Thimbles worth of opinion
Symetrically challenged
Registered: Aug 2000
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 Thoughts of a serious nature
A passage from "The Last of the Just", Andre Schwarz-Bart.
The building resembled a huge bathhouse. To left and right large concrete pots cupped the stems of faded flowers. At the foot of the small wooden stairway an S.S. man, mustached and benevolent, told the condemned, "Nothing painful will happen! You will have to breathe very deeply. It strengthens the lungs. It's a way to prevent contagious diseases. It disinfects." Most of them went in silently, pressed forward by those behind. Inside, numbered coathooks garnished the walls of a sort of giant cloakroom where the flock undressed one way or another, encouraged by their S.S. cicerones, who advised them to remember the numbers carefully. Cakes of stony soap were distributed. Golda begged Ernie not to look at her, and he went through the sliding of the second room with his eyes closed, led by the young woman and by the children, whose soft hands clung to his naked thighs. There, under the showerheads embedded in the ceiling, in the blue light of screened bulbs glowing in the recesses of the concrete walls, Jewish men and women, children and patriarchs were huddled together. His eyes still closed, he felt the press of the last parcels of flesh that the S.S. men were clubbing into the gas chamber now, and his eyes still closed he knew that the lights had been extinguished on the living, on the hundreds of Jewish women suddenly shrieking in terror, on the old men whose prayers rose immediately and grew stronger, on the martyred children who were rediscovering in their last agonies the fresh innocence of yesteryear's agonies in a chorus of identical exclamations: "Mama! But I was a good boy! It's dark! It's dark!" And when the first waves of Cyclon B gas billowed among the sweating bodies, drifting down towards the squirming carpet of children's heads, Ernie freed himself from the girl's mute embrace and leaned out into the darkness towards the children invisible even at his knees, and shouted with all the gentleness and all the strength of his soul, "Breathe deeply, my lambs, and quickly!"
When the layers of gas had covered everything, there was silence in the dark room for perhaps a minute, broken only by shrill, racking coughs and the gasps of those to far gone in their agonies to offer a devotion. And at first a stream, then a cascade, an irrrepressible, majestic torrent, the poem that through the smoke of fires and above the funeral pyres of history, the Jews- who for two thousand years did not bear arms never had either missionary empires nor colored slaves- the old love poem that they traced in letters of blood on the earths hard crust unfurled in the gas chamber, enveloped it, vanquished its somber, abysmal snickering : "SHEMA YISRAEL ADONOI ELOHENU ADONOI ECHOD... Hear, O Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is One. O Lord, by your grace you nourish the living and by your great pity you resurrect the dead, and you uphold the weak, cure the sick, break the chains of slaves. And faithfully you keep your promises to those who sleep in the dust. Who is like unto you? O merciful Father, and who could be like unto you...?"
The voice died one by one in the course of the unfinished poem. The dying children had already dug their nails into Erine's thighs and Golda's embrace waas already weaker, her kisses were blurred when, clinging fiercely to her beloved's neck, she exhaled a harsh sigh: "Then I'll never see you again? Never again?" Ernie managed to spit upthe needle of fire jappingat his throat, and as the woman's
body against him it's eyes wide in the opaque night, he shouted against the unconscious Golda's ear, "In a little while, I swear it!" And then he knew he could do nothing more for anyone in the world, and in the flash that preceeded his own annihilation, he remembered, happily, the legend of Rabbi Chanina ben Teradion, as Mordecai had joyfully recited it: "When the gentle rabbi, wrapped in the scrolls of the Torah, was flung upon the pyre by the Romans for having taught the law and when they lit the fagots, the branches still green to make the toture last, his pupils said "Master, what do you see?" And Rabbi Chanina answered "I see parchment buring but the letters are taking wing.""..."Ah yes, surely the letters are taking wing." Ernie repeated as the flame burning in his chest rose suddenly to his head. With dying arms he embraced Golda's body in an already unconscious gesture of loving protection, and they were found that way half an hour later by the team of SOnderkommando responsible for burning the Jews in crematory ovens. And so it was for millions, who turned from Luftmenschen into Luft. I shall not translate. So this story will not finish with some to be visited to be visited in memoriam. For the smoke that rises from crematoriums obeys physical laws like any other; the particles come together and disperse according to the wind that propells them. The only pilgrimage, estimable reader, would be to look with sadness ata stormy sky now and then.
And praised. Auschwitz. Be Maidanek. The Lord. Treblinka. And praised. Buchenwald. Be Mauthausen The Lord. Belzec. And praised. Sobibor. Be Chelmno. The Lord. Ponary. And praised. Theresienstadt. Be Warsaw. The Lord. Vilna. And praised. Skarzysko. Be Bergen-Belsen. The Lord. Janow. And praised. Dora. Be Neuengamme. The Lord. Pustkow. And praised....
Yes, at times one's heart could break in sorrow. But often too, preferably in the evening, I can't help thinking that Ernie Levy, dead 6 million times, is still alive somewhere, I don't know where.... Yesterday, as I stood trembling in despair, rooted to the spot, a drop of pity fell from above upon my face. But there was no breeze in the air, no cloud in the sky... There was only a presence.
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08-26-2000 12:13 PM
