Marion

I stand abruptly and flee, bumping into a few chairs as I reach the bathroom just in the nick of time. Thankfully, I’d grabbed my coat and purse, and after a moment of gagging in the ladies’ room, and only regurgitating a bit of bile, I gaze in the mirror. After I wipe my mouth and examine the white and gray hair growth around the part in my hair I shake my head and frown. Am I a coward?

I had just listened to a woman, maybe in her fifties, probably ten years younger than me, describe how she had sometimes touched the numbers that the Nazis had tattooed onto her grandmother’s forearm. Her grandmother, no longer alive, had never wanted the tattoo removed because it was part of her past—but hearing about her survivor resolve was what had forced my quick exit. My heart beat faster en route to the restroom, as I thought about how my own grandmother had perished, along with my grandfather, each in a different concentration camp, thus dying terribly alone. Of course, I don’t resent that woman for having her grandmother while she was growing up. It’s good that her grandmother, like so many relatives of the people seated there with me at the Holocaust descendants group meeting, had escaped, but the enduring evidence that woman had mentioned is what upset me the most: those tattooed numbers. They’d rekindled the memory not only of my grandparents but of someone akin to them: Marion and the...