What Stays With You

Someone in front of me rifles through a rattling plastic package. "Oh!" she says, thick annoyance souring her voice, "We're out of the cherry flavor."

So spoiled?

Pulling on a thick sweater (it's seventy one degrees!) but I'm still cold.

So selfish?

Eating, cake and fruit, snacking in frustration. "There's nothing here to eat", I say.

So pampered! Don't you know, don't you know how many those crumbs would feed??

And standing in the train station, packed in the crush of traffic, so uncomfortable. But there is space to breathe, I think. And they could push us tighter, and harder, until my legs are lifted off the ground, and I can't move, not at ALL, and I'm so, so scared, because I don't want to die...

But the crowd moves on, beacuse we are not in a gas chamber. And I must move on as well, wading through these modern luxuries, trying to preserve my new sensitivity while never forgetting to live.

Breathing in Majdanek

The black sign smiles down from the black building, friendly and benign. The letters are white and curvaceous, winking sweetly at us, as we pass beneath it's hungry, seductive gaze.

The sign reads "Bad und Desinfektion I."

Bath and disinfection. We file inside.

Numbly, I wonder how I have come here, how I am so arrogant as to think I could survive where hundreds of thousands of my sisters and brothers have perished. We walk slowly through chambers designed to quiet the condemned, watching our surroundings and drinking them in as if these were to be our last living sights as well. The entranceway, where our hair would have been cut. The bath room, where rusty showers suspend like a sprinkler system from the cement ceiling. We walk in the footsteps of so many, and I feel their quiet eyes upon us as our shod feet fall where their bare soles had shuffled. I swallow, and whisper Tehillim, and pray we do not disturb their rest.

In the last room, the gas chamber, the stench of chemicals pervades. The walls are streaked and stained with green residue, which clings to the cement like some morbid facsimile of living moss. Fingernail scratches scar the confines, following final moments scrabbling for life as the vices of death took hold. The scars grow fainter as they draw closer to the floor.

I begin to shudder as my mind struggles to encompass my surroundings. Tears swell my vision, and my very being is racked with a silent hacking I realize are sobs. The screams of the past echo around me, billowing in a deafening final protest. My feet stand on a wooden pathway raised above the floor. Step down, some terrible force commands me. Stand where they stood, die where they died. Step down! Not for several minutes can I bare to leave the "comfort" of my pathway, but I do. I step down, and join my sisters, for the few moments my sanity can sustain it.

Reality is thin in the gas chamber. There is a sense, somehow, of both terrible pressure and a vast, inescapable emptiness. The fabric of the world is frayed and weak, there where so many souls were choked from their bodies. Time is slower, and existence seems to float, very gently, in the currents of Eternity like some ancient cobweb. I continue to tremble as we mouth the Shema together, and as we leave the chamber of death. Alive, I wonder, as we shuffle out. A miracle. You do not walk out of a gas chamber.

I breathe deeply as we stand finally outside, reveling as the cold April air enters my lungs. I breathe as if I am breathing for the first time.

Perhaps I am.

Gift of Life

If I could count each flake of ash
If I could breathe for every soul
If I could cry for every tear
How long until I fill the hole?

The hole undug for every grave
The lives unlived, the days unsaved
The freedom snatched from every slave...
The payment for the gift they gave.

But though in their valley of death I do walk
Lo irah rah, ki Atah imadi,
Peace for the dove, and blood for the hawk;
From the nights in the fires
Are reborn the free.