8 - The face of a Jew in my head

 

  

I make up a face for the Jew in my head, whose hair makes up my bed and my socks.

I know it is more than one Jew, but I ache for a face to comfort me.

It is so cold here under the Atlantic – American or British ships constantly on the prowl in their search for us.

We slither silently along the bottom.

I am always scared and cold and lonely.

Even a Jew’s face is better than no face at all.

This is something I know none of the others trapped inside this hull understand.

They tell me to love the fatherland.

They tell me I must hate Jews – or gypsies or Soviets or any others listed on the list of enemies the Fuehrer issues.

But how do I hate the man or woman who keeps me warm?

The Americans have a saying about walking in another man’s shoes, and here I walk in their socks and sleep on their heads.

How can I hate them?

How can I not wonder about them?

Was this a good man?

Did he raise good sons?

Sometimes in my dreams I call out names I have never heard in waking, Jews names, dead names.

And those around me who hear me warn me to keep silent or else.

I am puzzled as to why I say these things and helpless to stop them.

And sometimes in this close place, I feel the hair smother me, bad air filling the chamber around me not with the expended breath of my fellow sailors, but the last breath of Jews I have never seen.

I tell myself the war won’t last forever and I will not spend the rest of my life locked in this chamber filled with heartless men.

Someway, I will go home again to where I can walk again side by side with strangers and not feel hatred.

Or shame.

And I won’t need to make up a face or name.

Or have nameless ghosts haunting me in my sleep.

Then, the Americans or British find us, bomb us and our world rattles and leaks, air growing staler and staler with each breath.

Until we all cry or pray or close our eyes, no longer supermen, perhaps no longer even men, but boys calling for the comfort of our mothers or our wives.

And I’m so scared I don’t know who to cry to any more or to what God I should pray.

So all that comes out of my mouth is the name I make up for that person I never saw, the man, woman or child whose hair keeps me warm at night.

If any of the others hear me they are too scared to say

What is in a name when you wait for death?

Is this space of metal like that space where those Jews died?

Did those Jews feel then as I feel now?

Once the attack ends, we all become good Germans again.

I tell myself these people here are my kind, while my ghosts are not.

If we die – here in this ship, we die with honor, not like dogs.

I tell myself I am a hero, a man, a good German.

Yet when no one can here me, I still call out my Jew’s name, snuggling deep into the warmth of his hair, feeling something more growing inside of me that is neither German nor Jew.



email to Al Sullivan

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

20 - Shoemaker

Image
  I am a shoemaker, but not so good a shoemaker as my father was, or his father before him. I learned from my father’s hand, yet have only a dim memory of him from those hazy times in the old country when he ran a small shop near Berlin . My father was a good shoe maker, not a wealthy one. Since he was a Jew he mostly sold to other Jews, and in Germany in those days, few Jews had wealth to spare. None the less my father earned a living, as well as the enmity of Hans, the German shoemaker who hoped not only to sell his shoes to Germans but to us Jews, too. Hans hated my father long before any of us heard about the Nazis or understood fully who and what they were. I think now Hans envied my father’s ability, fingers that could mold leather in a way few other men could then or since. Hans often called my father “a dirty Jew” in the market place just to keep others from doing business with us. This being Germany, many already blamed us for losing the Great War, so th...
Read more

12- We turn to dust

Image
   If I have so much, why do I feel so poor? We live in this place because they do not let us live anywhere else – and then blame us for living as we do. They call us greedy, and say we earn our livelihood in dirty professions, as if we could earn our keep in any other way. I count coins at night because I have so few to count, and must squeeze what I can out of each, knowing I will be blamed for being cheap. They hate us not merely for what we are, but also for our ability to survive. Each time they take something from us, we manage, and so they take more until we have nothing left for them to take except what we cannot give up, and then they take that, too. When they put us in ghettos, they thought we would act like rats and devour each other in such a small place. But we survived. So then they put us in an even smaller place, and even smaller after that, and a place finally so small, we turn to dust. Holocaust menu email to Al Sullivan
Read more

3 - I won’t let them take God from me

Image
    I won’t let them take God from me, although I am not a God-fearing man the way my father was, and my brother. I did what I did to honor God the way all boys my age did. But I was a boy with my eye on the world, someone who truly believed I could become whatever I wanted regardless of the blood others said ran through my veins. Others, of course, made it clear I could become only what they said I could become, and so I became that, learning to accept what I could not change, learning to thrive on less so that I might thrive at all. And then that took even that, calling me greedy for clinging to only what I was told I could have, and this, too, I accepted, and did still with even less. When they told me we had to live here, I even accepted my shrinking world as inevitable, until I found it had shrunk to a bunk six of us must share. But by that time, I had shrunk, too, my rattling bones fitting into half the space I thought once as necessary. Even this was too m...
Read more