Real and unreal: Holocaust monologues

   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...