First I’ll assemble those little pieces I have. There’s no one left to ask about the connective tissue. How did I miss that window? How could I have been so careless with my Mother and Father, letting them slip away before polishing the narration of each significant scene? Sometimes the patch merely conceals the hole. And sometimes it transforms the treasured scrap into new cloth.
I listen to the life leave you and I’m told there’s not much time. I must write your story. I may tell your story. The elusive gifts of urgency and permission. Your story never had time for doubt: can I do it? will it be right? enough? You dove in and made things happen. That’s [...]
One group savages another, strips them of their rights, their livelihoods, their safety and sometimes arbitrarily their lives. These things are so basic and their deprivation so unimaginable. It stretches from the beginning of time to tomorrow–what torment and what injustice. It makes me feel sick and powerless. How can a civilized people slip into the abyss and take the world through it with them?
And you, Mom? You knew that loneliness at such an early age. But you’ve never complained about it, not when Grandma was sick, not when you were nursing Dad, or after he died, or when your friends started to move away to go live with their children. Even now you won’t let the word take hold in the room.
It is eight years since Carole left and we have to find her. First we have to get back to our home in Germany, but what a mess we go through. We must get across the Polish Corridor and then still so far, with everything miserable and broken. People die on the platform just waiting for the train;
Rudy: (Carole’s father, musing in 1937, Germany) Is a land in your blood, your bones, is it the safe feeling under your feet? Or is it the place your family has lived for generations—even after it strips away your rights and treats you hatefully? What identifies a person with a country? Is it the culture, [...]
Fifty-nine dead. Fifty-nine dead from one family. That’s a numbing loss, without even thinking about the zeroes that bear down from hundreds, thousands, and millions. Fifty-nine dead in my family, their not-breath filling the wind that cuts my cheek, not-lit candles at holiday dinners, non-hugs from grandmas and grandpas. Each missing member suffered immeasurably: torture; [...]
My America echoes with the voices of my family, the old immigrant neighborhoods my Father remembered, the characters who lived there, newcomers, natives and children like me. I ran across some of them in the great hall at Ellis Island. I listened for frightened whispers and halting speech in the examining rooms. I heard mutters, [...]
People in Texas didn’t speak in terms of the four or five cows that brother Norbert would have brokered in Westphalia. Here, people had thousands of head of cattle. They took enormous risks and pulled oil right out of the ground. But the biggest difference was safety, security, warmth, acceptance—knowing that your hardest times were behind you and you’d made it through somehow.
There is no understanding Auschwitz and Birkenau—that is the point of coming here. That is what drives us along the corridors so we can get out in time. That is what saves us, as we push inside the taxi. If you could contain Auschwitz, if you could grasp it, perhaps you would become a part of it. It is permissible, essential even, to leave portions unread, moments uncontemplated.