The Shattered Six-Year-Old Speaks and I Ask her to Return by Gabrielle Ariella Kaplan-Mayer

The shattered six-year-old 

Before the day I found out about the death camps, my world was Muppets and stories and waiting for the school bus. When I saw particles of dust in the sunlight, I did not think of human flesh.

I thought the world was built from love.

That day, I was waiting on the Temple steps with the other first graders. Sunday school was over. 

I’m looking for Dad’s blue Honda Accord hatchback. Dad picks us up, takes us kids to lunch at McDonald’s after Sunday school. Julie rips up her french fries and hamburger into little sticks and circles to make a forest of fast food flowers. Because she’s the older sister, I do the same. Dad sips his coffee and lets us play.

The older kids come running down the steps. They are shouting but their shouts are whispers. Electricity runs through them. I move closer. I overhear them say to each other they burned people in ovens.

Dad pulls up and I tell him what I’ve heard and ask if it’s true. He drives home, hands clutching the wheel, skipping McDonald’s. We go into the house and he whispers to mom.

We sit in the family room. Our baby brother’s taking his nap. Mom and Dad are forced to tell me things now that they would not have told me for years, things about us. About hatred. About Nazis. About Pop-pop. About Pop-pop’s sister, Grete. Whom I’m named for.

Dad tries to soothe us. He says It was a long time ago. Mom tries, too, saying: We are safe here. You are safe.

But the world I knew is shattered. I may need to find a different world, I think.

I start to have a dream at night. I’m sitting in Grandma’s kitchen and a man comes to the door and I let him in the house. He becomes a wolf and chases me upstairs. I run into the bedroom and discover a secret wall that opens and on the other side, there is another room where I’m safe. I hear Grandma scream Go away, Wolf! and she pushes the monster out of the house, a reverse Red Riding Hood.

Waking up in bed, I want to stay in the dream. 

I want to find the wall behind the wall, the magical place that only I can see. I want to run through a meadow of flowers, like the one Pop-pop used to take me to, in the time before he fell over because his heart stopped beating, the field where we used to walk together before the day that he took his last breath, just months ago. I want to run through the wildflowers, to fall into the flowers, to see Pop-pop again, to laugh my head off, to lay there until nightfall and look into the stars. I want to pick bouquets of wildflowers and give them to everyone who is sad.

I do not want to live in a world where Aunt Grete was put in a cattle car, sent to die by poison gas. 

I go away.

When the part of my soul who picks wildflowers leaves, this is the me left behind

When I wake up from the dream, I don’t remember the secret wall, I remember the monster. I tell myself It was just a dream because that’s what I’ve been taught to do. I know not to wake anyone in the middle of the night. I tug the sheet over my head and wait in the dark for sleep.

I am lonely.

I lose my desire to pick dandelions in the yard, to blow their white seeds. It just looks like dust.

I spend more time at the Blum’s house next door. The Blum boys are teenagers now and don’t have time for Pretzel, their old Pug. But I do. I sit with Pretzel every afternoon. I feed her biscuits. I play chase with her back and forth across the floor. When I am with Pretzel, the world is not shattered. 

I go to school. I do my best. I have a pixie cut and people think I’m a boy. I cuddle in Grandma’s lap when she comes to visit and listen to her stories about Pop-pop. I look at the photo of Great-Aunt Grete, the one where she is a child my age and sits beside her big, black dog. I know what happens to her. I wonder, what is the name of her dog?

I make jokes and entertain people with silly stories. I lose myself in books. I imagine that I am Laura Ingalls. Dad gets a new job, and we move to a new town, far away from Pretzel. I am the only Jewish child in my second-grade classroom. The teacher gives me a Star of David ornament to paint while the others make rosy-cheeked Santas. One boy whispers Dirty Jew. Grandma drives five hours to visit us at our new house and the whole time she is there, I stay by her side in the kitchen. She makes magic in her pots and pans: in goes this and that, out comes vegetable soup, roasted chicken, rich chocolate cake. Eat, live, grow, she says, by cooking for and feeding us.

When I am ten years old, four years after the world shatters, I start getting thirsty. I wake up all through the night to pee. My pancreas shuts down. 

I am rushed to the hospital. Maybe I will die now. Maybe I will go back to the other place where I am not scared of the people who send other people to ovens. Maybe I will go dance through the stars.

It is not time for me to die. It is time to start taking insulin shots. It is time to imagine that the world is both horrors and also miracles. My life becomes a miracle.

I begin to notice rays of light and energy that come into quiet rooms. Pop-pop comes to check on me late afternoons, after school. I watch Grandma in the kitchen now when she visits and I learn how to cook, too. I audition for plays and find safety in endless rehearsals, memorizing lines in dark theaters, pretending that I live in different worlds, Emily in ‘Our Town’, Cecily in ‘The Importance of Being Earnest.’ People clap. I finish high school and go to college. I travel. I smoke hash. I fall in lust. I fall in lust. I fall in lust. I fall in love. I bring two children into the world. My first baby almost dies in childbirth, but he doesn’t, and I hold him to my chest when the nurse lifts him out of the NICU incubator. We name him George, for my grandfather. Pop-pop kvells in the afterworld. I take him to meet Grandma in her nursing home, where she smiles from a land called dementia. Carefully, I place the baby in her arms.

The returning is a process

When I sing and dance with my children, when I run breathlessly with them, I sense the part of myself who is missing. A part of myself who used to sing and dance and run that way. I hear her saying

I have been here, waiting. All of this time. 

One day, she says to me

I want to dance through the wildflower field inside your heart. 

I had forgotten that magical place–but she remembered!

I whisper to her come back and she whispers to me I will. We begin to talk like that, first a little choppy, but then it gets easier and easier.

I nurture her, all of these years later, by writing these words. They are not easy to write but when my tears fall softly on the keyboard, she knows that they are an offering. I will do anything for her now, as I do for my own children, who are at the end of their teenage years, each with their own passions and pain. 

In my life, I have walked through fire to heal old wounds and broken parts and I would do it again and again. When the six-year-old part of my soul nestles back inside me now, I hold her tight.

Gabrielle is a writer and spiritual director working on a memoir about ongoing ancestor connections. She writes a weekly Substack called “Journey With The Seasons” offering poetry and creative prompts.