I am compelled to tell the other side of the story.

A little girl is kneeling on her bed, staring out the window. Her chin is resting on her arms folded on the windowsill. Its night. Its late. She can hear the television in the living room. The special reports upset her family so badly, they sent her to her room. The child listens and pieces things together. The city of Los Angeles is on the other side of her mountain. Instead of the usual soft blue glow of city lights below, the sky is red and black. Watts is burning.

The hours pass. Tension grows in silence.

The phone rings. They got out. They’re safe. People are crying, hugging, and asking how? How did they get out?

After the war, two survivors of Auschwitz had made their way to America where they met, fell in love and married. They moved to Los Angeles, where they rented a store with an upstairs apartment and started a family. Just like their parents did in the old country, before the war, they gave their customers a line of credit, for a handshake. Every day, for years, they scrimped and saved and kept their store open from seven in the morning until ten at night. Eventually, they bought the building and life got easier. Instead of paying rent, they hired people to work in their store. They had free time now, and they spent it on their children.

News spread fast in Watts, but not fast enough. News did not reach them until it was too late to leave. They closed the store, locked the doors, turned off the lights, and hid in their upstairs apartment. At this point in the story, Gramma stared at her forearm. She was remembering again. She was remembering the night they came for her family. She was remembering where they sent her. She was remembering Auschwitz.

They heard someone tapping on the door of the store. Grampa peaked out the window. The people on the street saw him and waved him down. Grampa slipped down the stairs and made his way to the front of the store. His neighbors were waiting. Get your family, they said, and pointed to a car driving down the sidewalk towards the store.

The shop owner and his wife, and their two little boys, slipped out of the store and into the backseat of the car. They crunched down on the floor and the men covered them with blankets. I’m sorry, but I do not remember how many people climbed in after them. I think it was seven, three in the front seat and four in the back seat where a family hid beneath their feet. As the man in the driver’s seat drove, they could hear people shouting, windows breaking, tires screeching, sirens, chaos.

That night, their store, their upstairs apartment, and everything they owned burned. Someone asked the man if he took his ledger with him. It was a sensible question, after all, he kept the ledger next to the register, and had to pass it on his way out. There was a lot of money in that ledger. If his customers paid him the money that they owed him, he’d have enough money to start over.

The question upset the man so badly, his five feet eight inches turned into six foot eight inches of fierce indignation. “When the Nazis came for us, our neighbors watched them take us away and did nothing.” He spat those words out his mouth. They were burning with fire. If his words had touched me, I swear they would have burned my skin off.

Anyways, that’s the story of the night, one American family acquired a debt that could never be repaid. No one can repay the gift of time – time to live and grow a family, a marriage, a business, a home, a life. To live in this kind of debt, is to know the meaning of humanity, not believe it, pray for it, or hope for it, but to know it. It is to know the kind of person you want to be and then be it. Five generations later, this priceless debt remains unpaid.

As I said, there was another side to this story. Here in America, Black people and Jews, and every other “other” have always lived on two-way streets. Like it or not, believe it or not, that is how we survived the one way streets.