Mahmoud’s mother came out of the bedroom, where she’d been folding clothes, and turned off the TV. “Time to pray, Waleed. Get washed up.”
Mahmoud’s mother, Fatima Bishara, held her pink iPhone in one hand, and in her free arm she carried Mahmoud’s baby sister, Hana. Fatima had long, dark hair she wore up on her head, and intense brown eyes. Today she was wearing her usual around-the-house attire: jeans and a pink nurse’s shirt she used to wear to work. She’d quit the hospital when Hana was born, but not before the war had begun. Not before coming home every day with horror stories about the people she’d helped put back together. Not soldiers—regular people. Men with gunshot wounds. Women with burns. Children with missing limbs. She hadn’t gone nearly catatonic like Waleed, but at some point it had gotten bad enough that she just stopped talking about it.
When he was finished washing up, Mahmoud went to the corner of the living room that faced Mecca. He rolled out two mats—one for him and the other for Waleed. Their mother would pray by herself in her bedroom.
Mahmoud began without Waleed. He raised his hands to his ears and said, “Allahu Akbar.” God is the greatest. Then he folded his hands over his stomach and said a brief prayer before reciting the first chapter of the Qur’an, the most holy book in Islam. He bowed and praised Allah again three times, stood and praised Allah again, then got down on his hands and knees and put his head to the floor, praising Allah three times more. When he was finished, Mahmoud sat back up on his knees and ended his prayers by turning his head right, and then left, recognizing the angels who recorded his good and bad deeds.
The whole prayer took Mahmoud about seven minutes. While he’d been praying, Waleed joined him. Mahmoud waited for his brother to finish, then rolled up their mats and went back to his homework. Waleed went back to watching cartoons.
Mahmoud was just starting a new equation when he heard a sound over the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles theme song. A roar like a hot wind rising outside. In the second it took for the sound to grow from a breeze to a tornado, Mahmoud dropped his pencil, put his hands to his ears, and threw himself under the kitchen table.
By now he knew what an incoming missile sounded like.
ShhhhhHHHHHH—THOOOOOOM!
The wall of his apartment exploded, blasting broken bits of concrete and glass through the room. The floor lurched up under Mahmoud and threw him and the table and chairs back against the wall of the kitchen. The world was a whirlwind of bricks and broken dishes and table legs and heat, and Mahmoud slammed into a cabinet. His breath left him all at once, and he fell to the floor with a heavy thud in a heap of metal and mortar.
Mahmoud’s ears rang with a high-pitched whine, like the TV when the satellite was searching for a signal. Above him, what was left of the ceiling light threw sparks. Nothing else mattered in that moment but air. Mahmoud couldn’t draw a breath. It was like somebody was sitting on his chest. He thrashed in the rubble, panicking. He couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t breathe! He flailed wildly at the debris, digging and scratching at the wreckage like he could somehow claw his way back to a place where there was air.
And then his lungs were working again, raking in great gulps. The air was full of dust, and it scratched and tore at his throat as it went down, but Mahmoud had never tasted anything so sweet. His ears still rang, but through the buzz he could hear more thuds and booms. It wasn’t just his building that had been hit, he realized. It was his whole neighborhood.
Mahmoud’s head was hot and wet. He put a hand to it and came away with blood. His shoulder ached and his chest still seared with every hard, desperate breath, but the only thing that mattered now was getting to his mother. His sister. His brother.
Mahmoud pulled himself up out of the rubble and saw the building across the street in raw daylight, like he was standing in midair beside it. He blinked, still dazed, and then he understood.
The entire outside wall of Mahmoud’s apartment was gone.
The Hitler Youth led Josef down the narrow corridor of the German passenger car. Tears sprang to Josef’s eyes. The Brownshirt who’d taken his father away on Kristallnacht had said, “We’ll come for you soon enough,” but Josef hadn’t waited. He’d gone to them with this stupid stunt.
They came to a compartment with a man in the uniform of the Gestapo, the Nazis’ Secret State Police, and Josef stumbled. The Gestapo man looked up at them through the window in his door.
No. Not here. Not now. Not like this, Josef prayed—
—and the Hitler Youth boy pushed Josef on past.
They came to the door of the Jewish train car, and the Hitler Youth spun Josef around. He glanced over his shoulder to make sure no one was listening.
“What were you thinking?” the boy whispered.
Josef couldn’t speak.
The boy thrust the armband at Josef’s chest.
“Put that on. And don’t ever do that again,” the Hitler Youth told Josef. “Do you understand?”
“I— Yes,” Josef stammered. “Thank you. Thankyouthankyouthankyou.”
The Hitler Youth breathed hard, his face red like he was the one in trouble. He spotted the piece of candy Josef had bought for Ruth and took it. He stood taller, tugged at the bottom of his brown shirt to straighten it, then turned and marched away.
Josef slipped back into his compartment, still shaking, and collapsed onto his bench. He stayed there the rest of the trip, his armband securely in place and as visible as possible. He didn’t even leave to go to the bathroom.
Hours later, the train pulled in to Hamburg Central Railway Station. Josef’s mother led him and his sister through the crowds to the Hamburg docks, where their ship waited for them.
Josef had never seen anything so big. If you stood the ship on end, it would have been taller than any building in Berlin. Two giant tan smokestacks stuck up from the middle of the ship, one of them belching gray-black diesel engine smoke. A steep ramp ran to the top of the tall black hull, and hundreds of people were already on board, milling around under colorful fluttering pennants and waving to friends and family down on the docks. Flying highest above them all, as if to remind everyone who was in charge, was the red-and-white Nazi flag with the black swastika in the middle.
The ship was called the MS St. Louis. St. Louis was the name of a city in America, Josef had learned. That seemed like a good omen to him. A sign that they would eventually get to America. Maybe one day visit the real St. Louis.
A shabby-looking man stumbled out from behind the crates and luggage piled up on the dock, and Ruthie screamed. Josef jumped, and his mother took a frightened step back.
The man reached out for them. “You made it! At last!”
That voice, thought Josef. Could it really be—?
The man threw his arms around Mama. She let him hug her, even though she still held her hands across her chest as if to ward him off.
He stepped back and held her at arm’s length.