the time. The tire is almost fixed. I would almost eat a live octopus.
But now we really are almost there, I think. Because as we stand near the dock, smelling the brininess of the air while the salt chaps my lips, the ship has begun sounding its horn. The people around us—the hundreds of other people clutching suitcases—hear it, too, and they all begin to chatter.
Ottawa. This is the name of the place we’re going, the place where the local Jewish federation has sponsored us and the other families lucky enough to be selected in the lottery. We’d pulled out a map, traced our fingers along the southern border of Canada, found the city in the east, on the border of a province called Ontario.
“How are your feet?” I ask Abek, because his shoes are too big for much walking, it turns out, and we didn’t layer on extra pairs of socks soon enough to prevent them from blistering.
“Almost okay,” he says.
“Really, almost?” I ask, concerned.
“They’re fine, I promise,” he reassures me.
I wish I’d taken some of the things from the closet in my family’s apartment when I left Sosnowiec—the sewn mementos, the memories of a previous life. I would have, if I’d realized I was leaving for good. Now in my valise, I have changes of clothes, and needles and thread, and a new pair of sewing shears that someone, incredibly, sent over in a donation box. Nicer, even, than what my family’s factory once had, with blades of clean, polished steel. We’re all traveling light. We’re all carrying just enough energy to start over.
Maybe one day I can write to Gosia and ask her to send the heirlooms. Maybe one day I’ll have a new life that will allow me to make space for the previous one.
In my valise, I also have a square of graying cloth, cut out from a shirt that I’d found on the doorstep of my cottage in Foehrenwald the morning after my last conversation with Josef. I’d spent the previous night trying to decide what I was going to do. How do you measure forgiveness—who deserves it, who can dispense it? How do you measure whether someone is punishing themselves enough? I debated whether I was going to tell Mrs. Yost, or whether it was possible she already knew. Whether I’d tell Breine and Esther, at least.
But I woke up that morning, and the shirt was on my doorstep, and Josef wasn’t. He’d left. So I didn’t have to decide whether to forgive him. I only got to decide that his absolution wouldn’t be my job. It made me relieved, and it makes me sad.
I think about him more than I wish I did. I wonder where he is and if there’s a world in which I’d see him again.
I kissed Breine and Esther and Chaim goodbye several weeks after that, as they left to find their own new start on their own boat. I had explained to them why we wouldn’t be joining them. Abek and I wanted something brand-new, something we’d chosen entirely on our own. A new decision for a new family.
And in a way, we found the most comfort in choosing something the most unknown. A place we knew almost nothing about, where there would be no reminders of pain and no expectations to live up to or down to. We read a book about ice hockey. We asked one of the Canadian volunteers at Foehrenwald to sing us the national anthem.
The boat is an ocean liner with three smokestacks, the size of a floating town almost. The gangway is long and zigzags up the side, and at the beginning, passengers stop and hand over papers, waiting to be checked off a manifest.
Abek walks onto the gangway ahead of me but turns back when he realizes I haven’t followed. “Are you coming?”
“Almost,” I say, and then, quickly, “I mean, yes.”
I take his outstretched hand and move forward. The boards sway a little under my feet, but I keep moving forward.
A Note on History and Research
I WROTE THIS NOVEL, MY THIRD SET IN THE WORLD WAR II ERA, because after five years spent researching those horrible years, I realized that most of the books I’d read and documentaries I’d seen all finished at the same place: the end of the war. They ended with the liberation of a concentration camp. The disbanding of an army unit. A celebration in the streets. There was much less about what happened in the