Across
- 1. He thrashed in the rubble, panicking. He couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t breathe! He flailed wildly at the debris, digging and scratching at the wreckage like he could somehow claw his way back to a place where there was air.
- 3. Luis didn’t have time to answer. A whistle blew. The police were being summoned elsewhere.
- 4. After Herr Meier had called him in front of the class to show how Jews were inferior to real Germans, Josef had returned to his seat next to Klaus, his best friend in the class.
- 5. remember the last time he’d seen his brother laugh, or cry, or show any emotion whatsoever.
- 8. war had made Mahmoud nervous. Twitchy. Paranoid. It had made his little brother a robot.
- 9. But he’d lost himself watching the Flandre sail out of Havana Harbor, his back turned to the promenade, and that’s when they’d caught him.
- 10. If Cuban refugees were caught at sea with “wet feet,” they were sent to the US naval base at Guantanamo Bay, at the southern end of Cuba. From there, they could choose to return to Cuba—and Castro—or languish in a refugee camp while the United States decided what to do with them.
- 12. Not soldiers—regular people. Men with gunshot wounds. Women with burns. Children with missing limbs. She hadn’t gone nearly catatonic like Waleed, but at some point it had gotten bad enough that she just stopped talking about it.
Down
- 2. He felt the stirrings of indignation, of anger, of sympathy.
- 6. sizes too big for him. Aaron Landau’s eyes bulged from his gaunt face as he turned to look at his children.
- 7. “Do you want to build a snowman?” his father sang. They had seen Frozen in a movie theater—back when they could get to the now-government-controlled side of the city that had theaters. “Youssef—” Mahmoud’s mom warned. Mahmoud’s dad looked sheepish. “It doesn’t have to be a snowman.”
- 9. Not that Waleed smiled much anymore. Mahmoud
- 11. Too thin. A skeleton in a threadbare suit