remark days earlier as the Italian coastline had faded from view. Heads around her had bobbed in agreement: we were fortunate to be away from the violence that had worsened ominously against the Jews in recent months. But as the ship pulled from the Stazione Maritima, I did not feel lucky, but alone. My parents were still there—and I wanted to go back.
“You!” a male voice barked, and I turned with a flicker of hope. Perhaps my uncle had found me after all. But it was one of the burly stevedores who had herded us from the boat. “Down!” I scrambled from the railing, trying to fade into the crowd. The travelers had moved forward, though, dwindling and leaving me exposed like a broken shell on the beach at low tide. “Keep moving.” It had been like this the whole of the trip, deckhands shouting orders to the lower-class passengers, not bothering to maintain a pretense of courtesy. “Someone here to get you?” the man pressed.
I processed his English slowly. Good question. What if the message had not gotten through and no one was coming for me? Perhaps they would let me go back, I thought with fleeting joy. But after all of the struggle to get me out of Italy, Mamma would think that a failure.
It was only a week ago that I had been reading in our two-story apartment just off the Via del Monte, snug in the bedroom that I had shared with Nonna before she passed two years earlier, when Mamma came running in, breathless. “We have to go.” Downstairs, Papa was throwing papers into the fire that never burned in summer, with an energy I thought he no longer possessed. “Come!” Mamma ordered, urging me down to the street, and lifted me onto the handles of her bike.
“Where are we going?”
My mother did not answer, but pedaled fiercely through the darkened streets. It was after curfew and I feared the police might stop us. We neared the harbor, drawing close to the docks where too many people were crowding onto a rickety ship. Mamma stopped, climbed off and pulled me from the bike, breathing heavily. Perspiration glistened on her forehead and cheeks. “You have to go first.”
I stared at her in disbelief. “Where?”
“America.” She handed me a satchel heavy with coins, and a ticket and papers, though real or forged I could not say.
She could not possibly be serious. I reached for her, panicking. “I can’t go alone!” The sight of the dark water behind the ship filled me with terror.
“There’s no other way. You’ll be fine. You’re strong.” Mamma had never coddled me, forcing me to find my own way from our apartment through the city to market from a young age and do almost everything for myself. It was as if she had known and somehow been planning for this.
“Why now?”
“These documents.” She gestured. “That ship. You’ll have to transfer in Gibralter, but there’s no telling when we might get another chance.” But her voice was evasive, and remembering Papa burning the papers, I knew it was something more. I would be leaving them behind in danger.
“Papa and I will follow.” I knew it was a lie. Papa was too weak to travel. She urged me forward onto the rotten-smelling dock, finding gaps in the crowd that I could not see and making her own with shoulders and elbows where none existed. Her hair fanned out around her, a lioness with her cub.
We neared the front of the crowd and Mamma pushed toward a uniformed man and handed him a fistful of bills, saying a few words I could not hear. She turned back. “Come.” We reached the edge where the dock met the ship and my toe caught in the gap. Mamma grabbed my arm hard to keep me from stumbling. “Stay out of sight as much as you can.” Her fingers bit into my skin. “Talk to no one. I will send word to Papa’s brother.” She took her mizpah necklace, with its half-heart pendant made of gold that she had always worn, from around her neck, and fastened it on mine. My father had given it to her years earlier, keeping his half in his breast pocket, close to his own heart. She did not kiss me, but pressed me tightly to her once, firm and hard. Then she released me and, before I could follow, disappeared into the crowd.
“Hey!” The stevedore’s voice came again. My vision cleared. Impatient now, he gestured with his thick hand in the direction of the large building ahead. “You gotta go in there. Police come for the kids who’ve got no one to claim them.” There was a quiet thud in my chest, as I carefully pieced together his words. What did the police do with those kids?
I ran my tongue over the chipped spot on my front tooth as I glanced back over my shoulder at the ship. Once dirty and confining, now it seemed a refuge. But I did not have money for a meal, much less a return ticket. “You can’t go back, only forward.” The man stood with arms folded, blocking the way behind me, and I had no choice but to move in the direction of the building.
Inside the high-ceilinged arrivals hall, bodies pressed together, making the air warm and thick. Conversations in different languages, German, Yiddish, Italian, rose and clashed around me. I hung back from the queue that shuffled forward, trying to figure out what to do. In an alcove to the right, a few of the other kids from the ship sat forlornly on a wood bench. A policeman lorded over them in the doorway. Nothing good was going to happen to that lot and I didn’t want to join them. But I was not about to go up to immigration and announce that I was alone.
I saw a sign for the ladies’ room at the far side of the terminal and made my way toward it. Pressing inside through the wall of stench, I grimaced at my reflection in the cracked mirror. On the boat I had tried to cow my thick dark hair back into braids, as Nonna had done each morning. But pieces stuck out in all directions. The scratch on my cheek had just begun to heal. I pushed my way to the basin where women jostled at the sink like pigs at a trough. Reaching my hands into the fray, I managed to get a few drops of water. I desperately wanted to drink it, but didn’t dare. Instead, I used it to smooth my hair and wipe a smudge from my forehead.
Back in the main hall, the crowds from the ship had thinned. I walked to a newspaper stand in the corner, pretending to be interested in the headlines. Ten minutes passed. “You buying?” the man behind the kiosk asked. I moved away, feeling exposed in the vast, emptying arrivals hall. If I stood here any longer, the policeman who took the kids was going to notice. In the short queue which remained ahead, a family with several children was nearing the immigration desk. I moved close to them, hoping to slip through with them.
But as the family stepped past the desk, a hand caught my shoulder, stopping me.
“Papers?” I drew myself up to my full four feet eight inches, then handed my passport to the man in a dark blue cap and jacket whose eyes darted back and forth as he scanned the paper in front of him. An open pack of Lucky Strikes peeked out of his breast pocket. I held my breath, praying that the papers were good, and that the money my mother had given the ship’s purser was enough to have my name added to the manifest. The waiting room on the far side of the immigration desk, where cleared arrivals met their hosts, stood just feet but oceans away.
The man looked up beneath bushy brows. “Who’s sponsoring you?” I shook my head at the unfamiliar word. “You have family here?” he asked more slowly.
“My aunt and uncle. They’re expecting me.” My accent sounded thicker than when I had practiced speaking English with Mamma back home.
“Where are they?” I faltered. “Children have to be collected.” He made me sound like luggage. I bristled at the notion of still being called a child at almost seventeen, then decided not to complain. He gestured toward the guarded side room with the kids. “Otherwise you’ll have to go to the Home until your relatives can collect you.”
“Home?” I repeated, picking out the word I recognized.
“It’s a place
