Far to Go - By Alison Pick Page 0,16

of the evening. The ducks have forgotten to fly south, and huddle dimly together at the edge of the pond. Say there’s a chill in the air; I’ve been resisting my winter jacket, and now the wind slips a cool hand down my back, the first touch I’ve felt in . . . forever. It comes over me then. I’ve had a good day at my desk but still I get the sense that I’m missing, or that something within me is missing, some crucial piece of me that used to make my whole self run. I’ve been taken apart one too many times, and the little cog at the centre of my chest has slipped into the gutter and been lost.

It’s hard to imagine anyone ever finding it.

It’s too hidden, too covered in leaves.

It would take a small person, someone curious, someone low to the ground.

It would take a child—and of course it’s far too late for that.

The children suffered the most. This is what my research has led me to believe. Some would say otherwise, but the children did know. Even the little ones—perhaps the little ones especially—soaked it all up. They absorbed it directly, a straight hit to the bloodstream. All of the stress, the incredible tension, the relentless, insidious day-to-day: encroaching hunger, restricted living quarters, the edicts marching forward, a row of shiny boots and polished guns. They took in their parents’ fear like black milk—that’s Celan, of course—from the breast. They were raised on it, fed on fear, until fear itself was in their bones, in their visible skeletons, where baby fat should have been. When the children at Auschwitz were sent towards the gas chambers, on the most basic level they knew what was coming.

Tell me, how should I have faith in the world when I know the things that I know?

The children I’ve dedicated my life’s work to—they got out. But it wasn’t easy for them either. They were sent away from their families, from houses full of fighting they could not understand, and they blamed themselves. They were given away as Chamberlain gave away the Sudetenland. They thought they had done something terrible to merit this. Even when they were reassured otherwise.

Sometimes, walking in the evening, a toque pulled low over my thin white hair, I try to summon up the child I myself must have been. All I get are flashes: shoes with brass buckles, a curl against my forehead, a sliver of female laughter and a back that turns and disappears.

There is a feeling that I could have done something. Shame that I couldn’t save her.

Beneath the shame: fear. Beneath the fear: grief. Alone in my small rooms, so late in life, the knocking from the centre of my ribs. Someone is locked inside there. Has been for years. I roll onto my side, pull the pillow over my ears. And still the little voice, the pleading. Mama.

I’ve lived almost my whole life without her. There is no reason I should expect to be walking late in November, my hands in my pockets, and turn a corner and see her, her thin coat, no scarf. Her cheeks hollow, the way I last remember her, in the winter of 1945. There is no reason I should still hope to find her, to take her home to my apartment and heap blankets over her, to spoon hot soup into her mouth and whisper her to sleep.

I will never sing to her—some old Yiddish folk song—while the snow sifts silently down.

It’s shameful really, the weakness of my longing. And yet the heart continues. There’s the fluttering in the ribs. The hope that all the loss might somehow be redeemed.

Ach—that’s the phone. Probably the new department secretary. Mara? Marsha? Excuse me for a minute. No, don’t. I’ll just let it ring.

What was I saying? Yes, the children. There were, of course, among the children whom I study, situations that worked out well. There were the people we now call “righteous Gentiles,” Christians who risked their lives. There were families in England who gave up everything they had, and often what they did not have, to offer a tiny traveller some kind of home. There are stories of love and heartbreaking humanity—but these are not the bulk of the stories.

What I have found far more frequently are cases of trauma and upset. The Kindertransport children who were sent out of Czechoslovakia often spoke no English. They arrived in a country with no desire for war,