They didn't look like the type of people who ran a place where kids slept together in log cabins and had pretend Indian stories and rituals foisted on them. They had none of the heartiness or pretend friend to every child attitude of all those camp directors whose hands my parents entrusted me to each summer. For one thing, I couldn't see either of them getting up and leading everyone in a rousing chorus of "Johnny Appleseed" before each meal as thanks for mass-produced slop.
I looked around to try and get some clue from my younger cousins on what it could mean. I saw they had looks of awe and something close to fear on their faces as they talked together in little whispers. Not for the first nor last time did I think about the unfairness of having a gentile father. If not for him, perhaps I would understand more about these mysteries my cousins all seemed to understand without trouble.
It was while I was thinking these confused thoughts, feeling even more like a guest at a party where you were the only person who didn't wear the right clothes, that I caught an inadvertently thrown lifeline: Auschwitz. I knew that word — the camps — must mean concentration camps. So those cousins who weren't cousins except by marriage had been in a concentration camp — surviving things far worse than having to sing "Johnny Appleseed" before each meal.
The rest of the meal, as I remember, was spent trying to grab surreptitious glances up the table as if we hoped, or at least I hoped, to gain some insight into what they had experienced by merely staring at them. They did exist in a space of their own up there near the head of the table. It was as if they had extra room for the memories that were part of their permanent state of being.
Something had changed about them since the information had been passed around. They'd gone from being possible Litvaks to almost celebrity status. Most of us had never seen survivors before; all of our families had been in Canada long before World War One and didn’t have to worry about being caught up in the fires of the Holocaust. Our parents and grandparents had lived out the war in school and the war factories, so this was the closest any of us had ever come to tangible contact with people who had been through those horrors.
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