Real and unreal: Holocaust monologues

   [Regina Resnick was 17 when the Holocaust started] We had a very nice life, we had families and friends, we went to movies. We did all the things kids do here, that families do here. My father was manufacturing of all kinds of leather goods We had stacks and stacks of hides all kinds of hides, you know leather and machinery Before we went to concentration camp, we were three girls and I have a brother, I had two brothers, but as soon as we got to Auschwitz, my younger brother and my mother, they took her, they  them right away to the gas chambers. So we were five siblings We started in Auschwitz and then from there we went to [a nearby labor camp]. Where we – that was the only place we did some work. We manufactured powder -- black powder in very high temperatures, and I think that was the IG Farben industries, and they manufactured ammunitions. That was the only place we worked. That was the second camp Then we went to Robinsberg, and when I think of ...

    [Katie Berces was 19 when the Holocaust started] We didn’t know where they were taking us, we didn’t know, We just saw the German SS came and one two three and we got the family ghetto lists together And then they took us to the wagon and they took Auschwitz . And that was our first arrival, and we was lucky because my mother was 47 and Mengele s ent us to left side, and who went to right side they all took them to crematorium My mother’s old sister we never saw her again Immediately. My other aunt I brought back from the other camp because I exchange her I did things unbelievable Because when you speak more languages you are more person That saved my life completely, the Russian language With my mother – this was the happiest time that we are still together Terrible thing we was standing every morning in “ Sara pel” as they used to call it – like the army, they counted so you shouldn’t disappear. But we had in four corners watchmens. One morni...

  My parents owned a fabric store, both in the business, I and my sister went to grammar school Life was very nice – normal. It was a hectic time for us. Our lives changed completely. Because they had different ordinances for Jewish people. They planned a head of time to solve the Jewish question. If you ever heard the term it was on Hitler’s mind He was obsessed with it, to eradicate the Jewish population. You can not step on the sidewalk, you have to go on the road. You have to wear the yellow star to identify you. Life was limited for us, beside that the next step was. Jewish people couldn’t have any jobs in the government, or couldn’t teach in the schools or whatever. They collected us all in the Beautiful synagogue. And they told us to take some belongings That they are going to take us to a ghetto. We should mark out belongings. This was all an indication that the would be misleading us to where we are going. They – so we all took along some items with us, basic...

    Is it hot or cold this thing they want me to breathe? I remember how warm I felt in the shop I kept before they came to tell me to leave. I have not felt so warm since though I have felt frightened. You can’t warm your fingers over a pot full of hope the way you can over one of burning coals. You can’t taste, smell or touch hope, and so, it lingers on the tip of tongue or finger or nose, illusive and deceptive when all you ache for is something real. So when I breathe this, will I taste or smell it? Will I feel some warm glow inside my chest? Sometimes, I ache to rush the wire just to be able to feel the penetration of bullets or blade, something solid against my flesh. But this thing they want to make us breath feel as evasive as hope, a tease, a deception, a sneak thief through the back door to eternity when I need to have it hit me full in the face. Is it hot or cold, this thing they want me to breathe?     Holocaust menu   ema...

  I hear it even in my sleep, the clink, clink, clink of what does not quite sound like falling bits of metal. I work in a room full of shoes, and wonder after so many days why so many people feel like they do not need them. The clink, clink, clink bothers me, rising and falling from a room beyond mine. I have tried to look in there a few times but rough hands haul me back. I do not know anyone who actually works in that room only people who work in rooms like mine, collecting items that people no longer seem to need, like hats and shirts and ties and pants. And those who work in those rooms also hear these clinks and also wonder what it is that sounds like metal but is not. We all try to picture articles of collected clothing that would make such a sound, and how much of this there must be to go on and on like it does. Clink, clink, clink. Even in my dreams.     Holocaust menu email to Al Sullivan

  I touch momma’s lips and they are cold. “Sometimes people get cold like that,” she told me once when we saw someone go cold on the train. But I never though momma would. She’s always the one who keeps me warm, especially when I am lonely at night. I’ve been lonely a lot since we left home and still don’t know why we had to leave, only that momma said we must. I didn’t like it so much when we slept in the street with all our neighbors who talked around fires about all the other people who went cold. I want to make momma warm again like she did for me. So I rub her hands until another lady makes me stop and the men with guns come and take momma away. Everybody is waiting here. But no one will tell me for what. Even momma wouldn’t say. And I’m cold and I’m scared that I might go cold like momma did, and I have nobody to rub my hands while I wait.   Holocaust menu email to Al Sullivan

   I don’t cry any more when they shoot someone. I think: “It’s only natural.” And I’m glad it isn’t me. It happens so often, I’m actually surprised that I’m not shot. When I hear the gun go off, I wait for the pain. I don’t look for reasons because I know there are none, only excuses. If you look at someone the wrong way. If you cower or cough. If you don’t look up when spoken to, Or look angry or sad or glad. Sometimes they shoot you no matter what you do. It’s only natural. It’s living that’s not, clinging to this thing in the middle of all this like a drowning man clinging to a life preserver knowing that out here in the wild sea full of sharks with guns, you can’t possibly stay alive. And the most deluded of us are the ones who think someone can save us. So I don’t cry when someone gets shot. I keep my mouth shut and thank God or fate or fortune that it isn’t me this time, and maybe it won’t be the next time either.   Holocaust menu ...

   The trash cans rattle in yard outside my window like Marley’s chains. A screen door yawns with a squeak so loud someone should be charged for torture. My night light flickers to vibration of each footstep down the alley. My landlady tells me people living in the room I just rented sometimes hear ghosts. An old Polish Jew lived in this flat before I got it, always jerking up at the least sound, as if he was the ghost and not those making the noise outside. He bore a numbered tattoo on his army and usually drank too much on weekends, one of the parade of Polish men staggering back to their homes after the bars closed. My landlady says she could sometimes here hear singing songs in Yiddish as he stitched shoes back together in the small store on the street end of the apartment. My landlady is convinced the Yiddish tongue is as incomprehensible as Martian. Most of the younger Polish in the neighborhood couldn’t under stand him though old and young no longer shun...

   I see the car waiting at the corner and I panic, turning up my coat collar hoping they won’t see me inside. I am an old man now – different from the man I was when I was young – but they won’t care that I only followed orders. I slow my pace to avoid the headlights of another passing car. The store window is filled with naked mannequins, each face as pale as death, hovering over me as I hobble along the sidewalk. The car’s reflection shows in the glass, and I wonder what these men think, and if it is possible for me to explain the mistake I made as a soldier, a mistake I have regretted my whole life since. I AM a different man now. I WAS only following orders. My children would never understand or even believe what I did if they learned about it. I have kept my silence all these years since. Why do these shadows in this car want to ruin their lives just to get back at me? I still see the faces in my head, and the lives of people walking inch by inch, s...

   I feel the tip of his rifle and it feels smooth. I am sixteen and my father’s daughter, and this is a man who looks after us. Sometimes, he brings me treats and does not ask for too much in return. My father would not have approved if he was still alive. I don’t know where my mother is. She didn’t come in on the same train as I did. Some older women look after me, but I feel utterly alone. So I feel grateful when he comes around. I do not starve. We sneak away to private places where we can be alone. But tonight, he says he is sad and won’t let me touch his gun, telling me things are going to be different in the morning, telling me we all have to go somewhere sometime and now it is my time to go. He shakes his head and tells me how sorry he is. Then he tells me good bye   Holocaust menu email to Al Sullivan

   Look at them, standing there looking at us as if we do to them anything more than they deserve! Are they not to blame for all the bad things that we have suffered before we figured out who to blame? These self-righteous, self-pitying people who think they own God and us, doing every bit of foul work proud people would never do, always trying to subvert us, to cast themselves above us and sometimes, we don’t even know who they are, this pathetic breed who breeds as to squeeze us out. That’s why we mark them. To make sure we know who and where they are, and so that they cannot continue to ruin us. Look at them! Why do they stare at us like that? Do they think they deserve what we take from them? They work hard, but then so do insects. We cannot trust them. Even the ghetto is too good for them. They conspire so, and compiling them in one place only makes them worse. Even the cattle cars are too good for them, a wasted resource upon which we can’t even feed...

    The Nazi guard tells me I should do this or I will die. I cannot believe what I see, bodies piled on top of each other like pieces of clay. The smell of carbon monoxide is still hovering over them, still oozing out of their open mouths with their last breaths. I am so hungry I could gnaw off my own arm. I have already seen others die, who have eaten more than I have. Some from my synagogue hate me for what I am doing. But what choice do I have? In this world swimming with death, I must do all I can to keep alive. The Nazi guard assures me he will protect me if I do what I am told. I have no desire to becoming one of those I saw, bones stretched tight with flesh over which even the rats won’t feed. Others, even some from my old shuel would do the same if given the chance. Although I have seen many who have refused, and then glare at me as I pass them in the compound. They look at me with hate for the few extra morsels of food the guard gives me as ...

  I pretend I am not a Jew because my life depends on it In this place where even the smallest percentage can mean extinction, this is more than merely a white lie – and I cling to it. I don’t completely understand why people tell on people and so some of us who say we are something we are not get caught and branded, not merely as a Jew, but as a lying Jew, and get hurt worse for deceiving them. At what point do we stop being a Jew? How many generations back to we have to go before we can say we are something other than what we are? And who gets to calculate all this? How do we take the measure of a man or women so they gain the right to live? I don’t look like a Jew or act the way they say Jews act. I do not feel like I belong to any of them except as fear I might follow them to where they all must go sooner or later. And in the end, when I am most scared, when I think someone is onto me, I wonder to which God to I pray to come save me?   Holocaust menu ...

   Momma always told me that if I didn’t eat right I would turn to skin and bones. I always tried to make momma happy. But I am a leaf, so think I can see the bones through my flesh. We never have enough to eat. Some say I am lucky to have survived our first coming to camp. Someone else says a German law prohibits the Nazi from killing anyone until we turn 18. But since when did German law protect a Jew? I saw them shoot many men, women and children when we got off the cars, people they say weren’t strong enough to work. I must look strong. They let me live. But the men in uniform always yell at us, whipping us to do more, beating the women -- even my mother. I don’t know how to make them stop. I feel as if I have failed momma. Life wasn’t easy in the ghetto before we came here. But momma seemed to worry less. And we didn’t see the men in the uniforms much, if we were careful. In those days, all I had to do was give momma a hug to make her smile...

  I hate when on gets away. All the trouble we go through just to catch a Jew. But they’re like cockroaches. You let one go they breed and you have to start all over again This time we do everything right. We kick in the front door and charge in, shooting at every nook and cranny we suspect might hide a body. But they’re tricky little beasts. They need so little room I wonder how they can breathe. They aren’t breathing generally when we’re done. Except in this case we find the back door open and I know instinctively one or more of them got away. I shoot at the wall just to shoot and blink twice when I see a trickle of blood oozing out the floor board. As I said, they’re tricky Nicholas asks if we should hunt them down. But I look out at the tangle of ghetto yards and know that it could be a trap. Fear tinkles inside me and I feel vaguely ashamed. How can a race as superior as ours fear afraid of rats like them? Do real men fear insects? Can real me...

    They wake you in the morning put a flashlight in your eyes, dragging you and the bed sheets to the floor. They strip off your bed clothes with a gun at your head. You feel like dust already, you eyes itch, your mouth tastes of linoleum, and the newsprint from the morning headlines leaves images on your face, of heroes who are not your heroes in a country that used to be yours. Someone takes your picture then asks about your wife. You’re scared and say you’re going to call the police. They say they are the police and they’ve come to bring you law and order. It’s just not quite the law and order you had in mind. One of them grabs your daughter as she comes through the door. You don’t see her; you just hear her scream, and then the muffled sound of tearing fabric. Your guard just grins as he waits his turn, his eyes like x-rays as he looks in her direction. You rise, they hit you, you rise again and they hit you until you stop trying. They say they are...

  In the last hours before the darkness comes, they choose: right or left. After all the badges we wore, and ghettos we lived in, after the box cars and bunk beds, after all the ditches dug and sweat of having not been buried in one, it all comes down to right or left. I have never been a man of great courage, choosing things more out of necessity than conviction, with the hope all would turn out well in the end with whatever choice I made. So doing what I was told made sense to me, even when what they told me to do did not. Perhaps I truly believed God or fate would steer me right when logic could not, each stumbling step through each strange change making me more desperate for some divine plan that lacked in mankind. But I know better now on this walk to the showers that are not showers, I know neither God nor fate holds my hand, only blind luck and some man in a uniform steering me to the right – or it is the left?   Holocaust menu email to Al Sullivan ...