While Paris Slept

by Ruth Druart

“You can tell a person by their nails and their shoes.” “Not in America,” I’d tell him now if I saw him. “In America they look at your hair and your teeth.”

It struck me that all men looked the same in a hospital bed. Vulnerable. Harmless.

How many times had we stood by while our neighbors and friends were deported to God knows where? We all felt complicit in some way, though we never voiced it. After all, what could we do?

Wasn’t that collaboration? Pretending that nothing had happened?

So she sewed it on as ordered, and went out, her head held high. How naive she was. It immediately changed who she was. People looked at the star, and then at her.

It wasn’t possible to survive alone, not when something as commonplace as losing your shoes meant being sent straight to the gas chambers; after all, it was easier to replace women than shoes.

How much more painful to watch one’s child suffer than to do the suffering oneself.

“It always starts with almost insignificant measures, you know, things you can live with, like not being allowed to own a bike or a radio. It makes you feel uneasy—alienated, but life goes on.

Then further restrictions make it much more awkward: limiting the places you can go, where you’re allowed to shop. You can no longer mix with non-Jews.”

Then it becomes almost impossible to support your family; your children go hungry, and you begin to think to yourself: they’re trying to kill us. But by then, it’s too late. You no longer have the money or the ...

“It wasn’t the water that saved you that day, was it? It was seeing an act of kindness in hell itself.

Not flesh of my flesh nor bone of my bone but still, miraculous, my own. Never forget for a single moment, you didn’t grow under my heart but in it.