Those Who Save Us by Jenna Blum

effort, no matter how small. But the past twenty-four hours have been trying, and Trudy knows that were her pupils to seek her out now, she would be impatient with their ever-ringing cell phones, their fidgeting embarrassment at being in such close proximity to her; their improbable, grammatically incorrect, unpleasantly intimate excuses as to why they haven’t turned their assignments in on time.
    Today, Trudy thinks, with any luck, the weather or the demands of their mysteriously busy lives will prevent them from coming to see her. She needs the hour to shift gears from her personal persona to her professorial one. She helps herself to a cup of coffee from the History Department hot plate and hangs her damp coat, then assumes her usual post at her desk and pulls a pile of midterms onto the blotter. With an air of diligence, Trudy uncaps her red pen.
    The Mother’s Cross, the top paper is entitled, An Examination of German Women as Breed-Horses of the Third Reich. Trudy sighs and flips open the oaktag folder to the first page:
It has been argued and indeed perported by historians of the time period under discussion, that is to say the Third Reich, that during this time period the German woman was viewed by the Nazi Government as a Baby-Machine, that is to say she was valued for her fertilization abilities above all. A particku-lar Award was awarded to German women that produced three, six or nine Purebloded children, bronze silver and gold respecktively, and from this an implication can be drawn that the real station the German woman occupied during this time period was the stable. She was merely a Breed-Mare or Horse.
    Trudy refrains from scribbling, Do you have the slightest idea what you’re talking about? in the margin and instead writes SPELLCHECK so vehemently that her pen rips the paper. Then she closes the folder and pushes it aside. Perhaps she is not in quite the right mood for grading after all. She tilts her chair back and stares at the far wall, where the room’s only decoration hangs: an archival photograph, enlarged to poster size, of American soldiers marching German civilians to Buchenwald a few days after the camp’s liberation, where they will be made to bury the dead. The afternoon is gray and gloomy—not unlike the one beyond Trudy’s window right now—and the Amis are in army-issue slickers, their prisoners in patched wool coats. Toward the rear of the column, clinging to an invisible hand, is a small towheaded girl who could be the identical twin of Trudy at that age. She might in fact be Trudy herself.
    Trudy is gazing at the poster without really seeing it when she hears the dreaded knock on the door. She tousles her hair, which from the feel of it is drying in stiff unattractive spikes, like whipped egg whites.
    Come in, she calls, and arranges her features into what she hopes is a welcoming expression.
    But it is not a student who enters; it is Dr. Ruth Liebowitz, Director of Holocaust Studies, from down the hall.
    Have I caught you at a bad time, Dr. Swenson? she asks.
    No, not at all. Why?
    Ruth laughs. Your face, that constipated look you get when you’re trying to seem helpful. You must be expecting a student.
    Trudy pulls a mock scowl.
    I was, yes, but mercifully nobody’s shown up. Come on in, I still have—Trudy checks her watch—another twenty minutes. How are you?
    Ruth drops into the chair on the other side of Trudy’s desk and tucks her feet beneath her, catlike. Trudy watches her fondly. People meeting Ruth for the first time often mistake her for one of her own undergrads. Her small freckled face, her nimbus of frizzy hair, her uniform of sweater and rumpled khakis seem more appropriate to a freshman than somebody in Ruth’s important position. And Ruth deliberately fosters this impression, using what she calls my disguise to her advantage whenever pos-sible: on the first day of class, she sits among her students to hear what they say about her. In actuality, she is only