I Will Protect You

CHAPTER ONE

Trouble at School

The other kids were up to something. My identical twin sister, Miriam, and I watched as boys tiptoed across our one-room schoolhouse with little bird eggs in their hands. Grinning, they laid the eggs on the teacher’s chair as if it were a nest. Then they sneaked back to their seats and sat calmly, like perfect little angels.

None of the forty-four students said anything. It had been a long winter in the Transylvanian mountains, and now the warm spring air blew gently into the classroom. It meant a day of flowers and sunlight, and I couldn’t wait for what was to come. It felt like a day that promised fun and happiness.

Our teacher, Mrs. Margit, was wearing the perfect dress for spring. It was white with soft pink and yellow flowers. My mama loved dressing Miriam and me in matching dresses that she had specially made by a tailor in the city. So I knew a thing or two about clothes. The other girls at school wore long skirts with scarves covering their heads, and the boys wore trousers and shirts.

“Now, class,” Mrs. Margit began, turning to face us and backing into her chair. She hadn’t noticed the eggs, and when she sat on them, they crunched louder than a scream. Mrs. Margit leapt to her feet and looked behind her. What a mess! Our village did not have any electricity or running water, and it would take a lot of scrubbing to get the eggs out of that pretty dress.

A boy pointed his finger like a dagger at Miriam and me. “The dirty Jews did it!” he shouted.

The kids we played with looked at us like we were snakes: maybe dangerous and definitely not human. Miriam and I were the only two Jews in the class, and ours was the only Jewish family in the entire village.

“Did you?” Mrs. Margit demanded angrily, glaring at Miriam and me.

“No, Madame Teacher, no!” we exclaimed. Everyone had seen what really had happened, and I hoped another kid would tell her the truth. They all knew us, Miriam and Eva Mozes, and they knew we wouldn’t be mean to the teacher like that. I looked at my best friend, Luci. Miriam and I helped decorate Luci’s Christmas tree, and she came over to our house to play.

“Yes, they did!” another child shouted. “We saw them!”

“Punish them!”

Luci looked down and said nothing.

Mrs. Margit ordered Miriam and me to the front of the room, facing the class. She savagely hurled a pile of corn kernels onto the classroom floor. “Kneel!” she commanded.

The kernels were hard and small, and they bit into our bare knees like pebbles with sharp edges. The longer we had to kneel there, the more it hurt. Mrs. Margit forced us to stay there for a whole hour.

While we knelt, the class made faces at us. Even with Miriam there beside me, I felt so alone. Why did everyone hate us?

Our schoolbooks were filled with anti-Jewish ideas. We had a math question during class one day: “If you had five Jews, and you killed three Jews, how many Jews would you have left?” The real answer was two. But the question seemed to suggest “two too many.”

One by one, the other kids turned against us. A girl who used to play a game trying to tell Miriam and me apart started calling us dirty, smelly Jews. A boy who never used to bother us threw us down into the dirt. The more the other kids learned to hate us, the more passionate about their hatred they became.

One night not long before, the whole village had come to the school after class to see a movie. I’d never seen one before, so I was excited. We called it a jumping picture. Standing there with my sisters and parents, we watched images move along the wall. The movie was called something like How to Catch and Kill a Jew.

The movie showed men with guns. Instead of hunting animals for food, these hunters were hunting Jews for sport. A Jewish father and son were running from the hunters. Shots were fired. The hunters dragged away the Jewish bodies. They killed Jewish people simply for being Jewish. The movie was over.

Everyone watching was stunned. But as more anti-Jewish books and movies came out, such images became a common thing to see, and the people got used to this antisemitism. They started to agree with it more. Even the people who didn’t hate Jews, like my friend Luci, wouldn’t raise their voices to help us.

It was 1941. Miriam and I were seven years old. We had no power. And people hated us.

Miriam and I felt so alone. But in a larger sense, we weren’t. Millions of Jews had suffered for about two thousand years because of antisemitism—the hatred, fear, and violence directed toward Jewish people simply because they are Jewish. Antisemitism has taken on different forms over the centuries. In the Middle Ages, Jews were banned from countries like France, Spain, and England. False stories were repeated that Jews murdered Christian children and drank their blood and that Jews poisoned wells to spread the plague. There was no evidence for this, but people believed it. During the Spanish Inquisition, which began in the 1400s, religious rulers believed they were doing holy work by forcing Jews to convert to Christianity and killing or expelling those who refused.

Even in modern times there were pogroms, where people would massacre groups of Jews.

Usually the country’s government was behind it or let it happen. In the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, many people realized that the stories about Jews spreading the plague and drinking blood were superstitious and ignorant beliefs, but the anti-Jewish thoughts morphed into something new. People were putting more faith in science, so antisemites came up with the idea that Jews were naturally evil based on their race. I’m not ignorant for hating Jews, they’d say. I’m being scientific!

To make things worse, a document called The Protocols of the Elders of Zion came out in 1903 in Russia and was sold around the world. The book claimed to be proof that powerful Jews were plotting to control the world through evil means. It was probably published by people massacring Jews, as an excuse to murder their neighbors. It was easy to prove that the document was fake and had been copied from earlier documents, including some that had nothing to do with Jews. But for people who wanted an enemy, it was just what they needed. It gave them “evidence” to say that fighting Jews was not only scientific but moral.

My classroom was full of little warriors, ready to do the right thing because they had been told it was the right thing. They grew up in a world where some churches still taught that it was holy to hate Jews. A world where some politicians talked about Jews as if we were the enemy of the people. Like a lot of adults, my classmates never questioned it or thought they should dig a little deeper.

As we had on so many other days after being bullied at school, Miriam and I ran home, crying.

“Mama!” I called, slamming open the door.

“Yes, Eva?” my mama said. “Yes. Calm down.” I couldn’t calm down. It was all so unfair!

Hearing what my classmates and Mrs. Margit had done made Mama cry, too. She held us close, whispering, “Children, I am so sorry. We are Jews, and we just have to take it. There is nothing we can do.”

I always looked to Mama for comfort, but hearing this didn’t soothe me at all. I wanted to march back to school and hurt Mrs. Margit, hurt her the way she’d hurt me. Of course I couldn’t. Mrs. Margit was a grown-up, and grown-ups got away with everything. But then I wondered, Why can’t Mama take a stand?

Papa was out working in the fields of our farm. When he got home, we told him the same story.

“Just say your prayers and ask God to help us,” Papa said. That was his usual response to any problem.

My knees still hurt from the corn kernels. I never wanted to go back to that scary school again! I wished I could learn with my big sisters, Edit and Aliz. They were too old for the village school, so Mama had a tutor live in our house and teach them. Papa said girls didn’t need that much education, but Mama disagreed, and she won. The tutor was Jewish, too, and I’d learned some German words from her.

Even when the world outside was cruel, Mama tried to keep a loving home. She sang us songs and told us stories. She cooked delicious food from our farm and our gardens, and she tried to live by the words of an embroidered message she kept framed in the kitchen. The embroidery said: Your mind is like a garden. Plant flowers so weeds can’t grow.

Although Mama was very gentle, she did tell me the hair-raising story of Little Red Riding Hood. A girl in a rose-red hood went to visit her grandmother in the forest, where it was dark, deep, and so far from home. In the grandmother’s house, an old woman waited for Little Red. An old, strange-looking woman with big eyes and even bigger teeth.

“What big eyes you have,” said Little Red Riding Hood.

“All the better to see you with,” said the grandmother, who was really a wolf in disguise.

“What big hands you have,” said Little Red Riding Hood.

“All the better to hug you with,” said the wolf, his claws ready to attack.

“And what big teeth you have,” said Little Red Riding Hood.

“All the better to eat you with!” And he leapt down and swallowed Little Red Riding Hood whole.

A wolf came near my family’s farm during the winters to attack our livestock, so I already knew to fear wolves. But the scariest part of the story was the wolf’s trick. He fooled the girl into thinking he was her sweet, safe grandmother when he was really a dangerous beast. At times, I felt like Little Red Riding Hood. She could tell something was wrong, but she couldn’t figure it out in time. And look what happened to her.