish voice by dint of volume:
“No! Siggy! Siggy!”
    The clerk had finally cracked a smile, but in the end, it was he who decided and the boy was now Sidney.
    There were new rules to play by.
    Only Sabina’s name remained unchanged, perhaps no easy substitution had materialized in the clerk’s head. Or he just liked the sound of it.
    She’d forever be Sabina.
    She would never be the same.
    —
    They tried a few months in Rhode Island, ended up moving to Brooklyn when Oskar grew impatient with guests and revealed a side he’d never shown before: prone to anger, a taste for drink.
    A year to the day after their arrival in Brooklyn, Kristallnacht erupted in the city of the Blausteins’ birth, Jewish shops, residences, and synagogues demolished, streets littered with broken glass. Hundreds were murdered outright, thirty thousand others arrested and shipped off to concentration camps.
    The beginning of the nightmare. Willy and Sabina never saw any of their relatives again. Neither of them spoke about it; both of them insistent on suppressing images, thoughts, memories. But the primary lesson rang loud: The world was a treacherous, terrifying place.
    That view was buttressed when Willy could gain no entry to the union-controlled world of electrical work and was forced to eke out a living by taking on double shifts as a janitor at a lunch-meat factory. He came home reeking of garlic and offal, supplemented on weekends by work as a shoeshine “boy” at Penn