My name is Zofia Lewin Berman. Everyone has called me Zoe since I came to America, but that was not the name my mother gave me.
I’m ninety-six years old. I live in a brick two-flat on the Northwest Side of Chicago with my granddaughter, Maya, and a cat named Pierogi who believes he owns the building. My knees don’t work as well as they used to, and my eyes need glasses thick as the bottom of a jar. But my memory is still very good.
Sometimes too good.
I was born in Warsaw in 1929, in an apartment building on Twarda Street. It was four stories tall, yellow stone, with iron balconies and a courtyard in the middle where children played and women hung laundry on lines strung between the windows.
My family lived on the third floor. My father was a watchmaker with a small shop around the corner. My mother taught piano to the children of doctors and lawyers. My little brother, Aron, was four years younger than me and followed me everywhere like a duckling.
Our grandmother lived with us too. Babcia Ruchla. She had white hair pinned up in a bun and hands that smelled of cinnamon, and every Friday evening she lit two tall brass candlesticks on our dining table and sang a blessing in a voice so soft you had to lean in to hear it.
Across the hall from us lived the Nowak family.
Mr. Nowak drove a streetcar. Mrs. Nowak sewed dresses for half the women in the building. They had one son, Stanislaw, who was eleven months older than me and the most stubborn boy in all of Warsaw.
He had brown hair that stuck up in the back no matter how much his mother wet it down. He had a gap between his front teeth and freckles across his nose, and he could whistle louder than anyone I’d ever heard.
He was my best friend.
We walked to school together every morning. His school was Catholic and mine was not, but they were on the same street, so we walked side by side until the corner. Then he’d go left and I’d go right, and we’d meet at the same corner every afternoon.
We traded books. He liked adventure stories about pirates and explorers. I liked stories about girls who did brave things. We’d read each other’s favorites and then argue about them for days.
In the summer, we stayed outside in the courtyard until our mothers leaned out the windows and called us home. We played tag with the other children. We caught fireflies in jars. We sat on the stone steps and talked about what we’d do when we grew up.
He wanted to build bridges.
“Big ones,” he said. “Over rivers. So big they reach the clouds.”
“Bridges don’t reach the clouds,” I said.
“Mine will,” he said.
I wanted to be a teacher. Like my mother, but for reading instead of piano.
“You’d be good at that,” Stanislaw said. “You’re always telling me what to do.”
I hit him on the arm. He laughed so hard he fell off the step.
Part Two: The Promise
It was a warm evening in June of 1939. I was ten years old.
We were sitting on the stone steps in the courtyard, eating cherries from a paper bag his mother had bought at the market. We were spitting the pits into a flowerpot to see who could get them in from farther away. I was winning.
The sun was going down, and the yellow walls of our building had turned orange and pink. Somebody upstairs was playing a gramophone. The swallows were diving over the rooftops the way they did every summer evening, swooping and turning in the last of the light.
Stanislaw stopped spitting cherry pits. He got very quiet, which was unusual for him.
“Zofia,” he said. “When we grow up, I’m going to marry you.”
I laughed. I couldn’t help it. He looked so serious, with cherry juice on his chin.
“Fine,” I said. “But you’d better not forget.”
He held out his hand. His little finger was crooked from when he’d broken it falling out of a tree.
“I promise,” he said.
I hooked my finger around his.
Then he reached into his pocket and pulled out something wrapped in a handkerchief.
He unwrapped it carefully. Inside was a tiny pendant on a thin chain. A swallow, made of silver and blue enamel, about the size of my thumbnail. Its wings were spread like it was flying.
“My mother let me pick it out,” he said. “From the shop on Marszałkowska. I saved for four months.”
He held it out to me.
“Swallows always come back,” he said. “Every spring. No matter how far they fly. That’s how you’ll remember.”
I put it on. It sat right at the base of my throat, cool against my skin.
“I’ll never take it off,” I said.
“You’d better not,” he said.
And then he went back to spitting cherry pits like nothing had happened. I won that contest too.
That was the last summer evening we ever spent together.
Part Three: September
By August, everyone in our building was whispering.
The grown-ups gathered in the stairwell and talked in low voices. My father stayed late at his shop listening to the radio. My mother stopped giving piano lessons. Babcia Ruchla spent more time at the window than she used to, watching the street.
I didn’t understand most of what they said. I only understood that something was coming, and that the grown-ups were afraid.
One night at the end of August, my father sat me down at the kitchen table.
“Zofia,” he said. “We’re going on a trip. A long one. To America.”
“America?” I said. “Why?”
He didn’t answer right away. He looked at my mother. My mother looked at the floor.
“Because it’s safer,” he said finally. “For people like us. My cousin in Chicago sent us papers. We have to go now, while we still can.”
“When?” I asked.
“Tomorrow night,” he said.
“What about Stanislaw?”
My father put his hand on mine.
“You can say goodbye in the morning,” he said. “But you can’t tell him where we’re going, Zofia. You can’t tell anyone. Do you understand?”
I didn’t understand. But I nodded.
I didn’t get to say goodbye.
In the morning, the Nowaks’ door was locked. Mrs. Nowak had taken Stanislaw to visit her sister in the countryside for two days. They’d left before dawn.
I stood in front of their door for a long time. I knocked. Nobody answered.
We left that night.
We could each bring one suitcase. My mother packed clothes and photographs. My father packed his watchmaker’s tools wrapped in velvet. Aron packed his wooden horse.
I packed my school notebook, two dresses, and the book Stanislaw had lent me the week before. It was an adventure story about two children lost in Africa. I hadn’t finished it yet.
Babcia Ruchla didn’t come.
She stood in the doorway in her nightgown and refused. She said she was too old for boats and trains and strange countries. She said she’d been born in Warsaw and she’d die in Warsaw. She said somebody had to stay and keep the apartment.
My father begged her. My mother cried. Babcia only shook her head.
“I’ll be fine,” she said. “The Nowaks are right across the hall. They’ll look after me.”
She kissed each of us on the forehead. When she got to me, she held my face in her cinnamon-smelling hands.
“Be brave, my little bird,” she said. “And come back someday.”
Then she pressed something into my hand. A small iron key on a loop of string.
“The key to our door,” she said. “So you can always get back in.”
We left Warsaw on a train at midnight. Then another train. Then a boat. Then another boat, much bigger, that took eleven days to cross the ocean.
On September first, while we were on the train to the coast, the war began.
We arrived in New York in October. Then we took a train to Chicago, where my father’s cousin had found us a tiny apartment above a bakery on Milwaukee Avenue.
It was cold. The buildings were tall and dark. Everyone spoke English so fast I couldn’t understand a word.
My teacher at the new school couldn’t pronounce Zofia. She called me Sophie. Then the other children started calling me Zoe. By the end of the first year, even my parents had started using it.
Part Four: The Silence
We wrote letters.
My mother wrote to Babcia every week. I wrote to Stanislaw. I told him about Chicago, about the lake that looked like an ocean, about the snow that came up to my knees. I told him I still wore the swallow every day.
None of the letters were ever answered.
The war went on for six years.
We heard things on the radio. Terrible things. We saw pictures in the newspapers that my mother tore out and hid before Aron could see them. My father stopped talking at dinner. He’d sit at the table and stare at nothing, turning his wedding ring around and around on his finger.
When the war ended in 1945, my father wrote to the Red Cross. He wrote to every agency and organization he could find. He asked about Babcia Ruchla. He asked about the Nowak family. He asked about our building on Twarda Street.
The answers came slowly, over many years.
Our building had been destroyed. Most of the street was gone. There were no records of Ruchla Lewin after 1942. There were no records of the Nowak family at all.
My father put the letters in a drawer and never spoke about them again.
I kept the swallow pendant.
I wore it every day through high school. I wore it when I went to college at the University of Illinois and studied to become a teacher, just like I’d told Stanislaw I would.
I wore it the day I met Abe Berman at a dance at the Jewish community center. He was tall and gentle and laughed at all my jokes, even the bad ones.
I married Abe in 1951.
On my wedding day, I took the swallow off for the first time in twelve years. I put it in a small velvet box in my dresser drawer.
I told myself it was time to let go.
Part Five: A Long Life
Abe and I had a good life. A very good life. I want to make sure you understand that.
We had three children. Ruth, David, and Miriam. We bought a little brick house in Albany Park. Abe worked as an accountant for forty years. I taught third grade at a public school on Lawrence Avenue for thirty-four years.
I taught thousands of children to read. Some of them were immigrants like I’d been, who arrived not knowing a word of English. I always made sure to learn how to pronounce their names correctly.
Abe died in 2009. A stroke, very fast. He was eighty-two. We’d been married fifty-eight years.
After the funeral, I sat alone in our bedroom and opened the dresser drawer. The velvet box was still there.
I took out the swallow. I held it for a long time.
I didn’t put it on. But I didn’t put it back in the drawer either. I kept it in my pocket for a week before I finally returned it.
My children grew up and had children of their own. I became a grandmother. Then a great-grandmother.
Poland and Stanislaw became distant memories from another life. Sometimes I dreamed about the courtyard on Twarda Street. The orange light on the yellow walls. The swallows diving over the rooftops. Cherry pits in a flowerpot.
But when I woke up, I was in Chicago, and I was old, and that little girl was gone.
My granddaughter Maya moved in with me three years ago.
She’s my daughter Miriam’s youngest. She’s twenty-nine, with dark curly hair like mine used to be and a laugh like Abe’s. She’s a physical therapist. She helps old people learn to walk again after strokes and surgeries.
She said she moved in to help me with groceries and stairs. But I think she moved in because she was lonely after a breakup and needed somewhere soft to land. We take care of each other.
When Maya graduated from her physical therapy program, I gave her the swallow pendant.
I’d thought about it for a long time. My daughters had never been interested in old jewelry. My other grandchildren lived far away.
But Maya used to sit with me when she was little and ask about Warsaw. She was the only one who ever wanted to hear the stories. She would sit on the floor with her chin in her hands and say, “Tell me about the courtyard again, Grandma.”
“It’s a swallow,” I told her, as I fastened it around her neck. “They always come back. No matter how far they fly.”
She touched it with her fingertips.
“Who gave it to you?” she asked.
“A boy,” I said. “A long time ago. In Warsaw.”
She smiled. “Was he cute?”
