CHAPTER 12Greener
November 1949. I board a city bus in Baltimore. Gray dawn. Wet
streets. I am going to work, to the clothing factory, where I will spend
all day cutting loose threads off the seams of little boys’ boxer shorts,
paid 7¢ per dozen. e factory reminds me of the thread factory in
Germany where Magda and I worked aer we were taken from
Auschwitz—dry, dusty air, cold concrete, machines clattering so loudly
that when the forewoman speaks she must shout. “Minimize
bathroom breaks!” she yells. But I hear the forewoman of the past, the
one who told us we would be worked until we were all used up, and
then killed. I work without stopping. To maximize my productivity, to
maximize my meager pay. But also because to work without a break is
an old necessity, a habit impossible to overthrow. And if I can keep the
noise and the urgency around me at all times, I will not have to be
alone for even a moment with my own thoughts. I work so hard that
my hands shake and shake in the dark when I get home.
Because Aunt Matilda and her husband didn’t have the space or
resources to take in my family—Magda was already an extra mouth to
feed—we have begun our new life not in the Bronx, as I had
imagined, but in Baltimore, where we live with Béla’s brother George
and his wife and two young daughters in a cramped walk-up
apartment. George had been a well-known lawyer in Czechoslovakia,
but in Chicago, where he ĕrst lived when he immigrated to America in
the 1930s, he made a living as a Fuller Brush man, selling brushes and