So my memories turned to cold water, rushing in through the gash the iceberg left. An iceberg—there’s a devil. How wicked to hide a towering city of thoughtless cold beneath the water’s surface–invisible and unknowable. The water rushed to evict air with drowning clarity. “It was this; you can’t control. You don’t even know. You may never know.” Irrefutable choking ignorance.

Warm or cold, these memories suffocated me. I became used to pushing them away from my throat, from my chest, from my eyes.

But now memory is hard to find and trickier still to hang onto. I do hang on as it tears across a field with me clutching at it’s mane, afraid to fall. It stills the world around it like that wild horse would do—with terror, hot steam and cold reality. Who cares if you ate lunch, darned socks, read the paper or answered the phone? Only this matters now: hanging on tight and noticing which way the fence goes. I could fall and even if I could hang on, this crazy ride might crush my legs against that fence. She has a will of her own and pays me no mind.

My own mind, my thin, sometimes not-there mind, knows only on the mane and the fence. I am in the memory. I live it again in the tell, I live it again in the show, I live it again in the steam of my breath, I live it again in the blood and the bone and the taste of stale kisses. And when it’s finally still, I let go, slide off, and wonder where I’ve landed.

I thought we would never get to our home. I don’t know if I would have tried to go back home even, but Ilsa said that is what we must do. We must first live through those first weeks when she is so sick with the other ladies and I take care of them all. I don’t know what happens to the others, but I know Ilsa finally gets rid of the fever and then she can eat the little bit of food they give me to cook. I have to go very slow, giving her little bits of soup.

Then she is also right—we must get away from the Russian soldiers. They save us but they would also take us and then maybe we will never find Carole. Ilsa is so weak but still she tells them we have to go home, to Germany, to see if anyone else survived from our family. Then Ilsa says to me, we try and find Carole and we apply to go to America.

She is right, people don’t stay in the same place all that time, especially in New York. 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; the tracks are broken and torn up. How do we get anywhere? It wears me out when I think about how we did it, even though now I have a bed and we have food and little coal for heat. I used to think all these things are normal; now I don’t take them for granted. I know they are very important and I am lucky to have lived to have them again. Some are not so lucky.

I’ve walked the streets of small towns, big cities, beaches, exotic continents, parks and neighborhoods, all alone. I’ve made most decisions big and small alone. I’ve trod the hardest trails alone: father’s death; mother’s deterioration; divorce; child’s illness; career dissatisfaction. I didn’t know what to say when asked by the partners and friends I’d kept at the periphery. Even I didn’t see the invisible barrier.

I wouldn’t call myself a loner. I have pockets of people: new friends to make; old friends to catch up on; and calendared gatherings. But I’m just fine alone—even in a movie theater—that most forbidding of lone adventures.

Some came closer, spun out, and hated the not-knowing and shifting priorities. Some would have been there for me had I let them. And some got through and took a bit of the strain from my tired bones.

You might not have noticed just how alone I am. After all, I lived well-loved with my parents for eighteen years. I spent thirty years as part of one couple or another. But coupling can be so isolating. At its worst, it steals the generous mantle of solitude and replaces it with missed-opportunity.

In unconnected hours face-to-face, drenched in the ice-water of failed intimacy, alone finally becomes loneliness. My strong right-side withered under worm-eaten embraces, preoccupied hearts, and habitual sex. The unearthly weight of sadness, the black weight of doubt, the sharp stones of anxiety, sent me sprained and sprawling atop the original ruin.

You might not know it’s ok to be alone. But alone stands on two strong legs. Feet may tire, shoulders ache, and breath rasp, but the slow stride uphill can continue almost indefinitely, alone.

I don’t know exactly why I bit her ankle. I hate ladies—I hate this lady: hate; hate; hate her. But I love having her ankle in my mouth. I’m so used to having this ankle in my mouth. I don’t know what I’d do if I didn’t bite it anymore. Would life be as sweet? Would I have all those fantasies again about ankles?
Would I feel lonely? Would I long to have my mouth fill with her blood?

Do I even like blood? I don’t know–I’m a dog. I’m bred to hang on, so I do.

She was nice to me, once. She fed me, scratched my ear, but then I ran away. When I came back she said that she was “really quite allergic.” She felt better without me. But that’s not gonna work with me. NOBODY walks away from me. I’ll bite. That’s all there is to it. I’ll show her.

She’s wondering how she can get rid of me. But she can’t. She can’t cut off her foot. That’s not really a solution. I don’t think she’ll go for the old silver bullet. I mean she could wind up worse off than me. She thinks I’ll get tired and fall off, or maybe I’ll get hungry, or distracted.

I mean, what if we pass a really good Bar B Que? Oooo that smell…that smell might get me.

Oh look, a ball–a kid with a ball. I could go for a ball.

(catches himself almost distracted enough to let go) She is so frustrated; trapped by a dog this way. She really cannot believe this is happening to her. She’s busy. I know ‘cause she keep saying that to me after she stops screaming.

And she’s bleeding. Her strength is bleeding away. Yeah, right in my mouth.

She screams out ”Won’t someone please shoot this dog? Please, if I circle back around the block one more time, will you please have your gun ready and try to shoot the dog? Shoot the damn dog and don’t shoot me? Please.”

But she is panting so hard, nobody understands her. Just like a dog.

Taunts and whispers slide through empty hallways of red brick school houses. Ancient songs and rhymes pop out of bureau drawers or cackle in the whoosh of a campfire. Voices trapped in air currents swipe my ear, my memory and my imagination. They brush my eyes or my nostrils, and suddenly, the indelible media of song and spirit rush out. I feel the trials and joys, the courage and fears recorded there. The more these voices catch me, the more I crave their stories.

I don‘t think this is mere longing for a tender time past. Rather, it‘s time-trained listening joined to a jagged sort of hearing pressed deep into the quick in some dark amino acid.

The stories transcend time and technology. I listen to the wind for epics that blow across plains. I touch the earth and feel the hoof beats of settlers. I soak in the river that bathes the heron and native bones. Fondling tea cups stained with gossip and advice, I hear shuffles, accents and laughter of women I know, yet I’ve never met. Thumb-prints entice; are they mothers, maids or visionaries that twist canvas, stitches, stone, and glaze into beauty? The dust of Moses, Beethoven, and my grandfathers showers me with gifts. Ancient brothers sacrifice goats while sisters raise timbrels and dance in the deserts. My imagination dazzles.

Sometimes they weigh me down, the promises duty binds upon me and the gifts I can never repay. Those days, I am haunted by history, especially the dreams stolen from young dreamers. I cannot avoid the stench of camps where cruelty crushes the spirits of millions in the machinery of fear. I feel wooden and unworthy.

Other times these bygone days tingle in my nostrils and lift my wings. They charge the hair on my neck and drive the balls of my feet into ground. My pliers easily bend the next link of chain. I fill the song with my voice. My chest heats with wonder and the future shines, illumined by the past.

The Bitch started to move in during the muddle of middle school. My mother groomed her. First, she was a frustrated teen: pushing, hiding, wisecracking, seething and getting by. That’s the girl who needed the theatre so much, who was afraid to speak and wanted someone else to write her lines, to ive her a way to expel the steam inside her—“Bill Starbuck, you’re a liar and a fake.”

She was fed by the confusions of suburban California in the late ‘60s. With her sarcastic tone and sneering style she polished me into a young woman. She could take on Mama-the bitch-of-survival.

And finally I was rid of that damnably shy little lost thing who could never say what she wanted, never trust that her legs could carry her fast enough or that her lungs would support anything like abandon.

That one? Even though she was a kid, she listened to cautionary tales, she saved and measured, she played alone, quietly, she listened to the adults. Don’t ask questions, don’t upset anyone. She stuffed away her big old, grand old self: no one could love her that way.

Oh forget about her; let’s go be The Professional Bitch. The Professional Bitch was the only way to approach the repetitive carelessness of a cruel workplace, of a viscous profession, of a narcissistic husband.

She could close every comment, every argument. Last words were her specialty: last words and stage whispers. She could keep a list a mile long. She could drink scotch and laugh with the men. And with the Bitch, I was funny and glib. With her, I had a context, a ‘tude, a style. With the Bitch boa wrapped around my shoulders, nothing could hurt me. My stride was, sexy, witty, and impermeable.

But … I was a bitch.

She was powerful. And a little toxic.

Really, I was a hollow milk chocolate bunny, the kind my mother was always disappointed to bite. Didn’t everyone know I was hollow inside?  I thought it was perfectly obvious.  If I let anyone get close they were sure to know, right off.  Empty!  Fraud! My biggest fear. I could listen for a cue, be ready to run, adopt passing dreams, directions, beliefs, mannerisms. But I couldn’t muster conviction. I didn’t follow through.

The anger must have been there all along, just waiting to be flung at some unrepentant shit-head. Oh, I wouldn’t dare. And I wouldn’t even think about it for another twenty years.

By then, the Bitch had mellowed considerably. She ran into the usual pumice of disappointment, exhaustion, love, empathy, indifference, time and uncertainty. Grain by grain the rock-face wore away; sometimes boulder by boulder. She didn’t become less exacting or critical. She just got tired and gave up more often.

And that damnably shy little lost thing? She grew, even shut away and abandoned like that.  She grew: silent; hidden; unknown. She wanted a turn. She finally grew strong enough to push the door ajar.

“H’lo?  Where did she go, that Bitch that ran my life?”

It was my daughter who discovered the surprising fact and told me—I wasn’t a bitch. Next thing I knew, a man told me I was sweet.

“Sweet?  Me? The Bitch? You’ve got to be kidding.”

“No—your essence is sweet.”

Now how can he know something like that?  How could he see inside when there’s nothing there to see?

But it just might be true. I can tell the story my way. I’m a grownup and I fill me all up from my toes to my fingers.  I feel the sun on my shoulders and it’s ok. Maybe I don’t need the bitch to protect me.

When I moved to Portland, I bought my first car: a perfect green Rambler Rogue. I paid $1000 for a car that ran almost perfectly for years and worried that I likely overpaid.

I spoiled her faded, matronly body, by plunging it into a small yellow truck in a residential intersection. My only defense was exhaustion; I had just finished my first year in law school. The humans were just fine, but the Rogue gushed blue all over the intersection. My heartbreak.

My boyfriend loved cars and had monkeyed around with them since boyhood. This was more complex body work than he had done before but his devotion let to months of rehab. Love me—love my Rogue. She re-emerged as the lemon-lime Rogue. She had a shiny yellow hood and fenders, fresh from the junk yard, on her straightened steel frame.

In search of my next human romance I came to discover the Rogue’s special secrets. The front seats flattened back into a double mattress—they even took a fitted sheet if one was to be so delicate. She was the auto-equivalent of the diaphragm: up-front and functional. Together we navigated the public lands of Oregon in those wondrous days before “sex” was modified by the word “safe.”

I didn’t think she’d make it cross-country so I let her keep her cushy job, trucking law students to school, for a few more years. Eventually I replaced her with a brand new little red Chevette. I sometimes regretted leaving the Rogue behind. She didn’t need red, shiny, brand new. She was a classic, beyond all that. Her light yellow and faded green body was like Sophia Loren however thick the glasses. She was permanently hot.

350 what? If atmospheric concentrations of CO2 remain above 350 parts per million, we face human and natural disaster.

who?  You, me, all of us.

Why?

In December in Copenhagen the world’s nations meet to agree on a new climate treaty. On October 24, the International Day of Climate Action we, those of us taking part in actions around the world, will call upon those nations to do Enough. It’s the most widespread day of environmental action in the planet’s history. There will be rallies and incredible creative actions across the globe. Find an action near you. Go to the website 350.org. Find 350.org on facebook. Do Something:

I had a letter from Gertrud. She visited the archive of the concentration camp Stutthof. She saw the identity numbers my Grandmother and Aunt wore as prisoners there.

This information shocked me. Someone had a piece of my family that I didn’t have. I’d been working with my Grandmother’s notes of her experiences in Concentration camp and I knew a tiny smattering of what went on in the Stutthof. It was a place of unspeakable cruelty—extreme, even in the context of the Shoah. This was where Rudolph Spanner perfected the art of rendering human fat—pure Jewish fat.

Did this letter mean I had to go to Poland to see the numbers and inhale the place? It almost seemed indecent that others would see them and I would stay away. I didn’t know there was a place to go.

I’m sure Eva and Selma gladly left the rags of their uniforms, useless and hated detritus. Now I learned the numbers were enshrined: testimony to screams, terror, hatred, life-times missed and brutality mastered. They bore witness, confirmed history, recorded the sweat and soil and took people to places we cannot imagine with our intellect. They made the suffering and stories nauseatingly real, like the smell of the shoes at the Holocaust Museum.

I knew Selma and Eva’s story. But it is so hard to believe, even having known them and heard the stories from their own lips. Would I really get it if I saw these marks? If I stood under the timbers that held their dread? Wrapped in the gray skies that clothed them? Amidst the brutalized population that let this horror occur, that smelled the bodies burn in its own backyard and did nothing—or worse, was grateful for the relief from its Jewish problem?

I saw these things in Dachau. I felt the soils of Europe turn to blood beneath my feet, while my own blood turned to steel wire.

My Mother’s voice rose so quickly in my head. Laura said “No: it is wrong to spend a dime in such a place; wrong to support any industry designed to exploit this horror, however modest, or dignified. To contribute to the economy of a people that allowed this to happen on their soil? To support Poland? the Poles? No.”

“You knew your Grandmother and Aunt. Their story is the overcoming, not the labeling or limiting. Their lives should not be summarized by this helping of hardship they endured. This sore on our lives must be closed and the grip released.”

Their lives were certainly more than the three and a half years they spent in NAZI concentration camps. Their passion for life was not erased there; it was fulfilled here: they are the American dream.

But their role in history is probably as survivors of the Shoah; a teen-aged girl and a middle-aged woman who survived somehow by their wits, their bodily strength, sheer luck and mental fortitude.

Do I go? Would I go in search of completion? Or to find yet a new cynicism in this horror? Must I witness the lives and tears and blood spilled in that soil? Does my Kaddish need to come directly from the scar? Or do I listen to the voice of survival, of self-protection, of escape.

I didn’t yet know.

THE STUTTHOF—An Answer:

Here I am. I had to come after asking over and over before different audiences. Do I go? The answer came back yes, enough of this wondering. So I traveled for 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.

“Momma, you must come over to this side. You are with too many old ladies.”

“But I am afraid. The guard walks up and down with his bayonet drawn.”

Finally they worked it out. Another woman spotted her daughter in the group with Eva. The daughter slipped beneath the wire to join her mother while Selma slipped beneath to join Eva in the younger group. One slipped unwittingly to immediate death, the other to continued slavery, starvation, brutality, typhus, murderers, clubbers, dogs, possible attack by German or Russian forces, and the possibility of survival. But most importantly, the roll-call came out even.

This is a forgotten camp. It’s not mentioned in The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, the books, the movies about the Holocaust. Yet in it’s wicked days and nights it was the hub of a huge series of camps across the Baltic forest. It was built as a place for Nazis to terrorize the Western Pomeranians and hold prisoners of war. Eventually it was honored by a visit from Himmler himself and it was promoted to concentration camp status.

The Jewish barracks were destroyed long ago—ostensibly to try and curb one of the many typhus outbreaks. Under a carpet of snow in a forgotten corner of Poland it doesn’t look like a scar. The soil is not even visible, let alone red with the blood that flowed here. It’s hard to imagine the thousands of people brutalized and murdered here. It’s hard to imagine the Red Army stumbling across a scene so despicable that the liberating army quickly hanged all the SS guards, male and female and photographed them spinning from their improvised gallows.

“Tea?”

“Please. Thank you.”

Quiet.

I walk this sterile snow-covered camp converted to museum and archive and I realize it bears no relationship to the camp or subcamp world Selma and Eva inhabited. No, not the world of the Haftlinge, the prisoners, hostages of a doomed war, insular and desperate. After two and a half years of hunger and suffering the new girl could still figure out the better side of the wire, the widow could still fear the end of a bayonet, and love and connection could carry them through.

I look at the index cards that were given me, one for Selma, one for Eva. The prisoner number is recorded and retrieved according to the perverse brilliance that planned, executed and filed this horror away dispassionately and correctly. There is no getting this story, this place, these places. Here, they waited in the endless roll calls, listening to Russian bombardment coming for them. From here there was no meticulous bus schedule to Gdansk, to civilization. After they beat the typhus they still had to lie their way free of the Russians and find their way home across a wrecked continent. But from here they began to begin a new life.

This place is hard to take in. The quiet courtesy defeats the anger that should be here. The snow is deceptively soft and clean. The bitter cold seems justified.

Today this place is about death, memorial, documentation. Selma and Eva defied that legacy and lived. I see now, that this place did not hold them, own them, or define them. They left this place behind.

My people—my two who survived this hell— left a Europe wracked and ruined with hatred. They left it so far behind that they became another people altogether: Americans. They swallowed a huge long-acting tablet that worked on them as they struggled to return to the country that condemned them, through the purgatory years before they could emigrate, during the anxious years of transition, and while fevers of illness and recovery awakened them. It charged through their limbs for forty and fifty years, turning their gaze to the fierce sun like strong yellow flowers. I did bear witness and I witnessed escape.

If you’re interested in more about this subject find a more journalistic account of my Winter 2009 trip.

Yes, this is the astonishing thing—or is it one of those “astonishing things” that is perfectly apparent and mundane? Perhaps the amount one considers family members in daily life is in inverse proportion to the amount of family one regularly sees. I’m not representing this as any kind of principle or even as a belief I actually hold. I’m just testing it out. But if Suzie Psychologist wants to cook up a research project using this thesis, she ought to interview me.

The other odd thing about the space, time and thought I devote to my family is that I gave them little thought or interest throughout most of my life, when they were alive. Again maybe this is one of those perverse—oh excuse me—inverse, relationships, or maybe that big old fat subconscious just plays these tricks on us.

I certainly didn’t consider my family’s well-being when I was a younger person. I didn’t miss my parents or long to see them. In fact I took my first obvious opportunity to get out and I never much went back—even when it would have made sense to do so. I just booked cramped obligatory visits designed to disappoint. Perhaps family is one of those “don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone” kind of things? Or perhaps we simply cannot overestimate our parents’ power over our unconscious processes. Somehow with all the bumps and bruises this power slips out into my more-conscious substrate.

Let’s take a little inventory here—who exactly is my family? I am an only child—so siblings are out. I’m divorced, so although I have one “outlaw” I still connect with, when the official “in-law” family stampeded in eager renunciation of me, I kissed good-by the obligatory holiday visits and such with no regret.

My Father died almost twenty years ago. He was the youngest child of a youngest child—both families were large. His grandparents and aunts and uncles were all dead before I was born. His cousins were elderly. My youngest first cousin is sixteen years older than me and the removed’s—while quite connected among sibling groups—have only limited contact with me. Ah, the removed’s… Why was I so good at figuring out the proper name for each and every type of cousin?

My Mother and Father were both the children who moved far from home—an admirable trait I emulated. But we lost a lot of connections in the process. Hitler did in most of my Mother’s family almost seventy years ago and time has taken the rest.

So family is me and my daughter—my pride and joy, the object of day-to-day thoughts and no weight upon my sub-conscious, I think. Thank goodness.

I remember consciously instituting a practice to try and remember my parents and the experiences we shared. I had become concerned that pressure, shame, and my own psychology had caused me to lock chunks of my life behind large steel doors in my head. I wanted to share the old and almost forgotten worlds of my family with my daughter.

It may be true, for the sake of argument, that I missed much of my own life and neglected or suppressed the important intersections with parents. Maybe I failed to express my love or enjoy theirs. Maybe I misconstrued their lessons and behavior. Maybe there was something more to be gotten—or something less. But I’ve opened, dredged, written and remembered. I no longer worry that I simply missed these things. I’ve done yeoman’s duty recording, sharing, and paying homage.

I’ve been told I know a remarkable amount about my family members. My parents were very verbal people and I was a captive audience. I was never dismissed to the “children.” I was clutched in the mainstream of my parents’ lives. They consciously shared the bygone worlds they were raised in. They understood these worlds that had vanished and they held them, often tenderly for one another. They passed these memories on to me.

It’s taken me this long to actually see and place the old neighborhoods firmly enough to let go and leave the room. But now that I’ve put so much of this memory through my own process, I feel lighter and freer from
the certainties and uncertainties. Good by to all—well, some—of those thoughts, traditions, intolerances, confinement, chiding, reproach, and shame. I’m going to close the door on the archive for a bit.