they got to Germany?

Head down, hoodie up, eyes on the ground. Be unimportant. Blend in.
Disappear. That was how you avoided the bullies.

Josef smiled, remembering the story of Noah from the Torah. But he felt less like Noah and
more like Moses, wandering in the desert for forty years before reaching the Promised Land.Was that France? The Promised Land, at last?

“You see?” Mama said. “I told you somebody would think of something. Now, stay close,
and don’t lose your coats.” 

A calm came over Lito, as though he’d come to some sort of understanding, some decision. “I see it now, Chabela. All of it. The past, the present, the future. All my life, I kept waiting for
things to get better. For the bright promise of 
mañana. But a funny thing happened while I was
waiting for the world to change, Chabela: It didn’t. Because I didn’t change it. I’m not going to make the same mistake twice.

But making something happen meant drawing attention. Being visible. And being invisible was so much easier. It was useful too, like in Aleppo, or Serbia, or here in Hungary. But sometimes it was just as useful to be visible, like in Turkey and Greece. The reverse was true too, though: Being invisible had hurt them as much as being visible had.

“Mahmoud!” Waleed said, panting as he ran up alongside his brother. His eyes were bright and alive for the first time Mahmoud could remember. “Mahmoud! What are you doing?”

The Castillo and Fernandez families helped each other up onto the sandy beach, and their wet feet became dry feet. 

Mahmoud sagged. 
They only see us when we do something they don’t
like, he thought again. The refugees had stopped to get down on their knees and pray, and these people watching them didn’t do that. Didn’t understand. Now the refugees looked foreign again, alien. Like they didn’t belong.

Hungarian people on both sides of the road stopped and stared as Mahmoud and the rest of the refugees marched down the middle of the highway. Men, women, children, they had all come pouring out of the detention center after Mahmoud, joined by the UN observers, and the police had done nothing to stop them.

Isabel played it salsa for Iván, lost at sea, and for Lito, back in Cuba. She played it salsa for her mother and her father, who had left their homeland, and for her little brother, Mariano, who would never know the streets of Havana the way she had. And Isabel played it salsa for herself, so she would never forget where she came from. Who she was.

 but as she played she heard a different rhythm, a beat underneath the one everyone else was clapping to. Her foot tapped in time with the hidden cadence, and she realized with a thrill that she was finally hearing it.She was finally counting clave.

 ‘I’m a man now.’ And when those soldiers said one of us could go free and the other would be taken to a concentration camp, Josef said, ‘Take me.’
“My brother, just a boy, becoming a man at last.” 

His gaze lingered on the picture. He was filled with sadness for the boy his age. The boy who had died so Ruthie could live. But Mahmoud was also filled with gratitude. Josef had died so Ruthie could live, and one day welcome Mahmoud and his family into her house.

It felt like a home.

Earrings. The diamond earrings Josef’s father had bought her for their anniversary one year.
Josef remembered Papa giving them to her. Remembered the smile on Mama’s face, the light in her eyes, both long gone now. Mama had sewn her earrings into the lining of Ruthie’s coat! That
was why she had never let Ruthie take it off.

The Nazi didn’t care
how much money they had, how many jewels. It wasn’t about that. He was playing with them.This was another game, like a cat playing with a mouse before he ate it.

One of Rachel Landau’s children would go free, and one of her children would go into the camps.The Nazi soldier smiled at Josef’s mother. “You choose.”