Boo, kissing cousins.
Gross gross gross, moving on. I turned my phone around. “I got an email this morning from the rabbi’s friend.”
I watched him as he leaned over the screen, one of his curls flopping over his forehead. I didn’t itch to push his hair back. Of course I didn’t.
Dear Abigail,
Happy to help! It’s definitely possible your grandmother was part of the American Kindertransport program, though many families made private arrangements to have children sent to the states instead of going through any organized effort. I’d recommend checking with museums/archives that might have records from the organizations involved in American Kindertransport (I’ve linked to a few below).
Do you know if she traveled through other countries on the way to the States? While England and Germany never officially released the names of the children involved in Kindertransport, there are several databases you could search. The late 1930s also saw a wave of German children coming through France, so the Mémorial de la Shoah might have helpful records.
I saw how incomplete your great-grandparents’ Luxembourg deportation records were in the link you sent—the governments usually kept better records. Perhaps your great grandparents didn’t have accurate papers on them if they were trying to escapethrough Luxembourg (or perhaps they were using fake ones). Still, might be worth contacting similar organizations in Luxembourg to see if they have more complete details about these deportations.
He looked up. “Wow. Are you going to follow through?”
“Please, I already have. I emailed the American nonprofits at the bottom of the email, but they don’t have records you can search online, you actually have to go there in person and look through physically.”
“Jesus.” He licked a bead of ice cream off his cone. “Can you imagine doing this kind of research pre-internet?”
“Right?” I tried very hard not to think about his tongue. “They’re not far—there’s two in New York—but it’s not super easy, either. I thought I’d email the French and Luxembourg organizations, too.” I gave him my brightest smile. “You mentioned you studied French...”
He rolled his eyes. “All right, here goes.”
We finished our ice cream while composing emails to international organizations. “What’s the plan,” Noah asked, “if they don’t have anything helpful?”
“I’m not sure.” I focused on the rippling blue-green sea. “I still wonder if your family has any records from my grandmother’s arrival. I wish I could read her letters. Maybe she said something useful there.”
“So what you’re saying is you want to dig around in my family’s papers some more.”
“No. Yes.” I let out a half laugh, kicking at the air above the water. “Yes, but I want permission. I want another try at talking to your grandparents. Unless you think it would go terribly?”
“Well, yeah,” he said. “I’m for sneaking around in the study when they’re elsewhere.”
“Your family would have me catapulted off the island. And there have been sharks.”
“We’ll just need an alibi for why we’re there.”
“An alibi,” I repeated. “For why we’re... alone in your grandfather’s study.”
“You’re smart. I’m sure you’ll be able to come up with something.”
I wrinkled my nose at him, feeling flushed. Was he suggesting what I thought he was? Had he noticed how much I’d been watching him? “I doubt I could come up with a single thing.”
He laughed. “Sure.”
Our gazes locked, and I could feel the heat traveling from my cheeks down my neck and spreading all through my chest. We stared at each other. I wanted to throw myself off the dock into the water. I wanted to kiss him.
Instead, I babbled into the silence. “So who was the girl your family thought you’d marry?”
A wide grin broke over his face. He looked delighted. “What?”
Shoot.Wrong question to ask. The dark waters below seemed more and more appealing. “Never mind.”
“My ex. Erika. We broke up last year when she left for college.”
Right.Very reasonable. “How come?”
He shrugged. “It didn’t make sense for her to have a boyfriend in high school. She would have missed out on the whole college experience.”
