My grandmother Hannah arrived in Rhode Island in November of 1947. She was nineteen years old. She had spent the previous five years in Auschwitz, then in a displaced-persons camp in Bergen-Belsen, then on a Liberty ship across the Atlantic. She had three relatives left in the world. Her parents were dead. Her two younger brothers were dead. Her older sister had survived but was somewhere in Palestine; they did not see each other again until 1956.
She married my grandfather in 1948. He was a Jewish American who had served in the Pacific during the war and had never been to Europe. He met her at a community function for refugees in Providence. He liked, he said later, that she did not try to make small talk. They were married for fifty-three years. He died in 2001. She lived until 2019 — ninety-one years old. The last week of her life, in hospice, she spoke only in Yiddish, which she had not used in conversation for half a century.
She never told us most of what happened to her. She wrote some of it down, on yellow legal pads, late at night, when she could not sleep. We found the pads after she died. There were eleven of them. I have read maybe three. The others I cannot bear to open yet. They will outlive me, probably. Someone, eventually, will read all of them.
My mother is seventy-one. My grandmother's number is tattooed on her own arm, in pen, in my mother's hand — she has redrawn it every few years since she was a teenager. She says she wants to make sure she does not forget the digits. I have asked her once if she will ever stop. She said no. She said: nobody else in my family has a tattoo. I am keeping hers visible until I die.
This hex is for Hannah. For the eleven yellow legal pads. For everyone who survived something so vast that they could only describe it in a language that has nearly died. We remember. We will keep remembering. This piece of Rhode Island is yours forever.