Real and unreal: Holocaust monologues

   The whispers are always here I hear their voices even as I sweep – like dark spirits hovering over me saying “careful, careful, don’t knock the bones.” The guards with their black boots tell me to hurry or I might be next. If they hear the voices, they do not say so, yet they hear the bones rattle as the broom pushes them across the floor. The ovens are already dark, stained black with soot that never comes clear – even though I scrub and scrub. I fear the dark when the voices talk most, and when I can almost see the shapes kneeling on the ground like grotesque gargoyles begging guards for mercy none of us ever expects them to grant. I think often of my last birthday – before the soldiers came – and my mother making me a cake with ten candles on it. Warsaw seems years ago and I feel so old, as ancient as my grandmother, though I will see no candles this year and I am afraid to count. The guards – for amusement – sometimes ask me to count the bones, needin...

   It is not my fault. I am not like my momma or poppa who wanted nothing to stay in the shtetl, seeing no one, speaking to no one other than our own. They wanted no more than what they had, to go to temple, to recite and to go home again, needing no other path but the one our ancestors paved for them between birth and god. I like being in the world, to walk down a busy street filled with children and traffic, to wave and smile at people I know and have them wave and smile back at me. I like to think I am part of something larger than my religion, mean something to the place where I grew up and live, and have the respect of Goyim and Gentile. And for a long time I thought I did. I am a proud man. These fingers learned long ago how to work fabric in ways even poppa could not. I can make a suit with my eyes closed, hem a gown, tuck a cuff or sew a stitch as quickly as anybody. I do fine work. Even the worst of THEM say that. Then all this changed. I wal...

     My father called any music other than Jewish music, German music, and hated me for playing it. His idea of an orchestra was comprised of 12 instruments and resigned to the Temple . He always complained about “that screeching in the attic” when I practiced, thinking my violin as something evil. “Why do you knot learn to play the lyre or harp?” he always asked me. But I was always an ambitious boy and wanted to play great music not associated with scripture. I wanted to play in the great concert halls in Berlin or Paris or Prague . Now, I play here, scratching out “German music” each day when the work men march out of camp to the factories and each evening when they return. My father, had he survived the train that brought us here, would have hated my music more than ever. No Jew, he would tell me, has any business playing in a Nazi camp. Deep down, I know he is right. This is not Temple or great halls, but some aspect of living hell, to whic...

    My landlord is convinced I am a Jew. No matter how much I study being Christian, something small always trips me up. I need to leave Germany , but Christian guards are savvy to every trick, grilling people like me to make certain we really are the Christians we say we are. Each time I think I am ready to take that test, I panic. I pray for guidance, not as a Christian, nor even as a Jews, but at a desperate girl, having faith that God didn’t mean for any of this to happen and that he will eventually help save me. I am luckier than most in that I look German. On the street people nod at me as if I was one of their own. This has kept my landlord in doubt. He fears that I might really be German after all, and to report me would get him in trouble. But I know he never stops watching, waiting for the moment when I will slip up. I hope to secure passage out of the country before this happens. Maybe he guesses this, and I see in his eyes that he has made up ...

    If you breathe, it hurts less, I think, feeling my bones rattle with each breath I take . I no longer crave food I know will never come. I crave air, but fear if I take too deep a breath someone might notice me and tell me to stop. I breathe less and hope the pain will cease, though I know it never does. Each breath reminds me I still live when many I know have died. This is the real dilemma: to breathe or not to breathe. There is no other question, As long as I breathe, I will feel pain; and as long as I feel pain, I know I am alive. And yet, if I breathe, it may hurt less. Holocaust menu   email to Al Sullivan

  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...

  I always thought of myself as a good Nazi. In those days, we all needed to believe in something. We once saw ourselves as the Holy Roman Empire , feared -- we thought -- throughout the world. We once marched through Europe in grand majesty -- too proud perhaps. So many others sought to destroy us, and eventually did. My father never recovered from the humiliation he felt when the emperor surrendered in 1918. Better death by mustard gas, he said, than the slow death he suffered later, his mind becoming twisted with rage before the end. I saw Hitler as our salvation, a man with ideas, a man who could bring back to the fatherland the pride my father saw ooze away. I put on the uniform and the arm ban because it made me feel important, as if I belonged once more to a noble institution. I did not hate Jews the way many others around me did, though I admit deep down I believed as my father had that the Jews had caused us to lose the Great War. For this reason, I...