This is how the muse works. I was flipping through channels and caught sight of Tovah Feldshuh. Tovah, a Jewish woman, played Deanna Monroe and that got me to start thinking about the Monroe family being Jewish.
Traudl Junge was Hitler's personal secretary and was with him in the bunker in the final days of WWII. What the children read in the beginning of this chapter is taken from an interview she gave later in her life.
…
Aiden was the one to read the last lines from Traudl Junge as he, Beth, Eli and Bee sat at the kitchen table with their books open in front of them, following along.
"All these horrors I've heard of during the Nuremberg process, these six million Jews, other thinking people or people of another race, who perished – that shocked me deeply. But I hadn't made the connection with my past. I assured myself with the thought of not being personally guilty; and that I didn't know anything about the enormous scale of it.
But one day, I walked by a memorial plate of Sophie Scholl in the Franz-Joseph-Strasse. I saw that she was about my age and she was executed in the same year I came to Hitler. And at that moment, I actually realized that a young age isn't an excuse. And that it might have been possible to get to know things."
Bee sniffled and wiped at her cheeks.
Their back door was open and outside, the sun was shining and birds chirped happily as a light breeze blew the green leaves in the trees. Their other family and various animals were all outside, seeing to the never-ending farm work while enjoying the mild weather the day had gifted them.
Beth was the one in charge of the education of all of the children.
The others occasionally lent a hand, but for the most part, it was on Beth's shoulders and she admitted that she liked having it there. They had raided school classrooms for all sorts of textbooks, workbooks and flashcards and all of the children – if the world was as it was Before – would all be placed in much higher grades than their ages would have them be in. Aiden, at twelve, was already working on advanced algebra and Eli, at ten, had the entire periodic table memorized and Bee, at eight, was easily reading books intended for those in junior high.
The other children had worked out of their workbooks on vocabulary and their colors before Beth had excused them to go help outside with pulling weeds and the older children had remained for their last lesson of the day; not intended for younger ears anyway.
The others had been unsure of this particular lesson that had been over the past few days, but Beth had insisted. "It's too important to not teach them," she said and Aaron had agreed – followed by Spencer – but the others had still been uncertain even if they trusted Beth completely with the kids and their education.
"Are we Jewish?" Eli asked though he knew that if they were, his parents would have already told him.
Beth gave him a small smile and a shake of her head. "We're not. Your dad isn't anything and I was raised Southern Baptist."
"Are Bee and I Jewish?" Aiden asked as Spencer, followed by Daryl, came into the kitchen for glasses of water from the sink pump, both sweaty and a little dirty from their work of mending their fences and clearing the random walker or two who had stumbled into the pits they had dug outside of their property.
"You're half. Your mom is Catholic and I'm Jewish," Spencer answered.
Bee frowned at her dad. "I didn't know that."
"It's not like I could take you kids to a synagogue," Spencer said with that easy smile of his. He came and sat down at the table next to his daughter and across from his son. "And I suppose things like that just don't matter like they used to."
"But mama's taught us about God and Jesus," Eli said to that.
"It's all the same God," Spencer said with that same smile. "We just have differing opinions on Jesus."
With his own glass of water, Daryl came and sat down at the other head of the table, across from Beth.
Aiden looked to his dad. "Did our family… did we have family…" he looked down to his book, trying to figure out how to frame the question.
Spencer knew the – obvious – question though and he gave a single nod. "We did."
"Which one?" Bee asked quietly, afraid of the answer, but wanting to know anyway.
"Your grandpa's mom was in Ravensbruck, which was a camp just for women. You lost two of your aunts there and cousins, but your great-grandma survived. Other family on my dad's side was sent to Treblinka, which was strictly used for killing them. And family on your grandma's side was in Auschwitz."
Everyone was quiet as they listened. Spencer had never talked about this with any of them before – maybe Rosita, but none of the others. Beth and Daryl knew about his parents and his older brother, Aiden, but nothing past that. Most of them hardly talked about their families anymore or family history. This was their family now and this was their world.
"Why didn't you ever tell us?" Aiden was the one to wonder.
"It felt like it was a whole other world. Like it's not even something real, you know what I mean?"
Daryl and Beth nodded their heads, knowing exactly what Spencer meant.
Everything Before, it really did feel like something so long ago, it had happened to someone else. Daryl saw the scares on his back from his dad and he couldn't even picture the old man's face in his mind anymore. He can smell the cigarette smoke and the beer, still – the stale stench of their trailer – and sometimes, the searing pain of the belt buckle, but everything else had faded away a long time ago.
When Beth had told the others that she wanted the kids to know about the Holocaust, Rosita had frowned.
"Why?"
Such a thing didn't even seem real anymore – as terrible as it sounded to ever admit such a thing. But since the End, how many people had died? Millions? Billions? Countless? Why learn about something just as horrible that happened in an entirely different world? (Even if the big difference was that millions upon millions of people died because of other living people. But still, why should the children know about it?)
"We can't ever forget any history," Beth had answered. "And when we're all gone and the children are grown, we don't know how the world might be. They might need to not forget these things."
"Can we find one of those… a me…" Bee struggled with the word, having only learned about it a couple of days earlier during their other Holocaust lessons. "Menorah?" Spencer nodded to let her know she got it. "Can we find a menorah and set it up for Christmas?" Bee asked him.
"Celebrate Christmas and Hanukkah?" Spencer asked.
"Can we?" Aiden wondered.
"Of course we can," Beth was the one to answer.
Spencer took a sip of his water and looked to Daryl. "I can't imagine it would be that hard to find one."
Daryl shrugged, but no one even had the thought that he wasn't already taking this seriously; his mind not already racing with possibilities of where they could look in their mountains. "Even if it is, we'll look until we find one."
…
Thank you!
