“Rubble Children” by Aaron Kreuter

University of Alberta Press, 2024, 232 pp.

If it wasn’t for Betsy Brownstone, I doubt any of us would have become obsessed with the Holocaust. While other thirteen-year-old girls were into boys and fashion and vampires Betsy was reading thick terrifying histories, making charts of the numbers of dead per camp, drawing pictures of synagogues aflame, the doors barricaded shut, disembodied mouths laughing mirthfully. Yes, our obsession would soon parallel hers, but she was the one who showed us the way. Without Betsy Brownstone, I can say with confidence, the Toronto Chapter of Rubble Children, our girls-only Holocaust study group—which also happened to be the first and only chapter of Rubble Children—would never have come into existence.

A fat, stringy-haired thirteen-year-old, Betsy was bossy and brilliant, stubborn and loud. She recruited us one by one into the group, quickly proved her mettle, her deep devotion to all things Holocaust, her right to be our de facto leader. It was Betsy who discovered Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah. It was Betsy who had us read Ruth Kluger’s Still Alive, with its opening sentence that we repeated to each other for weeks: “Their secret was death, not sex.” It was Betsy who had us memorize the name of each and every death camp, their personnel, their killing methods. It was Betsy who came up with our motto, which we chanted at the beginning and end of every meeting. “It happened once. It can happen again.” Betsy’s intensity drew us all to her, and her brilliance and magnetism didn’t let us go; we were in love with her, we respected and feared her, we wanted to impress her, wanted her to like us, to see that we, too, were passionate about the Holocaust. Not only had she read more than any of us, memorized the most statistics and dates and gruesome deaths, but she was the most willing to force the Holocaust into every aspect of her life. While other girls were preparing for their bat mitzvah parties with dreams of centerpieces of summer flowers, embossed dance floors, and hot DJs, Betsy was envisioning something a little different. She wanted her bat mitzvah to be Holocaust themed: each table named after a different notorious Nazi commander, the centerpieces models of famous Third Reich buildings, the dancers wearing striped pajamas. POW rations for dinner. She would enter the ballroom to a military march.

Naturally, this vision did not sit well with her parents. “Isn’t this what’s important?” Betsy would rail at the family fights that had become a nightly occurrence. “The purposeful extermination of an entire people? Our people?!”

Her father flatly refused to accommodate Betsy, so Betsy—“what choice did I have?” she’d say whenever she told us the story—launched a hunger strike and a letter-writing campaign against him. She wrote seven and a half letters, rife with the facts of Nazi malice, drank nothing but water and ate nothing but plain toast for three days. Even under such pressure, her father wouldn’t relent, and Betsy, in a rare moment of compromise, decided to drop her suit.

Betsy didn’t win that battle with her father, but to us the outcome was clear: she was a force to be reckoned with. She lived her ideals. We held her even higher in our group mythos. We were the rubble children, and she was our rubble child.

✶

Since the core members of Rubble Children—myself, Betsy, Amanda Stein, Sam Bornstein, and Hadas Grossman—met at Kol B’Seder, the Reform synagogue our families were members of, in the early days we’d meet a half-hour before Thursday night Hebrew classes in the shul’s boardroom. However, once the synagogue found out what was going on in our little meetings, they insisted on sending somebody to supervise us, which is funny when you think about it: wasn’t Kol B’Seder partly the reason for our obsession? The Holocaust was an integral part of the curriculum at every grade. Betsy, who went to a Jewish day school before transferring to Brickshire for grade six, had been inundated with it on a near daily basis.

The administration got Stefan Lemieux, a retired French teacher who often volunteered at Kol B’Seder, to supervise us. Poor Stefan; he had no idea what he was in for. Quickly discovering what went on at our weekly study sessions, he told us that he was not happy that such “sweet young ladies” were spending their time talking about mobile murder vans and unmarked mass graves, and tried to interest us in The Little Prince instead. Betsy, in response, made him cry by narrating to him the day in the life of a Treblinka death camp guard. Stefan told Kol B’Seder that he couldn’t continue watching us, and our permission to use the boardroom before Hebrew school was revoked. What did we care? If anything, we felt empowered. Our Holocaust education had gone beyond the bounds of institutional sanction. We were now in uncharted waters.

We started meeting every Sunday afternoon at Amanda’s house instead. In Amanda’s basement, we were unsupervised, unfettered, free to dig as deeply into the pit as we pleased. It happened once. It can happen again. 

From those humble beginnings, Rubble Children grew.

✶

Those Sundays at Amanda Stein’s house. They were easily the focal point of our week, where we could discuss what we’d read, share every horrifying and unbelievable fact, lather up our anger and our communal disdain for those responsible, cleanse ourselves in sweet rage at the impossibility of ever truly seeking justice. We’d sit on brown leather sofas, plastic yellow bowls of party mix and paper cups of soft drinks on the coffee table, light coming in from the high basement windows. In the winter there’d be a draft from the never-used fireplace. Amanda’s dad would make us nachos with black beans and green salsa; I can still smell the hot cheese. He didn’t know the real focus of the club, thought we were organizing a fundraiser for Israeli children living in poverty, and besides the food and drink, left us alone. 

But we weren’t organizing a fundraiser. Mostly, we were scaring ourselves shitless. Don’t misunderstand these no-nonsense reminiscences, don’t think of us as just heartless macabre young women: we were deeply, terrifically afraid. The more fear we felt, the further we needed to go, the more we needed to worry this historical event that in its complexity and its unknowability was ultimately unworriable. We’d practice standing in the basement bathroom’s small dark closet without making a sound. We’d scream at each other trying to get us to break, name names, divulge. We’d play Sophie’s Choice. We were constantly updating and improving our go-bags. We talked about if we had an hour to vacate our homes, what would we bring, what would we leave behind? The heart and soul of Rubble Children, though, remained the horrendous historical accounts, the details, the paradoxes and debates. We’d argue about the functionalist versus intentionalist interpretation of the final solution. We’d devote two weeks to the Nuremberg trials, to post-war Germany. We’d assemble rigorous reading lists. We’d tell jokes; well, mostly Sam Bornstein told jokes. “In post-war Germany, what do they call a Nazi judge who helped craft the race laws?” she’d ask, her face solemn, like she was telling a ghost story. “I don’t know Sam, what do they call a Nazi judge who helped craft the race laws in post-war Germany?” Sam would smile, look us each in the eyes one at a time, before delivering her punchline: “Your honour.” We watched the ninth episode of Band of Brothers at least once a month (Betsy supplying the VHS, taped over an episode of The Young and the Restless). The six American soldiers on patrol in the woods, the war basically over, when one of the soldiers—a new recruit, not fitting in, desperate to see action—stumbles onto a concentration camp. The truth of what the Nazis had been doing behind their lines dawning on them. We’d sit on Amanda’s brown leather couches, amazed and angry, the soundtrack of swelling strings cranked loud enough to drown in. Destroyed bodies hanging off of fences, the imprisoned in their hovel barracks, pits of the dead. The inmate trying to get the soldiers to understand: “Juden. Juden. Juden.” The soldiers’ disbelief, their shock, their disgust, their anger: it moved us to tears every time. Juden. Juden. Juden.

When Betsy discovered, in a seven-hundred-page book called The Seventh Million, that in the fifties an elite team of Mossad agents had planned on infiltrating into Germany and poisoning the public water supply, we talked of nothing else for weeks, luxuriated in the possibility of revenge, however lopsided. We wrote a play about the operation, acted it out in Amanda’s bedroom. Betsy and Amanda were the Mossad agents, talking in ridiculous Israeli accents. Sam was an ex-Nazi, making us almost pee our pants with her satire. She got a big death scene after brushing her teeth and giving a final Nazi salute. I got to play an innocent German housewife, dying dramatically after drinking a beer stein of the contaminated water.

Like I said, we were different than other girls.

✶

I remember one meeting in particular. It was before we started going to Amanda’s house, before Stefan started observing us; we were in Kol B’Seder’s boardroom, sitting around the large shiny table in fancy wheely chairs, the chairs’ backs looming over us. We were still deciding on the name of our study group. Betsy was unhappy with Holocaust Girls’ Reading Club, the original name. 

“To start with, Holocaust really isn’t the appropriate term,” she said. She was sitting at the head of the table. The sunlight from the big windows was making her glow, golden and solid.

“Why not?” Hadas asked. Hadas had recently moved to Thornhill from Tel Aviv, still had a Hebrew accent, though by the end of the year it would be gone. Hadas often told us stories of the elderly people in Tel Aviv who talked to themselves, had numbers on their arms, and how her parents told her to just ignore them.

“Holocaust translates to burnt offering to God. What is that saying about the millions of murdered?”

“Is Shoah better?” Hadas asked.

Betsy sighed. “Really, the only morally rigorous term is The Jewish Genocide of the Second World War.”

“So you want us to be called The Jewish Genocide of the Second World War Girls’ Reading Club?!” Amanda asked, rolling her eyes. Amanda was the most naturally bitchy of all of us, and was our front-line soldier whenever we had to face the outside world.

Betsy shrugged. “It’s the right term.”

So far, at these meetings, I had not said much. I was happy just to be there, to have somewhere to vent my teenage obsession with death and cruelty. Also, if I’m being totally honest, I was quiet because I was unsure of my place in the group: all of the girls, as far as I knew, had family who died in the Holocaust, had a material link to the inferno. Whereas everybody I was related to was safely in Canada by the time the Nazis came to power. Did I have the same right to the Holocaust as they did? Our Hebrew-school teachers claimed I did, though I wasn’t sure. I was terrified of being outed as a fake, an imposter. A usurper. But now, an idea struck me, from one of the books I had recently taken out of the library and was planning on recommending we read for next week, and I nearly surged out of my chair. “What about if we call ourselves the rubble children?”

“What does that mean?”

“It’s what Germans call the generation of babies born in Germany in spring ’45,” Betsy said. I was once again amazed at Betsy; I thought I finally knew something she didn’t. She really did know everything.

“Yeah, but it, like, represents how we are all children of the rubble,” I said. My armpits were soaked, speaking up like this, speaking directly to Betsy like this.

“Wow!”

“Deep, Danielle!”

“Okay,” Betsy said, nodding purposefully. “I like it. I like it. Let’s put it to a vote. Those in favour of Rubble Children?” Five small hands went up. “It’s decided, then. Thanks for the suggestion, Danielle.”

I was beyond elated.

What else did we talk about at that meeting where we found our name? We talked about the controversy over the actual number of Jewish dead. Was it six million, or was it three million? Nine million? What, in the end, did it matter? We debated, once again, how we could possibly raise the money to get down to Baltimore for the Annual Girls’ Convention of Genocide, Ethnic Cleansing, and Settler Colonialism. Betsy had discovered the convention in one of the journals she read, and we desperately wanted to go. We yearned to go. Imagine: groups of girls like us from all over the continent, discussing the Holocaust! But we had no way of raising the funds. Betsy’s dad, the only one who could possibly have enough money to send us, was still mad at Betsy for her “appalling behaviour” in the lead up to her bat mitzvah.

When I think about my early teenage years, which is more and more recently, this is what I remember. I remember us sitting in Amanda’s basement, high off of juice boxes, laughing at Sam’s jokes, crying at the countless examples of human cruelty we looked at weekly, talking in low, serious voices. I remember Hadas’s comic strips, in particular the serialized Adventures of Primo Lentils, which told, in comic-book form, the story of Primo Levi’s time in Auschwitz, except Levi was a can of lentils, sort of a more absurd, less-developed Maus; Art Speigelman was, of course, one of our heroes, almost a god. (I wonder what happened to those comic strips; these days, Hadas could probably easily publish them as a book.) I remember Betsy showing us how to engage with difficult texts, steering our group through the ocean of Jewish Thornhill according to her own whims and desires. We were dark children. We were focused. We were children of the rubble.

Those were the golden days of Rubble Children, when we had our catastrophe, our unimaginable disaster, and we dedicated ourselves to imagining it, to memorizing it, to bearing witness. Before we stumbled out into the real rubble. Before the beginning of the end of our morbid little reading group.

Before Gloria Crosby.

✶

The decision to not allow non-Jews into the group was made at one of our first meetings with a near-unanimous vote. I’m ashamed now to say I voted with the majority, with Betsy. In any case, Gloria Crosby wasn’t the first non-Jewish girl who wanted to become a Rubble Child. Sam’s cousin on her Christian side Melinda wanted to join early on but was easily turned away. A few boys also tried to join, most seriously Yoni Krasner. He had a big crush on Hadas, especially after she grew breasts. 

“What, I thought all you care about is hockey!” Amanda scolded Yoni the first afternoon he came by. 

Yoni looked sheepish. “No, not just hockey! I also care about, about this,” he said, glancing at Hadas.

We laughed mercilessly. Hadas, who liked the attention, would have let him in, but we outvoted her and Yoni dropped it pretty quickly.

“Fine, whatever,” he said, pretending not to be hurt, “I’ll just watch Schindler’s List, same thing anyways,” he said.

“You do that,” Betsy said, to which we all snickered. We hated Schindler’s List.

We were a pretty insular group. We lived hard by the rules. No boys, no non-Jews, and barely any adults. The one adult we ever let near our basement meetings was Betsy’s grandfather Abe. He had been born in Berlin, witnessed the rise of Hitler, but escaped in the thirties. We loved Abe, had him come a bunch of times to tell us horrifying stories of being a child in a rapidly changing city; it was exactly what we wanted to hear. Abe went above and beyond though: he told us about his anarchist politics, his organizing with the far left in Toronto in the sixties and seventies, his hatred for borders of any kind, his disgust with what he referred to as “the so-called Jewish state.” We didn’t pay much attention to Abe’s feelings toward Israel—Israel didn’t particularly interest us, unless it was directly related to the Holocaust. (I wouldn’t find out until years later that the reason Kol B’Seder stopped having Abe speak during their Holocaust education weeks is because he refused to censor his views, especially when it regarded Israel.) Besides Abe, nobody got through those basement doors who was not a card-carrying member of Rubble Children. Perhaps if Betsy didn’t enforce our bylaws with such decisiveness we would have let non-Jewish girls, boys like Yoni, in from the very beginning. But we had Betsy. So when Sam showed up to a meeting one January Sunday with Gloria Crosby in tow, it did not go well.

“What’s she doing here?” Betsy asked. Gloria was Sam’s best friend from school, and we all knew her from the bat/bar mitzvah circuit and Sam’s birthday parties. She wore make-up, had soft wavy brown hair, a Louis Vuitton purse; she did not seem like the kind of person who would want to spend their Sundays debating if the Mossad made the right choice when they kidnapped Eichmann and not Mengele that fateful day in Argentina. While most of us were mildly unhappy—or maybe just uncomfortable?—that an outsider was here, Betsy was livid. She looked like she had just climbed twenty flights of stairs.

“What’s the big deal?” Sam asked. “Gloria is just as into the Holocaust as we are.”

“How could she join?” Betsy asked, indignant. “She’s not even Jewish! What does she know about the rubble?!”

“Yeah!” Amanda chimed in.

Sam defended her decision to bring Gloria. “She lost a ton of family in the Irish famine!”

As it turned out, Gloria was her own best advocate. Noticing my book on the Warsaw uprising, she immediately impressed us with her knowledge of the siege and the fight against the Nazis. She and Betsy got into an argument on the technical details of the uprising, which streets were bombed first, which tactics the Jewish fighters should have employed sooner. Betsy, notwithstanding the fact that she had a great-uncle, Abe’s brother, who was there, who personally lobbed grenades at Nazi tanks from the blasted-out windows of a former hospital, was not used to being argued with, and she was visibly flustered.

“Do you think they’ll ever find the rest of the Ringelblum archive?” Betsy asked, trying to steer the conversation into more secure waters. “I read through most of the first three milk cans.” This was a regular topic of conversation: we imagined a short story, written in Yiddish, in one of the lost milk cans Emanuel Ringelblum hid somewhere in the ghetto, a story that held the horror of the ghetto like a palm holding icy water up to our parched mouths.

“We’ve only found two milk cans,” Gloria said, causing a shockwave through the room. Betsy often talked about the three milk cans in the Ringelblum archive. How could it be two? What was going on? Amanda ran to a book to look it up.

“Oh my god, she’s right!” she exclaimed, after flipping through the index and finding the appropriate page.

Betsy looked shocked. Nobody had ever successfully corrected her before. The room’s attention turned to Gloria. Gloria smiled, sat back on the couch.

“Did you ever think about how if the Holocaust never happened, Anne Frank would just be an old lady living in Amsterdam or Frankfurt, and nobody would know her name?” Gloria asked.

The girls—except Betsy—responded with an assortment of wows and whoas.

Betsy, probably upset she didn’t think of it herself, scoffed. “What’s the point of a thought experiment like that?” she spat. “The Holocaust did happen. Anne Frank was murdered.”

“Honestly!” Amanda agreed.

I think after the initial shock, and especially after her performance that afternoon, most of us would have let Gloria in without a fuss. I, for one, was secretly thrilled that Sam brought her; with a non-Jewish girl in the group, my claim to the Holocaust suddenly seemed much stronger. But Betsy remained adamant. Did she see Gloria as a potential rival? Did she just not like her? Was it just her combative nature? Or did she really, truly believe that only Jewish girls should be in Rubble Children? Whatever it was, Betsy, from the moment she saw Gloria descending Amanda’s stairs, made it her personal mission to not allow Gloria in.

The following week Sam brought Gloria again, and Betsy showed how far she was willing to go to get her way. At the beginning of the meeting, before Amanda read out the last week’s minutes, Betsy put forward a new motion to vote on.

“The motion,” she announced, “is to repeal the no non-Jews allowed clause.”

As you probably guessed, the motion failed 7-2. The only ones who voted for it were Sam and Hadas. That was Betsy, always the wily politician.

Gloria left in a huff, tears streaming down her face, clutching her Louis Vuitton. Betsy smiled before leading us in the recitation of our motto. It happened once. It can happen again. At the time, I was happy to have helped her keep outsiders out. I was a dutiful soldier, basking in Betsy’s approval.

Betsy, however, had underestimated Gloria. We all had. Three nights later, Gloria started calling some of the girls. She had news: her father, who was VP of finance at Masada Assets Inc., was willing to pay for us—for all of us—to go down to the Annual Girls’ Convention of Genocide, Ethnic Cleansing, and Settler Colonialism. Even better, he was willing to finance a side trip to the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington.

That night our phones rang non-stop. How did Gloria get her father to agree to something like that? What should we do? What will Betsy say? How rich was he? We had Sam describe Gloria’s house to us in as minute detail as she could. It was our collective dream to go the Holocaust Museum—how could we turn that down?! Somebody had to speak to Betsy. Somebody had to convince her. She would never change her mind. Absolutely not. Betsy was a fortress, and when it came to Gloria, the drawbridge was raised. What should we do?

It was Amanda who eventually confronted Betsy. With Sam and myself listening silently on three-way, Amanda called her, asked what she was planning on doing now that we had an opportunity to go to the conference in Baltimore. 

“I wouldn’t care if Gloria’s father was going to fly us all to Yad Vashem, if he was going to rent out Auschwitz for prom! We don’t allow non-Jewish girls into the group.”

“Betsy, c’mon. You’re being ridiculous. What difference really will it make?”

“All the difference, Amanda. All of it.”

“Well, if that’s how you feel, then maybe Sam and the rest of us will just go down without you.”

There was a pause. I was standing in my kitchen, the hand I was holding the phone with wet with sweat. My heart was racing.

“Fine. Whatever,” Betsy said.

“Whatever,” Amanda said.

“Whatever.” We heard the click of Betsy hanging up.

“Holy. Fucking. Shit,” Sam said, the first to speak. “Did you just mutiny us Amanda, you pirate-eyed bitch?!”

Amanda laughed. “Don’t worry about it. She’ll come around. It’ll be just like her bat mitzvah, you’ll see.”

Amanda was right. At our next meeting Betsy, not acting anything like the hurt party, put forward a new motion to change our bylaws. Non-Jews would now be able to become full group members, as long as their dedication to the learning and analysis of the Jewish Genocide was proven satisfactory.

The vote, this time, was unanimous. Betsy avoided Amanda’s eyes the rest of the meeting, but otherwise she gave away nothing. You might think I would have started seeing Betsy as weak, as human, but no: I was amazed at her pragmatism, her ability to shift positions when necessary. As far as I was concerned, Betsy was still our undisputed leader.

The first person to take advantage of the new policy was Gloria.

We started planning for the trip.

✶

Six weeks later we were boarding a rented fifteen-person van in the Promenade Mall parking lot. Somehow, we had all managed to get our parents to allow us to go. I was embarrassed when I saw that everybody had brought their go-bags. How stupid of me! All I had was my carry-on, a hand-me-down from an older cousin. Gloria’s father and Amanda’s mother were chaperoning. We would spend two days in Washington, and three at the conference.

I’ve never been to sleepover camp, but I like to imagine that the van ride to the American capital is what taking the bus to camp felt like. The camaraderie, the growing excitement, the van going over a hundred kilometres an hour on smooth asphalt roads, Amanda’s mom feeding us homemade butterscotch cookies as Gloria’s father drove and told stories about growing up in New York City. On the ride down we watched our favourite parts of Shoah, as well as a documentary on the opening of the Holocaust Museum Betsy found somewhere, all of us swooning when Elie Wiesel took the microphone. We pretended that the border crossing into America was more harrowing than it actually was. We quizzed ourselves on American involvement in the Holocaust: the boatloads of refugees they refused to let in. Their failure to bomb the death camp train tracks. Their decision to drop the atomic bombs on Japan, one of the only non-Holocaust related events we discussed regularly. Gloria blended seamlessly into the conversation; after a few hours I forgot she was a newcomer, that this whole trip was happening because of her.

That night in our hotel room five blocks from the Museum, we lay in bed, discussing what was in store for us over the coming days. We were giddy with expectation.

First thing at the Museum, Mr. Crosby had arranged for us to hear a survivor’s testimony. The man speaking was ninety-two years old; his hands shook while he spoke, but he still had a full head of white hair, wet, kind eyes. We were sitting in the front row, like VIPs.

“I have lived my life with such anger,” he started, taking a slow sip of water. “My whole life, I never tell my story to anybody, never did talks like this. Eh, what’s the point I would say. But five summers ago I was the survivor-in-residence on the trip The March of the Living. You know this trip? We vent to Poland. To the camps. At the train tracks in Auschwitz, all the young people, they form a circle around me, and we altogether sang ‘Hatikvah.’ I tell you, I never felt such peace since the war. After that vee flew to Israel. After so many years, I was cured of my hatred. Since then I make talk all over the country. For you. For the young people.” His speech wasn’t anything like Abe’s righteous anger, it was ground we had all trod before, but it still hit the spot. We all cried. When Betsy sneezed Gloria pulled a tissue out of her purse.

Afterwards, we were let loose in the Museum. There wasn’t anything in the exhibits themselves that was particularly new to us—we were very good students—but just to be there, surrounded by photographs of Auschwitz commandants and the Righteous Among the Nations, felt like a homecoming. The best part was the special exhibit on the Ringelblum Archive, samples from the thirty thousand extant pages behind glass, pictures of life in the Warsaw ghetto, the names of the freedom fighters. We all searched for Betsy’s great uncle’s name, hugged with tears in our eyes when we found it.

That afternoon was probably the pinnacle of Rubble Children. How were we to know we were teetering on the precipice?

✶

It was the night before the conference officially got underway that I met Simone. We had recently arrived at the conference hotel in the outskirts of Baltimore and checked in. I was getting ice for our room, Simone was feeding quarters into a vending machine.

When I turned around with my full bucket of ice, Simone was looking at me. She had an Oh Henry! in hand.

“Hi, what’s your name?” she asked. She was a Black girl a few years older than me, wearing a dress, her hair in tight braids. She had a pretty face, eyes that in their depth and humour reminded me of Sam Bornstein’s.

“Danielle. Yours?”

“Simone. You here for the conference?”

“Yeah. It’s our first time.”

“I’ve been coming for around three years. What group are you here with?”

“Rubble Children.”

“Cool name! Yeah, I’m here with the Young Black Activists caucus. We’re fighting for prison reform. The amount of Black men in prison is a form of ethnic cleansing and is totally unacceptable. You should come to our panel tomorrow afternoon!”

“I thought the conference was mostly about the Holocaust?”

“Somebody’s been lying to you! No one form of systemic oppression gets top billing here. That’s what’s so great about it!”

I didn’t respond right away. I didn’t know what to say. Ice loudly fell in the guts of the ice machine behind me.

“Cool. Well, see you tomorrow, I guess,” I said eventually, hugging the ice bucket to my chest.

“Stay woke, Danielle!” Simone called after me, biting into her chocolate bar.

I didn’t tell any of the other girls about Simone, but I was up most of the night worrying about it. How was it possible that a conference on ethnic cleansing didn’t centre around the Holocaust? How could that be! Oh, how little I knew. I finally fell asleep, the phrase stay woke, which I had never heard before, fog-horning in my head.

✶

After a restless night, it was morning. We rode the elevator down to the conference level, saying goodbye to Amanda’s mom and Gloria’s dad, who were going to go sightseeing in the city. We registered. We were given name tags, pamphlets, and plastic bags with pens and stickers, pointed in the direction of the conference floor. We were here. The Annual Girls’ Convention of Genocide, Ethnic Cleansing, and Settler Colonialism. Young women of all colours and sizes were milling around, hugging, laughing, talking in serious, low voices. We stayed close to each other, unsure where to go first.

As Simone had hinted to me, the conference was not what we were expecting. Apparently—I would learn later, at a talk by a young Lakota woman who was president of the conference association—in its first years, it was mainly a Holocaust symposium, but that had changed. Other groups had started attending, demanding space. For a few years the conference was a place of battle, contention, girls screaming about their suffering, comparing atrocities. Three years ago, led by Simone’s African American caucus, the conference association voted, after an hours-long, teary meeting, to totally revamp its mandate: now, it was no longer about competing horrors, but coming together to fight for a better world, to dismantle the capitalist system that pits sufferings against each other, to demilitarize, to denuclearize. A big banner in the main room of the conference read, “We are not here to compare our suffering. We are here to witness each other. We are here to fight for a better world. Together, we are stronger.”

Simone’s panel that afternoon was amazing. She talked about growing up in Oakland, about her brothers and cousins and their run-ins with the police, about not understanding why the world was the way it was, until she found an Angela Davis book in her underfunded school library. Simone’s life was so unlike our lives in the Jewish suburbs of Toronto yet, somehow, I felt a powerful affinity with her. While the Holocaust was in the past—its horrors fast receding—Simone was living and fighting against a system still very much oppressing her and millions of others. We were so preoccupied with delving into our own people’s open wound that we never, not for a second, considered that we could turn our flashlights out towards the world, to our own backyards.

I rarely think about that conference now, but when I do, the feeling of discovery, of shame, of shyly approaching Simone after her panel to give her a hug, still blitzes through me. We learned about settler colonialism, the age of empire, about Indigenous dispossession, the hundreds of years of ethnic cleansing, law-making, forced eviction, massacring, and dehumanization that is still ongoing to this very day, this very moment. We sat in on panels about the horrors of slavery, of the Middle Passage, of lynchings, of the Jim Crow south and the ghettoized north. We learned of the daily violence done to gay bodies, trans bodies. We learned about the worldwide horrors perpetrated each and every day.

“How are we not constantly talking about all of this?” Amanda asked when we were safely in our hotel rooms after the first day. She was aghast. Betsy looked like she had just found out the planet she had been living on wasn’t earth after all, but some other oceany, treed rock orbiting a distant star. Hadas drew a new comic that night, a six-panel doozy where Primo Lentil stumbles upon the canned beans aisle at the supermarket. We lay on our beds, not talking. We were full of wet sandwiches and hot chocolate, our backpacks were full of books, our minds were full of a new sense of the world, an even deeper disgust at the powers that be.

If it wasn’t for Gloria Crobsy and her dad’s money, we would not have gone down to Baltimore, we would not have been shaken from our own particular nightmare; we would not have looked out over the lip of our pit and saw the colossality of the mine field. If this was what being woke meant, I didn’t know if I was ready for it.

The next day, the keynote lecture was about the plight of the Palestinians. We knew there were people who called themselves Palestinians, but like I said, Israel only interested us in its relation to the Holocaust. The speaker, a young Palestinian woman who grew up in Italy, told us about the Nakba, about the hundreds of thousands of stateless refugees, about the open-air prison that is Gaza. How the Nazis and the Holocaust were used to justify the attempted erasure of an entire people that had nothing to do with the Second World War. The human ingenuity and creativity when faced with the starkest survival that was shockingly familiar to us. The narrative we took at face value crumbled into dust. The young women we met after the keynote, hailing from all corners of the Palestinian diaspora, were smart, dedicated, kind, lovely. They put us to shame. These girls were actually out there doing something. We might have been children of the rubble—though, as we had learned yesterday, we are all children of the rubble—but these women were not just wallowing, they were building something new, fighting for a better world for their own children.

It was an intense weekend. The stories we heard, the friends I made, they’ll be with me always. Do you want to hear them? You know where to look. You won’t be hearing them from me. They are not my stories to tell.

✶

That was the end of Rubble Children. The nine-hour van drive home to Toronto was a quiet one. Betsy spent the whole ride drawing furiously in her notebook.

“Hey, what do they call colonizers, ethnic cleansers, and war criminals?” Sam asked. Nobody took the bait. Sam gave her punchline anyways, though she was obviously deflated. “The founding fathers,” she said, almost a whisper.

“That’s not funny,” Amanda said.

“I can’t wait to tell Zaidy about all this,” Betsy said. It was the first thing she said all day.

Though we would still meet once or twice more after the trip, our hearts had gone out of it. We were growing up. We were turning fourteen, fifteen that year, and other things started taking precedence. I’ve lost touch with most everybody from that part of my life, but I know where some of us ended up. Betsy lives in Silicon Valley, is a VP at Facebook. Sam Bornstein started doing stand-up in Toronto before moving to New York, where she now writes for television. Hadas became a Palestinian activist; I see her on the news from time to time, getting screamed at, called a self-hating Jew, an idiot, a terrorist-sympathizer. She takes it better than I would. Simone is also on the news from time to time; the youngest Black senator from New Jersey, her fight for prison abolition and reparations were making serious waves. Surprisingly—or perhaps not surprisingly at all—it was Gloria, fierce Gloria Crosby, Betsy’s first real threat, who stayed connected to the Holocaust most of all. She is a professor of History at SUNY Albany, an expert on the representation of genocide in contemporary media. I read her first book, on the Holocaust and graphic novels, was delighted to see in the acknowledgements the obscure sentence “to the ladies of RC.”

But that was all still ahead of us. For now, I watched the countryside going by the window. My mood was dark. Darker than usual. Was this so different than looking out the window of a car speeding down the Autobahn? A road to the rainforest clearcuts? Some Israeli highway?

It happened. It can happen again. It is happening.