rockaway holocaust

1944, Rockaway.

Paul’s mother told him not to look at the numbers on Cousin Max’s arm. “Make believe they’re not there,” she said the night Max moved in with them. But when Paul awoke the next morning, the last day of 1947, he saw nothing else — 53927 glowing on a pale arm across the room. He rolled over towards the wall and pulled the blanket over his head.

“You can look. Numbers don’t bite,” came a scratchy voice from the other bed.

Max’s English was a surprise. From the moment Max arrived last night, Paul had heard only Yiddish from his cousin and the dozen relatives and friends who had gathered to meet him. Paul understood very little aside from the sobs and the names of dead people and concentration camps. He wiggled his head out of the blanket. “I’m sorry,” he said to the wall.

“Sorry for what? You didn’t do nothing.”

“I didn’t mean to stare at them.”

“Staring’s not so terrible. Everyone got a number unless you went direct . . .”

Paul turned back to face his cousin. He couldn’t hide — he shouldn’t.

“I’ll try not to stay too long,” Max continued.

Paul sprang up. “No. Stay, stay. I don’t mind, I won’t ask anything.”

Max lay still. Only his arm, neck, and head showed. Except for the purple numbers on his straight stick of forearm, his skin was the faded gray of the blanket. His neck had grooves and ridges where tendons jutted from the skin. His cheeks and eyes seemed sucked into his skull. “Max is forty,” Paul’s mother had told him. “Daddy’s age if he was alive, but he looks eighty.” To Paul, he looked older than the oldest stone in Mount Hebron Cemetery, across from the 1939 World’s Fair, where, for him, Daddy breathed under the ground.

“Stare, don’t stare,” Max muttered. “Ask, don’t ask. What’s the difference?” He sat up. “You just started high school, your mother says. How old? Thirteen?”

“Fourteen.”

“You don’t look it. She says you’re smart like your father. Next week, when I start work, I’ll get up early so I don’t interfere with your school. It’s important you do good.”

Paul resented the reminder; he would do well without urging from anybody. “Thanks,” he made himself respond. “Happy New Year.”

Max said nothing.

For weeks, Paul and Max said little more to each other than hello and goodbye. In the evenings, Paul would do homework or practice the clarinet or listen to the radio — anything to keep himself inside himself — while Max spoke Yiddish with his mother and grandparents in the living room. He swam two hours every afternoon with the freshman swim team and fell into bed exhausted before Max entered the room and undressed. He was usually asleep by the time the numbers were uncovered, but they followed him into his dreams — 53927 on a translucent arm bobbing in the air like a jellyfish near the Atlantic’s edge; 53927 suspended from the Auschwitz entrance sign, Arbeit Macht Frei.

On weekend mornings, Paul would be gone before Max stirred — a Boy Scout outing, fishing in Jamaica Bay, Teen Torah Club. Anything. On school mornings, he faced the wall and feigned sleep until Max left for work in Manhattan’s diamond district. When Max sat on his bed to put on his shoes, Paul knew it was five to seven. When Max sighed and tiptoed from the bedroom, it was five after. And when the door to their second-floor apartment opened and closed, he knew he could have the bathroom for five minutes until his grandfather got up to get ready for the grocery store’s early customers.

But on the second Monday in March, he didn’t hear Max sigh or leave the room; the only sound was the radio in the Rossini’s first-floor apartment — Dinah Shore singing “Buttons and Bows.” Had he fallen back asleep and missed Max’s departure? Would he have time to check his math homework again? He rolled over. Max was sitting on his bed across the room, dressed and staring at him. His eyes seemed even deeper and blacker than usual, his cheeks more hollow.

Only Max’s lips moved. “I know you’re afraid to talk to me.”

“No, that’s not true.”

“Like it’s catching, being in the camps. But I got to ask you something.”

Paul looked at the clock by Max’s bed, but it was turned away from him. He might be late for band rehearsal.

“What?” Paul sat up but kept the blanket wrapped around him.

“You know when you played the clarinet last night?”

Paul pulled the blanket tighter and nodded.

“You know what you were playing?”

“It’s for the band — the Spring Concert.”

“The name of it!”

“Tan . . .” Paul stopped in the middle of the word, afraid his voice would crack.

“Tannhäuser!” Max said with disgust. “When we stood outside to be counted, they played it on the loudspeaker. Appell they called it, morning roll call, even though it was black outside. Hours in the freezing cold. People would go in their pants. If you moved, they shot you. If you were lucky they shot. Otherwise, the dogs. You know who wrote it?”

“Wagner,” Paul whispered.

“The worst kind of Jew hater. Hitler’s favorite composer.”

“I won’t play it,” Paul said. Silently, he added: at home. If he didn’t play it in school, they’d kick him out of band, and it wouldn’t be on his college applications.

“A Nazi before Nazis got invented.”

“I won’t play it.”

Max shook his head. “I can’t ask that. I’m only here because your mother’s so nice. We’re not even related anymore now that your father’s . . . But you and me, we’re always related. I don’t want to make trouble. She wants you should go to a big college.”

“I won’t tell her we talked about it.”

“Just let me know when you’re going to play it. I can take a walk. What’s the band teacher’s name?”

“Mrs. Heider.” Max frowned, and Paul added, “She’s Jewish.”

Max shrugged. “The worst kind of anti-Semitka.”

Paul had always enjoyed rehearsing Tannhaüser — the solemn opening notes of the trombones and French horns, lightened by the woodwinds that seemed to dance among them like falling rose petals; a regal march made joyous by his deft fingering and perfect timing. But at that morning’s band practice, instead of strewing flowers, he was standing in the Auschwitz lineup terrified he would pee in his pants. Suddenly, he heard nothing but his own clarinet and something banging. He pulled the reed from his mouth. Mrs. Heider, scowling at him from the podium, was slamming her baton against her music stand. He felt his face redden.

“Ahhh.” Mrs. Heider sounded a perfect C. “Mr. Hartman is rejoining us. You came in early three bars ago.” Behind Paul, a trombonist giggled until she was silenced by two baton taps.

Paul looked directly at Mrs. Heider. “It won’t happen again.”

That afternoon Paul skipped swim practice to prepare a little speech for Max: If his cousin didn’t want him to play Wagner, he would quit the band. Max, he was sure, would tell him to play.

Waiting for Max, he practiced Tannhaüser in the small bedroom, the one that had been his until Max moved in and everything was rearranged: his mother in the small bedroom, Max and Paul in the large bedroom — which, in Paul’s mind, was still his parents’ bedroom even though Daddy had been dead for almost four years. “Temporary,” his mother said, “until Max is ready to live alone.” To prove it, she left Paul’s pictures on the wall — Benny Goodman, the great Jewish clarinetist; Hank Greenberg, the great Jewish slugger who wouldn’t play on Yom Kippur, even though it was the World Series; and Jackie Robinson, the first Negro to play Major League baseball. In the large bedroom he was now sharing with Max, there were no longer any pictures, only five pale rectangles that appeared a few hours before Max’s arrival when his mother removed the dark-framed photographs from Czechoslovakia. “Too many gone, too many sad memories,” she explained before Paul could ask. “We don’t want to upset Cousin Max.”

Still stung by Mrs. Heider, Paul kept practicing until his fingers moved on their own. His tone had never been better. At six PM, he went to the window and looked out of their two-family home, past the empty lot to Sixty-ninth Street, where, as he expected, Max, enveloped in an overcoat too heavy for April and a fedora that sank past the tops of his ears, was walking — almost shuffling — from the Arverne Station of the Long Island Railroad. Paul put the clarinet away and went into the large bedroom.

Max was surprised to see him standing between the iron beds, but neither of them spoke. Paul waited while Max put his hat, coat and jacket in the closet. He knew Max wouldn’t remove his tie or roll up his shirtsleeves.

“I’ve decided,” Paul began, and suddenly he saw nothing but the gray rectangle beside Max’s bed where his parents’ wedding picture had been — thirty-six people, the bride in white, the rest wearing black, all standing straight and looking earnest. He heard nothing except his father’s voice just before they went to the beach on the day he died.

“Your mother, the prettiest bride anyone could remember, blonde like a goy; our parents; three grandparents who wouldn’t leave no matter how we pleaded or what Hitler threatened.” He had named each sister, brother, aunt, and uncle. “Over a hundred people came, but the photographer couldn’t get them all in the picture, so there’s no cousins or friends. But my mother, Grandma Gittel, counted, and we put back one of the cousins to get the number to thirty-six; that’s twice chai which in Jewish is the number eighteen and means life — a lucky number.”

Was Max the cousin they had added? Was he in one of the other rectangles? The one of his father’s swim team at the Hebrew Youth Games? Was everybody in that picture dead?

“What’s wrong?” Max knit his sparse eyebrows. “Sit on your bed. Maybe lay down. I’ll get you some water.”

“I’ll get it,” Paul said, but he couldn’t move from the wedding picture that was no longer there. Everything went blank until he drank the water Max had brought.

“Why’d they want to kill all the Jews?” Paul’s question surprised him.

“Good question, yunger man, but they never gave me an explanation.” For a moment, Max’s lips widened — as close to a smile as Paul had seen on his face. But only for a moment. “Who can explain? A lot of us didn’t believe it until it was too late. But your father, he took Hitler at his word, what he was saying about the Jews and getting back the Sudetenland where we lived. Right after you were born, he got the three of you out, then your grandparents. The rest of us . . .” Max shrugged. “Go do your homework.”

“I’m not going to play Tannhäuser.”

“Don’t be ridiculous.” Max’s mouth twisted in contempt. “The goyim run the world and you do what you got to. You beat them at their own game.”

The words surged in Paul, and he felt a bolt of fierce determination. He could beat them, like Max said. Not easily, but he would try with all his might — make Max proud. Dad, too. “Come to the concert in April!”

Max’s head jerked back.

“Only my mother’s coming. Tannhäuser’s the first piece, but you can wait outside till it’s over. The rest is mostly Sousa. Bouncy marching music. Real American. Red, white, and blue.” Paul lifted the pillow from his bed and pointed at his folded striped pajamas.

He felt Max’s palm on the back of his neck. It was the first time they had ever touched. “I used to play the violin. Not too bad.” Paul looked up at him and he almost smiled. “But a concert, I’m not ready yet.”

He started to massage Paul’s neck. Daddy had done this. But Max’s palm was scaly — the opposite of Daddy’s. Without meaning to, Paul stepped back, leaving Max’s arm in the air, then froze; he had insulted his cousin. “Can you come to the swim meet on Saturday?” he blurted out. “It’s the first time the coach entered me.”

He wanted to pull the question back inside him. How would he describe his gray cousin to the rest of the team? Or explain why Max was the only one in the bleachers whose sleeves weren’t rolled up?

“Thanks,” Max said softly, and dropped his hand. “Maybe another Saturday I’ll watch.”

Paul was relieved. After this week, all the Saturday meets were away.

The next morning, when Paul opened the bathroom cabinet, Max’s razor was gone. He went back to the bedroom to look under his cousin’s bed. Max’s suitcase wasn’t there. Paul knew better than to ask questions in the morning when everybody was rushing. But, when his mother called from the store, just before six that night, he couldn’t help himself.

“Where’s Cousin Max?”

“It’s better you don’t know too much. Some of it’s not so nice.”

Maybe she was right. But he was almost fifteen. “You can’t keep me out of everything.”

“Please Paul,” she said. “We’re rearranging the shelves. Adding some special foods for Peysekh — peysekhdike but modern. Maybe it’ll bring a customer in. Put out juice. No time for me to finish making soup.”

“Is he coming back?”

“I’m sure he’s not gone for good.”

“What kind of juice?” The hell with them all.

Just thinking the three letters M-A-X was dangerous. It could make his clarinet screech or his schoolbooks blur. Paul stayed after swim practice to lift weights with Bobby Bartola, the team captain. “You’ve got heart, Hartman,” Bobby told him. “Like Coach Barry says. But we have to put meat on you.” He slept even deeper but, no matter how deep, 53927 saturated his dreams.

^^^

Jay Greenfield is a writer and lawyer. His last novel, Max’s Diamonds (Chickadee Prince Books, 2016), is available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble in paperback and e-book, and at your local bookstore. Read an excerpt from his forthcoming novel, Almost Friends.