pressed between paper, so I already know there will be none left in this trunk.
But other things are here. Layer after layer, folded between tissue, is what we couldn’t carry and couldn’t stand to give away. Mama’s wedding gown. The dress I wore to my thirteenth birthday. All of it kept by the “friendly German couple,” who were most assuredly Nazis. Is this the kind of gesture that passes for kindness if you are a Nazi?
In the Chomicki & Lederman clothing factory, Baba Rose was most famous for her beautiful embroidery, but I could handle a needle and thread, too. I would have been better than her in a few years. Machines assembled most of the clothes, but we sewed the labels and embroidery by hand. It made the pieces feel custom-made, Baba Rose said; it made customers feel cared for: Chomicki & Lederman, in fine, stitched cursive.
When I made my own family’s clothes, sometimes I sewed in something special. Something hidden, tucked beneath the label or in a seam. Maja’s name, in royal-blue thread, along with a line from a romance novel she wasn’t supposed to lend me. Baba and Zayde’s wedding date, stitched into the tablecloth we gave them for an anniversary.
Now, when I unpack my old school uniform, I can run my fingers over the hem, where I know the names of all my friends have been embroidered on a secret piece of cloth. Now, in the lining of my mother’s old winter coat, I know there are a few hidden lines from a poem about spring. Nobody could see it; that wasn’t the point.
When we first moved into the ghetto, Abek got lost. He wandered off and was missing for hours; he didn’t know the new address. My mother loved him, of course; she loved us both. But when Abek was born, she was sick in her room for a long time—fragile, my father and grandparents said. It was hard on her body. I took care of him when he was small. And on the day he got lost, when he was returned hours later by a helpful passerby who had wandered the streets until Abek recognized our building, it was me he ran to, crying. And it was me who promised him nobody would ever have trouble returning him home again.
I sewed his name into the label of all his shirts. His name and address, the real one and then the ghetto one, and our parents’ names and mine.
And then I started to sew more. Whole stories in the tiniest handwriting on the thinnest pieces of muslin. I folded the cloth half a dozen times and sewed it inside the label.
There was a story in his jacket the day we all went to the soccer stadium. It was a birthday gift from me to him, my best work yet. The story of our family, told in the alphabet:
A is for Abek.
B is for Baba Rose.
C is for Chomicki & Lederman, the factory we own, and D is for Dekerta, the street we attend synagogue on, even if only on the high holidays.
H is for our mother, Helena; M is for Aunt Maja; Z is for Zofia.
Something like that. I can’t remember all of it. All the way from A to Z, some of the letters given whole paragraphs, and some just a few words. At the last minute, when we were getting ready to go to the stadium to get our new identification photographs, I took that story, which had been hanging on the wall, and I sewed it into his jacket, and I made him put that jacket on.
I must have known.
I must have known what was going to happen to us.
That’s the thought I came back to later. I thought it when I was starving in Birkenau, and when I was operating the loom in Neustadt—this girl can sew, the guard said, plucking me from death, sending me to work—and when the cold ate through my toes on the 140-kilometer winter march to Gross-Rosen because the SS evacuated the factory, and when I collapsed in the women’s barracks because the Red Army had finally come to liberate the camp and the Nazis had already fled. I must have known we weren’t just summoned to the soccer stadium to have new identification made. Otherwise, why would I have made Abek wear that jacket? It wasn’t seasonal. It barely fit anymore. What kind of person sews a family history inside a coat?