The Eighth-Grade History Class Visits the Hebrew Home for the Aging Read online

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  Title Page

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  A sunbeam slipped between the slats of the venetian blinds. Anne Berkowitz opened one eye. The clock on the nightstand by the bed had digits big and bright enough to let her read them without her glasses—6:47. She muttered and rolled away from the sneaky sunbeam. She didn’t want to get up so early.

  But she was awake. And she was having trouble breathing—not bad trouble, but the kind she had almost every morning after she’d stayed too flat for too long. She reached for the nasal cannula and put it in place. Clear plastic tubing connected it to the green-painted oxygen tank that sat on a wheeled cart by the other side of the bed.

  Wrinkled skin hung loose on her arm as she reached out to turn the valve at the top of the tank. She’d never been fat, not once in her eighty-four years. She’d hardly ever been as skinny as she was now, though. If she kept going this way, pretty soon there’d be nothing left of her.

  She nodded to herself as oxygen softly hissed through the tubing. Pretty soon there would be nothing left of her. The doctors said she had maybe a year left, maybe two, three at the outside. She worried about it less than she would have dreamt possible even ten years before. As long as it didn’t hurt too much, she was about ready to die.

  The oxygen made her feel stronger. The trouble wasn’t her lungs. It was the narrowing of the big artery that came out of her heart. Aortic stenosis, the docs called it, which was the same thing in Greek. An operation—a graft—could fix it, but they said she had not a chance in a thousand of waking up again after they put her under. So here she was, watching her clock wind down.

  After a couple of minutes, she reached out and turned the valve on the tank the other way. The oxygen shut off. Anne sat up. Once she got vertical, she was okay, or as okay as she could be these days.

  She put on her glasses. The room came into sharper focus. The room … Her mouth twisted. The Hebrew Home for the Aging insisted it was an apartment. They could call it whatever they pleased. It still looked like a room to her.

  A TV on a stand. A computer on a stand. A bookcase. Novels. History. Poetry. Genealogy. A black-and-white photo of her husband, looking handsome and Mad Men-y in a suit with narrow lapels and a skinny tie. Sheldon had been gone for almost twenty years now, and not a day went by when she didn’t miss him.

  Color photos of her son the CPA and of her son the ophthalmologist. Color photos of her grandsons and granddaughters, and a new one of her baby great-granddaughter. Not least among her reasons for keeping the computer was that so many other photos of Elizabeth were on Facebook.

  The room—the apartment, if you insisted—also boasted a minifridge and a hot plate. Anne could cook there, after a fashion. She could, but she seldom did. Meals were social times at the Home for the Aging.

  She walked into the little bathroom. The tub had a gap in the side so unsteady seniors wouldn’t have to step over it—and so the water couldn’t get more than two inches deep. She’d heard there were some bathrooms with real tubs, but she’d never seen one.

  Morning meds first, though. Anne’s mouth quirked. When you got to her age and state of decrepitude, you were what you took. She opened the medicine cabinet. Brown and green plastic pill bottles crowded the shelves, swamping things like toothbrush and deodorant. She took a blood-pressure pill, a stomach-acid suppressor, a vasodilator, a pill to steady her heartbeat, one to hold osteoporosis at bay, and a couple of old-fashioned aspirins for her arthritis, which wasn’t too bad. They all sat on her tongue while she filled a glass with water. Even if it wasn’t long and sticky, it could hold more at once than a chameleon’s.

  She brushed her teeth. They were in better shape than the rest of her—most of them were implants. Then she closed the cabinet. As she always did, she marveled at the little old lady who peered back at her from the mirror. How did that happen? How did time get to be so cruel?

  Her eyes. She still knew her eyes. Even behind the lenses of her glasses, they were dark and bright and knowing. And her narrow chin hadn’t changed so much, even if she had a turkey wattle under it now. The rest? Wrinkles gullied cheeks and forehead. Her nose was a thrusting beak. Ears as big as Golda Meir’s. Thin, baby-fine hair, white, white, white.

  Nothing she could do about any of it, either. Oh, she could dye her hair. She had for a while, when Sheldon was still alive. But she’d been younger then herself. It hadn’t looked so phony as it would now.

  After a shower, she started to put on a long-sleeved T-shirt and a pair of heather-gray sweatpants. They were easy, they were comfortable, and what else mattered?

  Most of the time, nothing. This morning, Anne caught herself. The kids would be coming today. She’d almost forgotten. She didn’t care about looking nice for anybody here, but for them she did. The T-shirt and sweats went back on the shelf in the closet.

  She chose a silk blouse with a floral print and dark blue polyester pants instead. She’d still look like a little old lady, but so what? She was a little old lady. These were the kind of clothes the kids’ grannies put on when they came over to visit.

  Her Nikes had Velcro fastenings, not laces. Tying shoelaces wasn’t easy any more. She opened the door, closed it behind her, and walked down the hall to the stairway.

  A young Filipino aide smiled at her. “Good morning, Mrs. Berkowitz!” the woman said in accented English.

  “Hello, Maria.” Anne’s voice held a vanishing trace of accent, too. If you listened, you could hear it in the vowels and in the slight guttural flavor she gave the r.

  She walked down a flight of stairs, holding on to the banister and feeling brave. Going up, she’d take the elevator—that was hard work. But down was okay, as long as you watched where you put your feet.

  A garden stretched between her residence block and the dining hall. The same warm, bright, San Fernando Valley sunshine that had woken her poured down on it. A scrub jay in a pale-leaved olive tree screeched at her: “Jeep! Jeep! Jeep!” Anne smiled. The bird figured the garden belonged to it.

  She ambled along the smooth concrete path. A hummingbird flashed past her on its mad dash from one flower to the next. Its whole head glowed magenta. Anne admired hummingbirds for their beauty and for their take-no-prisoners attitude. She’d never seen one till she came to America.

  Another Filipino attendant wheeled an old man up the path toward her. The man in the wheelchair stared at the orange and yellow flowers as if they were new to him. For all practical purposes, they were. Far gone in Alzheimer’s, he had no idea he’d been here last week, and the week before that, and …

  “Morning, Ninoy,” Anne said to the attendant as she walked by.

  “Morning, ma’am,” he answered. “Nice day, isn’t it?”

  “It is, yes.” But Anne frowned once her back was to him and he couldn’t see her do it. The Hebrew Home for the Aging’s Alzheimer’s wing was in a severely modern three-story building near the dining hall. She thanked heav
en she’d be dead before she had to go in there. Forgetting whom you’d loved, forgetting who you were, forgetting even how to use the toilet … She frowned again, and shook her head. Yes, truly ending was better than a living death like that.

  She had oatmeal for breakfast, and canned fruit, and a cup of real coffee, not the decaf she usually drank. Her doctor would cluck when she told him she’d done it. But he was only in his forties, younger than her boys. What did he know? It wasn’t good for her? Nu? So what? She was dying by inches anyhow.

  After eating and chatting for a little while with a couple of other residents who still had their marbles, she went over to the visitors’ center. Nothing there had sharp edges or corners. Most of the chairs were at a height convenient for old folks to use without too much bending.

  Two big aquariums dominated the main room’s decor. One held freshwater fish; the other, more colorful saltwater. A woman with Alzheimer’s gaped at the saltwater tank. An attendant stood close by, waiting, watching. When the woman’s attention flagged, the attendant gently led her toward the dining hall.

  Anne watched the fish herself for a little while. Then she sat down in one of those inviting chairs. No more than half a minute after she had, one of the Hebrew Home for the Aging’s community-outreach workers stuck her head into the visitors’ center and looked around.

  “Here I am, Lucy.” Anne waved.

  “Oh, good! Glad to see you, Mrs. Berkowitz.” Relief glowed on the outreach worker’s sharp features. She hurried over.

  Dryly, Anne said, “I do try to hit my marks.” She knew the Hollywood patter. Movie stars had fascinated her even when she was a girl. And, like so many Angelenos, she’d taken a shot at scriptwriting back in the day. She’d never had one of her own produced, but she’d done uncredited doctoring on a couple that did get made.

  “Sure, sure.” Lucy nodded. “And I want to tell you again how wonderful, how impactful, I think it is that you’ve agreed to do this. For today’s middle-school kids to get the chance to talk with a Holocaust survivor and hear what it was like from someone who went through it … That’s just marvelous!”

  “I was lucky,” Anne Berkowitz said: nothing less than the truth. She tried not to show what she thought of impactful. Like many who’d learned English as a foreign language, she had a strong feel for when it was spoken well and when badly.

  “They need to understand what people are capable of doing to other people when, when…” Lucy gestured vaguely.

  “When everything goes off the rails,” Anne finished for her. She couldn’t blame this middle-aged woman who hadn’t gone through it for not getting why and how the Nazis could have done what they did. She had, and she didn’t get it, either. Which wouldn’t have stopped the Nazis, of course, or even slowed them down.

  The community-outreach worker took her phone from her purse to check the time. “They’ll be here at half past eight—it’s a first-period class,” she said, and pointed over to a little meeting room where Anne could talk with the children. “Will you need anything special?”

  “If you could get me a water bottle, that would be nice.”

  “I’ll take care of it.” Lucy hurried back toward the dining hall.

  Anne stood up and walked into the meeting room. She didn’t hurry—she didn’t think she could hurry any more—but she got there. The room held a chair like the one she’d just escaped and a couple of dozen ordinary folding chairs for the kids. Sitting on one of those for longer than a minute or two would have paralyzed Anne’s butt. The eighth-graders probably wouldn’t mind at all.

  Lucy came back with the water bottle. She’d brought a big one, which was good. “You’re all ready,” she said.

  “Almost,” Anne said. “Could you open it for me, please?” As with tying shoes, her hands weren’t what they had been once upon a time.

  “Sure.” Lucy took care of it with ease. She was young enough and healthy enough to do such things without even thinking about them. Anne had been. She wasn’t any more.

  A clamor outside said the schoolkids were here. “Keep it down, please!” their teacher said, amusement and despair warring in his voice. Mr. Hauser had taught history at Junipero Middle School since it was a junior high in the 1970s. He still wore his hair long, the way he must have back then, but it was gray now. Despite the hair, he had the unflustered calm of someone who’d dealt with middle-schoolers his whole adult life. He also knew his history. Anne had talked with him on the phone and in person setting this up.

  Lucy hustled out of the meeting room to bring in the class. The kids wore uniforms: white or dark blue polo shirts, khakis, dark tartan skirts right to the knee. Mr. Hauser also wore khakis, and an old blue blazer to go with them. He came up and shook Anne’s hand. “Thank you so much for taking the time to talk with us this morning, Mrs. Berkowitz,” he said, pitching his voice both to her and to the students.

  “I’m glad to do it. It’s something different,” Anne replied. Most days were pills and oxygen and meals and TV and books. Days doing nothing, days waiting to die. The different days stood out, when there were any.

  The students stared at her. They fidgeted on the chairs—not because the chairs were so uncomfortable, Anne judged, but because thirteen- and fourteen-year-olds couldn’t not fidget. There were about twenty of them: white, Hispanic, Asian, one plainly from India or Pakistan, one African American. Junipero was a Catholic school, but Anne would have bet a couple of the white kids were Jewish. A good education was where you found it.

  Mr. Hauser turned and spoke to them: “We’ve been studying about World War Two. You remember how, in 1940, Germany invaded Denmark and Norway, and then conquered the Low Countries and France and seemed to be about to win the war. Well, when that happened, Mrs. Berkowitz was living in Amsterdam, the capital of Holland. How old were you then, Mrs. Berkowitz?”

  “I was ten—it happened just before my eleventh birthday,” she said. “I wasn’t Mrs. Berkowitz then, of course. I wasn’t Missus anybody. I was only a girl named Anne.”

  Some of the kids took notes. Some didn’t, but listened anyway. And some looked as if they wished they were running around in the sweet spring air outside. Well, that was about par for the course.

  “You weren’t born in Amsterdam, though, were you?” Mr. Hauser asked.

  She shook her head. “No. My father and mother and Margot—my older sister—moved to Holland from Germany in 1933. I stayed with my grandmother in Germany a little longer, and I went to Amsterdam in early 1934.”

  “Why did your family move?” the teacher asked.

  “Because my father could see how hard Hitler was making things for the Jews. He was a very smart man, my father,” Anne said. “He got a job at a company that made jam, and then at one that turned out spices. Some of my other relatives saw trouble coming, too. Two of my uncles came to America.”

  “They got far enough away from the Nazis to be safe, didn’t they?” Mr. Hauser said. “But your family didn’t. What were things like for Jews after the Germans invaded Holland?”

  “They were bad, and they kept getting worse and worse. The Germans and the Dutch Nazis made more and more laws and rules against us.”

  “There were Dutch Nazis?” a boy exclaimed, his voice right on the edge of being a man’s.

  Sadly, Anne nodded. “Yes, there were some. Most of the Dutch people hated Hitler and really hated Seyss-Inquart, the Austrian who ran Holland for him. Without help from people like that, my family never would have made it through the war. But there was a fat fool called Anton Mussert, who led the Dutch Nazi Party and helped the Germans rule Holland. Some people did follow him, either because they truly believed or because they thought that was the side their bread was buttered on.”

  “What kind of laws did the Germans make?” Mr. Hauser tried to keep things simple.

  “We had to wear yellow stars on our clothes, with Jood on them. That’s Jew in Dutch,” Anne said. “We couldn’t use trams. We had to give up our bicycles. We weren’t a
llowed to ride in cars. We had to shop late in the afternoon, when there was next to nothing left to buy. We couldn’t even visit Christians in their houses or apartments. We couldn’t go out at all from eight at night to six in the morning. We had to go to only Jewish schools and Jewish barbers and Jewish beauty parlors. We couldn’t use public swimming pools or tennis courts or sports fields or—well, anything.”

  “Why did they do that?” a pretty Asian girl asked.

  Before Anne could answer, the boy who’d been amazed about Dutch Nazis said, “Is that when they, like, tattooed numbers on the Jews’ arms?”

  “Jordan…” From the way Mr. Hauser said the name, Anne gathered that Jordan had a habit of breaking in whenever he felt like it.

  Not quite smiling, Anne explained, “They only tattooed numbers on you when you went into a camp. If you went in, you probably wouldn’t come out again. We knew that by 1942. Even that early, the BBC said Jews were being gassed. So that summer, when the SS sent my father a call-up notice, he didn’t go. We hid instead, in some rooms above and in back of the place where Father worked.”

  “Your family, you mean?” the Asian girl asked. She must have decided she wouldn’t get a sensible answer about why the Nazis tormented the Jews. Anne knew she didn’t have one, not after all these years.

  “My family, and a man my father worked with, Hermann van Pels, and his wife and son—Peter was almost sixteen when we went into hiding, about the same age as Margot. And a couple of months later we decided we could fit in one more person. Fritz Pfeffer was a dentist. We were all German Jews who’d gone to Holland and then found out that wasn’t far enough.”

  “How big were these rooms?” the Asian girl wondered.

  “Not big enough.” The heat with which Anne snapped out the words surprised even her. “Before Dr. Pfeffer moved in, Margot and I slept together in one room. After that, she moved in with Mother and Father, and I got to share that room with the dentist.”

  “Eww!” The kids made gross-out noises. Some of them probably had dirty suspicions. They were a lot less naive about the facts of life than she’d been at the same age. Fritz Pfeffer hadn’t been that kind of nuisance, anyway. Plenty of other kinds, yes, God knows, but not that one.