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.
I traveled thousands of miles to stand here in the snow and the cold where my Grandmother and her younger daughter, Eva, found one another in 1944, after eighteen months of heartbreaking separation, amongst thousands of women penned by barbed wire into two groups, awaiting role call.