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.

Not in Kansas Anymore

"BADATZ! BADATZ!!" The cry frantic as a plea for life. Crush of voices and feet and plastic bags, hemmers and hawkers swirling in the whirlpool's dance. Beggars wedged in sunken lives, bleating pleas for... their hands asking for money, their eyes begging for... other things. Light leaking sullen through the canvas tarp, not bothering to illuminate. Rain pecking and preying on the feeble and the frantic, fraying patience like thread. Poultry flesh, meat and fish lie strewn about their butcher's stands, their ripe sour reek seeping into living skin, into hair and cloth and vision, mingling with the rain and the rats. Then sweetness like Eden, sweetness of nuts melting in their shells, of dazzling fruit swathed in sugar, of pita so fresh it evaporates in your mouth. And light, not from above but from mountains of tomatoes glowing faintly through the dim, and from the shimmering heat rising from immaculate lines of sticky cakes. And the noise folding over it all, wreathing the scene... the screams of the vendors, chatter of coins, crackle of packaging, slither of a thousand feet on dewy concrete. The barks from haggling passerby, crunch of vegetables pulled from vines, flapping of breathing produce, the buzz of Hebrew and Yiddish and English and Arabic and French and Japanese, all sucked and twined into one bellowing, seething mass of staccato communication swelling like a wave brought up from the ocean depths, and crashing so as to eradicate thought-

 

 

"So that's the shuk."

 

"Yup."

Reflections on the Negev

There are... mountains all around me. I think.. I don't know. Are they mountains, these mind-stunning epiphanies? I feel as if my chest has been crushed by a war hammer. Massive spasms of purest rock, straining, stretching up from mystery... Red and purple, blue- green! Have you ever seen green rock? Have you ever been swallowed by a crater, left hoarse and gasping by frozen waves of beauty so enormous as to stifle thought? I raise my eyes to the mountains, is all I can think of. I shield my eyes from the heat of it, even though my back is to the sun. Did the king, as he wrote his words? Did he see himself from afar, a passing speck all-encompassed by Limitless Sight? From where will come my salvation? Is this is my salvation? A redemption witnessed by that which to me is infinite, is incomprehensible... My salvation will come from G-D, the Maker of the heavens and earth.

 

I breathe again.

A Life Is Not Of Questions Asked

Boy, time flies, time flies...
she says.
I think,
Again? I know.
Or thought I knew, more like.

Brooklyn accents spoken thick
Like cream cheese, on a sesame bagel.
Good times, right?
The best, but always over
even before I blink.

Relic stories, drifting
In my hazy mind, so foolish.
Of a bridesmaid- believe it, now she's fifty
And friends who remember when my mother was born.

It seems that things should disappear
Instead of thoughts, in the end.
Unfair, I think,
I'd rather have the memories.
Which weighs more, the thirtieth day
Or two hundred magnets?
Or watches, all from Swatch, of course
But why?

Why- the answers
I never know
Those that she knew, I think.
But she never asked the question.
Only just went through the alphabet
the letters of love,
With never a why
Like letters she got in the mail- and sent!
Our only honest pen-pal.

I love to hear from you,
I know.
(I should call more often)
Too busy, though.
And how is school?
It's good,
I'm safe
Like Jackie Robinson.
And by tomorrow...
I'll be a genius.

I love you...
too...
Again...
I'll call...
I'll try
I know...
I try
She never asked.

_____

In memory of my Grandmother.

I Walk

Today I walk
Up heaven's hills
In stolid steps of petty ills
I go whither my concsience wills...
I walk.

Some days I walk
In mountain-sky
The sun assaults the brown and dry
On feeble footing, far and high...
I walk.

I walk in desert, sand and sea
Alone, in friendly company
Where never had I thought to be,
I walk with them
I walk for me.

At night I walk
In sleepy knolls
In foreign yet familiar roles
I sing as sleep assaults my soul...
And in my dreams
I walk.

Is Anybody Home Away From Home?

I am comfortable here in Israel. It would be a lie to deny that to myself, however startling the realization. My bed is, in fact, my bed. My books, incredibly, fit into my meager bookshelf. My shelves and closet exude an air of chaos cloaked by neatness eerily similar to that of their American counterparts. So yes, I am comfortable here.

And I am happy. I am sad as well, because I miss my mother terribly, along with missing consistent privacy and temperature control. But on the whole, I have little to upset me unduly. My classes are stimulating beyond my wildest imagination, my mentors are infinitely and unconditionally generous with every power at their disposal, and every evening the sunset blazes into my room with an explosion of scouring vitality that brings even my drab walls alive for precious moments. 

I am content, and I am happy.

But I am not at home.

Israel is home, I know. And I do know- I feel it. There is something here that defies expression, an ineffable click of completion that fills you, inflates you, diffuses into you from the very air...it is nowhere else in the world. I can't explain it, but I know it is there.

But still, I do not feel like this is my home, now. I am attached to so much in America that I cannot be broken from. I have relationships, ties that distance, for all it is spanned now by technology, cannot help but freeze.

Let me intercept any thoughts that I feel pressure to move here. It is the last, if it is there at all, of many, many sensations that occupy my conscious and subconscious attention. But I feel stuck in something of a paradox. I live in Israel, but I live in New York. New York is home, but I am at home in Israel. It seems impossible to reconcile the two without denying some vital facet of the truth.

I'm sure I will, with time. For now, though... I feel rather displaced. It isn't unhappiness, just... unsteadiness. A constant glance over my shoulder to find my sister; a jolt, as I realize I am a suddenly foreign. So many small things that suddenly seem so vast.

Back and forth I go. Where I stop...

M.

PS: I receive all comments through e-mail, so I've been seeing the swarms of BlogSpam currently plaguing Ink As Rain. I apologize profusely, but I don't know how to stop it. It upsets me to no end, seeing this worse-than-nonsense clogging up my lines of communication. Please bear with it until I can find someway to remedy it- if you can, surely I can.