Departing - Jessica Maria Tuccelli

Last night I dreamt I was in a little town called Terezín, which is some sixty kilometers outside of Prague. I knew it was Terezín, although I’ve never been there and have heard it named only once in hallowed whispers in my parent’s kitchen on the High Holidays. Now that I am an adult, I know that during the war years, Terezín was transformed into a ghetto where Jews from all over Europe were brought before they were sent east to the gas chambers and the ovens. Of the fifteen thousand children sent to Terezín, only one-hundred came back. My grandmother was one of the children who survived.

In the Terezín of my dream, I find myself in a cemetery for children who perished in Auschwitz. Their brightly colored toys; rag dollies, oatmeal teddy bears, painted wooden blocks, are partially buried in the brilliant green grass and scattered between handsome headstones. But it is not a sad place because the children here are no longer suffering. In the distance, I see my grandmother. She beckons me with a wave of her hand, and as I climb up the hill, I hear the sound of laughter and gaiety, and when I reach my grandmother’s side, I can finally see them—scores of children dressed in their best clothes, little suits and dresses, not fancy but pressed and clean. They have come to visit the graves of the dead children. They reach into a fishbowl filled with polished turquoise stones. Each child dips her or his small hand into the bowl and lovingly places a gem atop each headstone.

When I woke, my eyes were filled with tears.

When I was five, I proclaimed my grandmother my “Favorite Person in the World.” I remember her scolded me saying, “Bubele, you mustn’t say such things!” But from the way she smiled, I suspect she was secretly pleased.

I want to tell you something meaningful about how my grandmother survived the Holocaust. But I can’t. I didn’t know her long enough to know to ask. She died when I was ten.

I can tell you she came to stay overnight when my parents went out for the evening, bringing with her Pepperidge Farm cookies and red Jell-O in a mold. She let me stay up late to watch The Price Is Right. After our program was over I’d leap and bound and spin and sometimes crash about the living room, imagining I was a ballerina in Swan Lake. The way my grandmother took such delight in my dancing, you might have thought I was the next Anna Pavlova, but honesty I have two left feet and not a great sense of direction. Without fail I would dance myself to exhaustion and awaken the next morning to find, as if by magic, that I was tucked into my bed, my ballerina outfit hanging neatly on a hanger from my closet doorknob, and Grandmother snoring softly beside me.