Schöningen, Germany 2007

Das habe ich alles geträumt.  It was all a dream.  The apartment by the bakery, the abandoned theater, the cobblestone streets, the people I saw every day.  They must have been something I watched on TV, something I read in a newspaper, part of a story about a stranger’s life.  I needed to forget them; when I stand in my empty house, when my head throbs the drum beat of whiskey and beer, and especially when my brother and I are together.  We sit in the neighborhood bars with our heads turned to the glow of the television.  We cheer on Eintracht Schoningen, our faces red, our drinks sweating.  We hug each other when they score a goal like we never did during the war, we drink, and when they turn the lights on, sometimes we see that the other has been crying.  

I can’t believe we made it here.  Sometimes, I wonder how that happened.

        I have forgotten what most of them look like; Herr and Frau Schmidt, Hans and Aleks, our father.  My wife and daughter are both gone; my wife is dead, and my daughter is across the ocean.  She hasn’t visited since she before my granddaughter was born, a little girl with brown hair and brown eyes.  My mother would have died if she’d seen all that dark hair.  My mother could never believe we made it here, either.  Now she is gone too.

My mother must be at peace, wherever she is, because she never visits.  I see my father every night.  He’s more talkative now than he ever was when he was alive.  He waits in the shadow behind the grandfather clock in my bedroom.  He never used to come back, but now that I am alone, he visits me.  Whenever I am about to fall asleep, he steps out of the darkness.  He is still wearing his traveling coat, and he looks exhausted; the journey has been long, and all he wants to do is get off the train.  My heart wrings; he must be in so much pain.  He is suffering, and I realize I don’t have what he needs, because I forgot it in some other lifetime.  Maybe it is in the apartment we lived in when we were different people.  I wonder if the apartment is still full of all the things we left?  Maybe the vial of medicine is still there, hidden under a floorboard, full of the doctor’s clear elixir.  I think I can go back, I think I can find it, and maybe get it to my father in time.  Before I know what’s happening, he is fading away, then gone suddenly, like glass in a shattered window.        

My father died after the war was over.  You would think the tragedy would have stopped when the Nazis were defeated.  It’s a convenient idea, that once the evildoers are punished, the effects of their actions come screeching to a halt.  

It amazes me that schoolchildren as far away as America have studied the horrors committed by the Nazis.  Books and movies and TV shows and plays have been written about what happened when I was a boy.  And here I am, helping to write another.  But why read about the memories of a drunk old man when the Nazis’ kept painstaking records of their own crimes?  

You want to know what happened here in our country?  All you need is the internet.  The pictures are there.  You won’t have to imagine a thing.  Emaciated children being cut up by soulless doctors, dead bodies plowed into a mass grave, starving human beings lined up, naked, waiting to die.  You could watch the videos twenty four hours a day if you wanted.  A menagerie of nightmares, free of charge.

It happened right under my nose, and yet we didn’t know. We didn’t know, but we could have made a good guess.  Some people were brave enough to guess.  What you have to remember, though, is that usually it was only a matter of time before those people disappeared too.  Once someone who knew too much was taken, everyone else hurried up and got ignorant.

So, neighbors and friends vanished. Some of them were Jews, some of them were actually brave and stupid enough to stand up to their government, and some of them were undesirable for reasons we never found out.  People were always going, and change was constant.  I remember getting a vanilla cone in the ice cream shop with my brother, smiling at the owner and saying, “So long, see you next time.’  Next time, a stranger was behind the counter, sweating and miscounting the change, letting the ice cream machine jam.  I remember when the old man I waved to on my way to catch the bus suddenly didn’t pass by one morning.  I searched the street for his beige cap, for the tweed overcoat he wore, but he had gone.  I remember a cold sweat, a nameless fear grip me.  Believe me.  You see that people are missing, and you can smell the smoke, but it doesn’t seem real.  We didn’t want to believe it.

Would you believe me if I told you we didn’t know?

Every day our government lied to us, but we still woke up, ate our breakfasts, went to our lessons, played soccer, had crushes on girls, fought with our brothers, and thought about our futures.  We were small pieces of a machine.  No one would have noticed if we suddenly disappeared; everything would have been more or less the same for the people we left behind.  Does that make us monsters?  Some people seem to think so.  We saw the smoke rising on the skyline; we breathed the sick, sweet smell of what they were burning.  

The world now knows what human beings are capable of.  What do I need to relive it for?  I’m out of here.  I’ve got nothing but time these days.  Maybe I’ll go read a novel about someone else’s tragedy.