For nearly 30 years, she has been failing to tell the story about a very quiet boy who marched from Auschwitz to Birkenau in 1996, stole a shoe from a mountain of children’s shoes on Holocaust Remembrance Day, stuffed it into his pocket and couldn’t explain why.
Words by Sabrina Orah Mark
September 9, 2024
She wasn’t there. It was her brother who was there, and it was her brother who told her the story. It follows her, this story. Over the years the story has grown a long white beard. She tries to comb it and it blurs.
For nearly 30 years she has been failing to tell the story about the shoe, how in 1996 her brother, Ari, along with 5,000 other high school students, marched from Auschwitz to Birkenau, and on the trip Ari met a boy whose last name was More, or was it Morestein, or Anymore, or Unmoored. She is not even sure of the boy’s name, and so in her head she just calls the boy More. “As a proud Marcher,” says the March of the Living website, “your experience will be in direct contrast to the tragic fate of hundreds of thousands of Jews and others, who were forced by the Nazis to take part in the infamous death Marches, across vast expanses of European terrain, under the harshest of conditions. This time, however, there will be a difference. It will be a March of the Living among thousands, marching shoulder to shoulder.” The march from Auschwitz to Birkenau is a little over two miles. Ari’s shoulder and More’s shoulder, she imagines, never touched. Not even once.
She goes upstairs and vacuums her sons’ bedrooms. She doesn’t write the story. A small mole, the same color as the shoe, appears under her left eye. She doesn’t write the story, although it’s possible the story has begun to write her.
“Remember that story you told me about the boy who stole the shoe from Auschwitz?” “Here we go again,” says her brother. Every few years she asks her brother to tell her the story about More and the shoe and whether he thinks More took the shoe all the way back with him to New York City and shoved it in his closet behind a skateboard and a pile of dirty laundry. “He just grabbed the shoe from a mountain of shoes, shoved it into his pocket, and then carried it through Poland,” her brother says. “Like an inheritance?” she asks. “Maybe. Or more like something that once belonged to him. Like something he had lost long ago, and now he had found. His father was a rabbi,” says Ari. “He was a good kid. He didn’t know why he did it. He was a mess over it.” “You will spend the first week in Poland,” says the March of the Living website, “traveling around the country, searching for traces of a world that no longer exists.” But More did find a trace. And he pocketed it.
The story decays, returns to the soil in her brain, enriches it, but still nothing grows.
Must this story she keeps failing to write stay unwritten to honor the child who, according to history, must stay dead? No, she decides. She must find some way to write it. But instead of writing the story, she designs a course on how to write stories that refuse to be written, and after she designs the course, she goes to the supermarket, wanders the aisles, and leaves with nothing.
Whether the laces of the child’s shoe looped and tangled into cursive letters in More’s pocket, and whether those letters spelled out secret messages, she is almost certain not even More knows. “Did the shoe even have laces?” she asks her brother. “Millie,” he says, “enough.” This is the name her brother calls her. Millie. It’s not her real name. Her real name is Sabrina. Her brother started calling her Millie after the painting “Millie” by Amy Cutler. It is a painting of a woman with an oar for an arm, who is wearing a boat. She loves this painting because Millie is as much inside the boat as she is the boat that carries her to shore. She loves this painting because Millie is her own fairy tale. When her brother calls her “Millie,” her insides light up with happiness.
In 1996, after her brother told her the shoe story for the first time, she repeated the story for months. “My brother,” she would begin, “went to Auschwitz for March of the Living.” She was in her 20s at the time, and she enjoyed how fucked-up that sentence sounded. “My brother went to Auschwitz for March of the Living.” Now that she’s almost 50, she is embarrassed by the desire she once had to startle people in this way, and even more embarrassed that rather than dim this desire it’s possible she has refined it instead. What lies at the heart of her obsession, she wonders, to write this story she cannot write? In one of her more cynical moments, she admits to no one but herself that without her ancestors’ pain she fears her life would have no meaning at all.
“The story is impossible,” a friend tells her in 2001. “The shoes are behind glass.” “My brother isn’t lying,” she says. The boy named More flickers for a second, like a dying lightbulb, but then comes back on, and when it comes back on, it shines even brighter. “My brother,” she says, “would never make a story like that up.” “You should call Auschwitz,” says her friend. “I don’t want to call Auschwitz. And even if I did call Auschwitz, who would answer?” She never tells her friend she eventually does scan the internet for a number, but when she sees the number out of the corner of her eye, she looks away just like she does whenever she sees a dead animal on the road.
Now it is the summer of 2023. Her house had burned down 18 months earlier. She still hasn’t written the story about the shoe. The night before the fire, she had a dream she was at a beautiful outside gathering with friends and family from her past and present. The lawn was lush, and wishbone chairs with soft white cushions were arranged in rows, like for a ceremony. In the distance, three small horses appeared and slowly walked toward her, which felt like more peace than she had ever experienced in her waking life. Behind the horses were three men. One approached her. With his face very close to her face he said, “We are returning tomorrow to take back our land.” The following night her house burned down. She doesn’t tell this story because she knows most people won’t believe her, and also because she stumbles when she describes the men, always uncertain whether or not to say these men were native to the land because it was a dream and she wasn’t even sure what land the man was referring to, or where exactly he was from, until her house burned down.
She used to be nearsighted, but now she can’t even see the close-up things. Now when she looks up the pile of shoes on the internet, they are blurry. She has two pairs of reading glasses, and often she can’t find either.
There are times she doesn’t really think she survived the fire. On one hand it feels perfectly logical not to have survived, and on the other it’s a terror so unbearable, the only thing that comforts her is sugar. Dead people, she figures, have very little interest in sugar. The more sugar she eats, the greater proof of her aliveness.
She thinks about the shoe once a day. Sometimes twice. She keeps trying to write this story. When she checks the March of the Living website again, now living in a rental while waiting for her house to be gutted and rebuilt, and this time wearing her reading glasses, there is news of a fundraising campaign called “From Sole to Soul” to preserve the shoes because it’s been almost 100 years and the shoes are now deteriorating. She finds an article with the headline “Auschwitz Museum Begins Emotional Work of Conserving 8,000 Shoes of Murdered Children.” In a modern conservation laboratory on the grounds of the former Auschwitz camp, a man wearing blue rubber gloves uses a scalpel to scrape away rust from the eyelets of small brown shoes worn by children before they were murdered in gas chambers. Colleagues at the other end of a long work table rub away dust and grime, using soft cloths and careful circular motions on the leather of the fragile objects. The shoes are then scanned and photographed and cataloged in a database. The cost of preserving a single shoe is $50.
Her burnt house is in a historic district, so she can’t start rebuilding until the Historic Preservation Committee approves her plan. The gables need to match the gables of 100 years ago. The windows must look out onto the small, haunted Southern town she lives in like they looked out in 1923. Their heads and jambs and sills must be the heads and jambs and sills of long ago. Her house burned down in December 2021, and she does not receive the committee’s approval until July 2022. While she waits, she is allowed to gut, but she isn’t allowed to build. What is time? she wonders. Whose history are they trying to preserve? And for how much longer?
Her friend, a novelist, offers to do a house clearing for her now that the house is rebuilt. The novelist is one of the few people she tells about the dream she had the night before the fire. She wants to ask her if she thinks she’s crazy for rebuilding. She wants to ask her if she thinks the man in her dream will burn her house down again. And if he does burn it down again, should she rebuild it again? How many times is too many? Burn down, gut, rebuild. Burn down, gut, rebuild. Burn down, gut, rebuild. When should she give up? she wonders. She still hasn’t even written the story about the shoe. Had her house not burned down, would she have written it already? From all the sugar, she has gained 10 pounds, and she promises herself that after her house is rebuilt, she will lose the weight and write the story about the shoe.
A few days after the house clearing, the novelist sends her an email with a list of all the dead things she encountered hanging around the house. None of them knew they were dead.
When she is dead, will she need a novelist to tell her she is dead?
The novelist also tells her that one of the dead was adamant that she honor the land, vow to take care of it, and ask permission to be there. It occurs to her she has never once in her life asked permission to live anywhere.
A few nights after she receives this email, she and her husband and sons dig a hole in their yard. The moon is a strawberry moon, and she still feels like there is a good chance this is the afterlife. In the hole, her husband leaves his favorite pipe tobacco, Captain Black. Her older son writes a note: “Thank you for letting us live here.” Her younger son leaves a dark blue stone. Into the hole she empties a jar of dirt from Israel she mixed with dirt from her grandfather’s grave. For years she kept this mixed-up dirt in a small glass jar in her nightstand, which she would periodically open and touch as a way to touch the same dirt her grandfather’s body was touching mixed with something holy. It was, inexplicably, one of the few things that survived the fire. She wonders if she weighed the dirt in the jar whether it would be the same weight as the shoe More carried. She figures probably it is. Give or take. And the same color, too. If she could, she would empty the jar of dirt once a day into the hole, but all she has is a day’s worth. She recycles the jar instead of keeping it. Let it become something else, she decides. Let it be spun. Let it be shattered. Let it be free. ◊
Winner of a National Jewish Book Award for Happily, her collection of Paris Review essays on fairy tales and motherhood, Sabrina Orah Mark is the author of the poetry collections Tsim Tsum and The Babies and the short-story collection Wild Milk, which won the Georgia Author of the Year Award for Short Story and was a finalist for the Townsend Prize for Fiction. Mark teaches nonfiction, fiction, and poetry for the Bennington Writing Seminars.