Ema was unlocking her apartment door and humming when she heard footsteps behind her. As she glanced back, she saw Drina taking some garbage out to the chute.
"Hey, Drina! How are you?" she asked.
"Sastimos! I am good, chav, how are you?" Drina smiled.
Ema nodded and walked over to help with the chute. "I'm great. I just finished a tattoo I want to show you! I think the tiger's eye is working; I've gotten quite a few bookings the last few days."
Drina laughed and pushed her garbage through the chute as Ema held it open. "See? I tell you, va? I tell you it works."
"Yeah, you were right," Ema said, taking out her phone to pull up a picture of a set of dates tattooed on a woman's forearm. As she looked up at Drina, her smile slipped as she noticed Drina's face had lost its color. "Wait, what's wrong?"
"Bibaxt." Drina's bony finger pointed at the picture. "Is bad tattoo."
"Why? I thought I did pretty well with it," Ema said.
Drina shook her head and went back to her apartment, muttering 'bibaxt' repeatedly, her voice quivering as she did so. More confused than anything else, Ema went back to her apartment, unsure what had upset her neighbor so much.
#
August 19, 1945
Her room was cold and bare. The only things hanging on the walls were a wooden cross above the bed and a warped mirror above the dresser. Still, she could not complain. She had been given the room by a couple who took pity on her and said she could stay as long as she liked, just so long as she earned her keep in their bakery.
She had only been back in Czechoslovakia for a few months, and she already knew how to bake the bread and sell it without her tattoo showing. Whenever someone saw the "Z," they began to treat her poorly. Either they would refuse to buy until her hosts and employers came out from the back, or they would call her cruel names.
"Kurva." Whore.
"Svině." Swine.
"Fena." Bitch.
She learned to wear long sleeves and not push them up her arms after a few days of this treatment. Long sleeves stayed down. That was her new rule.
#
Ema sat on her couch, watching Community reruns on TV, but the way Drina had reacted a few hours earlier was still bothering her. She had texted her friend about it, but Amy wasn't very sympathetic. Her reply made Ema want to throw her phone at the wall.
>>> Why are you so worried about what your neighbor thinks? Isn't she like 1000??? Lol
Not helpful. Ema may have been a fraction of Drina's age, but she still thought of her as a friend.
She continued to be distracted from the episode by these thoughts, but soon a knock snapped her back to the present. Ema turned off the TV and stood up as she yelled, "Just a sec!"
When she made it to the door and looked through the peephole, she almost wanted to pretend she wasn't home, but it was obviously too late, so she opened the door. "Hi, Luca. Can I just say that I am so, so sorry? I didn't mean to-"
"Calm down, it's not your fault," Luca interrupted gently before he glanced inside. "Can I come in?"
"Yeah, of course." She nodded and stepped aside before she closed the door behind him. "Sit anywhere."
"Thanks, dear. I wanted to come over and apologize for Drina."
Ema's eyebrows knit together. "What do you mean?"
Luca sighed and sat down on the couch, waiting for Ema to sit down as well before he continued. "I think there's something that Drina has failed to tell you over the last three years. She was in Auschwitz-Birkenau during World War II," he explained. "Because of it, she now has a tattoo on her arm. When she saw the tattoo you did, it brought back a lot of bad memories."
Ema's breathing stopped for a moment and she cleared her throat before speaking again. "She was in Auschwitz? Is she Jewish?"
He shook his head. "No, no. She's not Jewish. We are Roma."
"Roma? She's a- a gypsy? I didn't know they were taken to the camps," Ema said.
"Romani people have faced a lot of discrimination, particularly during the war. It was one of the largest mass killings in history, our people were targeted but most don't realize what hardships the Roma have gone through."
"I knew something was wrong. She doesn't usually get upset over tattoos, it was weird," Ema said. "This makes so much more sense."
"Yes," Luca said with a sigh.
"When I showed it to her, she kept saying 'bibaxt,' but I don't really know what it means," she said.
A sad smile spread across his face. "It means 'bad luck.' She probably meant her own."
#
Rather than bombard Drina or Luca with questions, Ema turned to Google. Her knowledge of Roma people and the Holocaust was more limited than she liked to admit, and it was unfair to expect others to educate her when she was more than capable of educating herself.
She cringed at her ignorance and did her best to commit the information to memory.
Roma originated in northern India.
'Gypsy' was a slur based on the misconception that they were from Egypt.
The Roma had spent many centuries as slaves in Romanian territory.
Between 220,000 and 1.5 million Roma had been victims of the Holocaust.
There were approximately one million Roma in the United States.
Hindu purity laws strictly regulated their social behavior, emphasizing cleanliness.
The more information Ema found, the more she wanted to understand Drina. Her entire existence had been filled with discrimination and oppression even before the camps; she had been a literal victim of the Holocaust, and she survived. More than anything else, more than all the questions she was eager to get answers to, Ema knew she needed to apologize.
