Middle Grade / Young Adult
Date Published: 6/2013
Markus Simmons, a 13-year-old 8th-grader, wants to hang with the cool kids. When his social studies class begins a Holocaust project, some A-listers befriend him to get him to work with them so they can have access to his Oma, who was in Auschwitz, and he discovers that there are Holocaust deniers in the world, one of whom is in his class. Then someone identifies his Oma as having played a criminal role during the Holocaust, and he has to reconcile his love for his grandmother, his desire to work with the cool kids, and his anger at the deniers and the others who attack his grandmother.
Excerpt:
CHAPTER
1
I couldn’t pry my eyes away from the wrinkled skin of
her forearm.
It could have been somebody’s zip code, guiding letters, bills, and
tons of
junk mail to people’s houses.
It could bring birthday greetings and Christmas cards, and
sometimes it could deliver news that we just don’t want to hear. It might show where a lot of people live when it’s
on an envelope, with a stamp parked neatly in the corner.
But this number
wasn’t on an envelope. It didn’t
delight anyone with news about
a new baby
or winning the lottery. It had nothing to do with where people lived.
It’s tattooed on an
old
woman’s arm, and it’s from a camp of torture where a lot of people died. And
like always, when I visited my grandmother at the nursing home this afternoon, the number hypnotized me.
Oma snored
lightly, and my eyes lingered on those
five
digits on her translucent skin, almost transparent in the overhead industrial lighting. They told me more than
she
ever had about her time in Auschwitz. And I had tried. I’d ask
her
about the camps,
she’d
talk to me about tents. I’d
mention Nazis, she’d bring up the National Guard.
I’d say something about
gas chambers, she’d talk
about the rising
prices at the gas pump.
So, I stood staring at the number on her arm and at the scar from a deep gash right in front of
the “2.” Puddles formed under my arms when I thought about why I was there. Visiting was never fun – more like a
grandson’s
obligation. But today the stakes were high. My
fingers played with the frayed edge of
the pink blanket, and then my gaze wandered up to her face. She was
staring at me with eyes
like warm, blue ice. I almost peed myself.
“Jeez, Oma! You trying
to scare me to
death? When
did you wake up?”
The eyes sparkled. “You’d prefer maybe that I did
not?”
“Not funny. When you
leave here, you should maybe
be a
stand-up comic.”
Her long fingers guided a wisp of white hair behind
her ear, and
the scar that stretched from the corner of
her left eye down to her mouth glared at me. I looked
away, and when
Oma shifted
in the bed,
the
strong smell of her
gardenia-scented bath
soap
washed over me like
a tidal wave. My sneakers squealed on the tile floor when I shifted from foot to foot.
I looked back at her face. She stared at me hard.
“Something on your mind, child. I can
always see it. That crooked little grin
gets
even crookeder.”
The time had come – now or never. I crossed my arms
over my chest. “Well, actually, yes…” I heard – and hated
– the squeak in my voice.
“Speak.” She
took my hand in both of hers. They felt weak but warm.
“It’s like this, Oma. In
social studies class we’re
starting
a unit on…well, on World War II…and I
was wondering…”
Her gaze shifted to the window, and she dropped my
hand. “You ever notice that window looks out on nothing?” I looked
over at the window but didn’t
answer. How could a window look out on
nothing? The room grew quiet except for the humming of
the
fluorescent lights.
Finally she sighed and
said, “You
mean you’re going to study the Jews.”
She blinked rapid fire about five times.
“Yeah, well… I just wondered if I could ask you some
questions, sort of interview you.” Her
lunch tray with
its remnants caught my eye. The lime Jell-O looked sort of
like bright green puke. And the chicken…well,
I appreciated the gardenia smell.
“Interview me? You
think maybe I’m a movie star?
This is a fancy spa I’m relaxing
in instead of a place where old people come to finish out their days? With this
broken-down junk they call furniture?” Her
skinny hand
pointed across
the room. “Look at that dresser with the drawer that won’t close, so it looks like it’s always sticking
its tongue at me!”
I turned to the dresser and almost stuck my tongue
back
out at it. This wasn’t going
exactly like I had hoped. I tried to get a grip. “You
know, you
could
tell me some things about what it was like.”
“What it was like? Why a teacher would want kids today to know what it
was
like, I’ll never understand.” She
looked back to me, but the eyes had stopped sparkling.
“No,
child. Some things
are
better left in the past.”
My stomach twisted and turned, and I pushed my
sleeves up a little. Oma’s hands
shook, and her scar jutted out like
a welt against her pale
skin. That couldn’t be good for her health. And I had done
this
why? Because some cool kids back at school were depending on me to come
up with a
killer project because I had
a grandma who had
survived Auschwitz? Really? My hand reached for hers. It
felt
cold as snow. Her
eyes
– cloudy now – looked through
me, and it sounded like she was breathing underwater. Little drops of drool spilled
out of the corner of her
mouth next to the scar.
“But, Oma…just a few questions…”
“No!”
The thunder
in
her voice made me jump. First that she
would shout at me and second that she was strong enough to
shout at all.
“No! For that you must look
elsewhere.” She shook her head back and forth.
“Oh, Markus, this has been my burden alone all these years. It would be a sin to unload it on my only
grandchild now!”
Her gaze dropped to her chest.
“Oma, I
didn’t mean…” I didn’t
have
a clue how to
finish the sentence. What did
I mean?
“Leave it
alone, child! So many things you
are
better off never knowing about.” My skin prickled when I saw a tear run
along
her scar like a drop of water terrified of being consumed by the desert. “Please, leave it alone.”
Then she closed her eyes and turned away. I knew that the interview had ended. And her breath still came in rasps.
I tiptoed into the bathroom so I
wouldn’t
have
to swing by
the gas station on the way home, and I stopped
at the mirror. The
little kid peering back at me looked so
different from Oma
in her bed. I figured that
someday I would have her white hair, but for now, I pushed the
reddish-brown mess away from my face and hooked it
behind my ears. I looked at my cheek. No scar there. And when I pictured Oma
in the bed in the next room, I saw
guilt in those ridiculous green eyes glaring back at me
accusingly. I loosened my hair again and let
it fall in my face.
About the Author
William McCauley was born and grew up in the Northern Virginia suburbs of Washington, DC, in a delightful little town called Vienna. His B.A. in German and M.A. in English are from George Mason University, and at the ripe old age of 29, he "ran away from home" to do doctoral work in linguistics at the University of Colorado in Boulder. After two years, his Wanderlust attacked again, and he trekked on down to Miami, FL, where he did more doctoral work at the University of Miami. Then the powers that be at The German School Washington, where he had taught English for six years, tracked him down and asked him to come back. That brought him back to the DC area, where he taught at the German School for another eighteen years. He finished his career in education at the end of school year 14-15, retiring after ten years as a Gifted and Talented Education specialist with Howard County Public Schools in Maryland. Now all he wants to do is write – and read.
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