More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
October 16 - October 17, 2018
I didn’t know why we took pictures of ourselves with symbols of tyranny and oppression. Maybe it was a way of remembering. Maybe it was the only way we knew how to say we recognized the importance of everything that had happened to bring down the wall.
I touched the wall with my forefinger, middle finger, and ring finger, the same three fingers I pressed to the space between my eyes when I said the Shema, the holiest of Jewish prayers. I tried to think of something profound to say, but couldn’t. Instead, I whispered, “I’m glad you’re in pieces now.”
He couldn’t have been more of a stereotype if he tried. Maybe he was trying. It clearly worked. Amanda was blushing before we even said anything.
Putting my mouth right next to her ear, I said, “New game, be as serious as the soldiers.” She giggled and stood ramrod straight as we began to walk forward, being loaded onto trains like animals. She was the happiest girl getting onto that train.
I had asked him, like I ask every Passenger, why he had to leave East Berlin. He had glanced up, squinting at me over his nub of a pencil, and deadpanned, “Too punk for them, I guess.”
“Death is one way of going home, Ellie. But you’re not going to die. Berlin has enough ghosts. Germany has enough ghosts. Europe has more than enough ghosts. Choosing to be a ghost is disrespectful to all the real ghosts.”
“I just think it’s weird to date someone with the same first name as you.”
“Come on. Fresh air. Adventure. I swear we won’t get arrested.” “Inspiring,” I said, but followed him out the door anyway.
“Home is a fantasie,” he said after another block. “We make up our homes and our ideas of home. Some days, I can’t even bear all the guilt I feel at finding my home in a city that nearly everyone wants to leave.”
“Magic and balloons,” I whispered, shivering from the cold and the dark. “And Walls and time.” Kai’s voice was low and sad. “The things that get us out and the things that keep us in.”
When she caught on to my boredom, Mitzi brought me a radio. I hadn’t ever seen one that wasn’t in a car, but I didn’t tell her that.
We cling to strange things when we no longer believe we’ll see the sun.
We kissed as if this were the solution to everything that lay ahead of us, as if a girl from the twenty-first century and a boy from the twentieth century kissing in an abandoned subway station beneath a divided city could untangle the terrible ways in which time looped and history replayed itself.
All the story, like you said? That’s the important part. The sad parts are all about surviving. We are a people who survive. We endure. We will endure this too.”
I pretended to start a joke and then paused, shaking my head and covering my face with my free hand. “No, no. Never mind.” He pulled my hand free of my face. “You already said it was terrible. You can’t back out now.” “No,” I protested. “Jokes about German sausages are just the wurst.”
You cannot erase a wrong. You can only make it right in the present and the future. Killing people to save people isn’t fair.
The city hummed with a frenetic sort of energy, the kind that came when people saw the light at the end of the tunnel and realized it wasn’t the oncoming train. It was hope.
I wished we always absorbed the best traits of everyone around us. I wished that was possible. Maybe this world would be less miserable.
What could change if we started to measure society’s successes not in wars won but in moments in which we countered injustice?
Be brave. Be a sponge. And remember, you too are making history each day. Let’s make a history that lifts up all people, erases no one, and leaves behind nothing but hateful ideology.
