In My Life

The way things felt, before. The way the air felt in the barrack, the way the striped pajamas felt against the skin, the way the camp felt like a cage built of silence and hunger and the endless walk from one place to another place, waiting. Waiting for
what? The way I learned to feel, to stop feeling things, or maybe to feel everything all at once, a terrible static in the head.

The way I remember smells, sometimes. I'm getting started again. I'm learning how to feel again after talking to many people, but it's still hard.  Seeing people disappear makes one disconnect from the world. For some of us, we were selected during roll. Because we were fit. So, they said that we would become new people if they took us to the edge because our traits would come out very brightly. But what I saw was different. I saw Anne strapped to a table with her eyes wide open. They made me watch. They told us that they needed to realize our traits because they were suppressed and extreme things would bring them out.

 It was slow, the way Anne got, the way she faded, the way the world just… stopped seeing her. The way I saw her last, in the little room, her eyes too big, her mouth open, waiting for a word, a sound, anything, and there was nothing. Just the silence, and the way the air felt thin.

I waited afterwards for Anne but I couldn't find her. And there was Miep, with those jars of jam. 

The way Peter comes sometimes, sits in the dark, and tells me things. Things about the war, about the future, about the boy he met. Peter, my Peter, he doesn't understand. He doesn't know the way the camp felt, the way the air tasted, the way the numbers dictated everything. He thinks I’m just sad, or quiet, or maybe it’s just the war. He doesn’t know the way I remember the smell of the disinfectant, the way it smelled like death had a scent, and sometimes I smell it again, suddenly, when I least expect
it. Like some stale almonds. Because we needed to be cleaned because we were not like the rest. And they hurt me badly.  These people aren't human.

The way I write sometimes, in the dark, when Peter is away. The way the words come, haltingly, like I’m trying to piece together a puzzle I can’t see the picture of. The way I write about things I can’t feel, or maybe I feel everything, and the words are just… wrong. The way the memory of the barracks feels like a physical weight, pressing in, making it hard to breathe, even now.

The way I look in the mirror, sometimes, at my own face, and I don’t recognize it. It’s older, tired, but it’s still me. The me who survived, who carries the weight of the dead, who keeps waiting for a letter, for a sound, for a word. But I see my son. 

The way the silence is, now. It’s not the silence of the barracks, that was broken by shouts, by marching, by the sirens. This silence is… full. It’s filled with everything that was, everything that wasn’t. And I sit here, in the dark, listening, waiting for Peter, for the memory of Anne’s laugh, for the war to finally be over, for the silence to mean something else. But it doesn’t. It just is. And the past keeps coming back, one way or another.

I understand why they accuse me of fleeing from Mengele in the Americas.

The systematic erasure of identity involved repeated trial and error attempts to isolate genes. To reframe individuals as new soldiers. Why are we lacking transparency on what happened?

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Gruss.u.kuss

Thank you for being there in california with me with your patch that you wore in the sun - 30 years ago

Everything kind of got erased. fortunately, the original documents were kept