The Girl in the Green Sweater

It is a funny thing, memory. It is a trick we play on ourselves, to keep connected to who we were, what we thought, how we lived. It is fractured, like a dream that returns in bits and pieces. It is the answer to forgetting.

I remember-the bits and pieces and the entire cloth. My father used to tell me I had a mind like a trap. “Krzysha will know,” he would say. “Krzysha remembers.” He called me Krzysha. Everyone else called me Krysha, and the difference was everything.

Yes, I remember. If I saw something, heard something, experienced something, I put it away for later, someplace where I could reach for it and call it back to mind. It was all filed away, the stories of my life bundled for safekeeping. Even now, when most of the people I remember are gone, they are here for me like they never left. Like what happened so many years ago happened yesterday instead.

My memories come to me in Polish. I think in Polish, dream in Polish, remember in Polish. Then it passes through Hebrew and somehow comes out in English. I do not know how this works, but this is how it is. Sometimes it has to go through German and Yiddish before I am able to tell it or understand it. All these thoughts. All these moments. All these sights and sounds and smells-tiny, fractured pieces, fighting for my attention, calling me to make sense of the whole. My memories of my family’s struggle during the Second World War are the memories of a child, reinforced over a lifetime. They are my memories first, and then on top I have put my father’s memory, and my mother’s, and even my baby brother’s. To these I have added the reflections of others who shared our ordeal, along with the histories I have read. I might have been only a child, but what I saw, what I heard, what I experienced, has been reconsidered many, many times, and it is the accumulation of memories that now survive.