Thursday, August 31, 2006

OCCUPIED POLAND

I was In Warsaw during the second world war. I don’t remember any of it, except for my first brutal Nazi experience. I was staying in an apartment where we were hiding 29 Jews. When the Nazis arrived and broke through the hallways like virus killers with a blinding mission, they were a double column, moving fast and thoughtlessly, they plunged through our corridors with mesmerizing severity, “how could this be reality?” none of us could really believe that it was happening, five of us stayed in a room watching the telegraph that was sitting on a wooden table, evidence that we too should die, the rumbling boots causing the telegraph to vibrate sending messages to nowhere, almost falling off the table before one of our trembling companions held it from the precipice. It was the fear that they would hear it fall and rush into our room; I told him to break it, he hesitated, but realizing that were they to find it broken, we might have a chance at survival, he caved in to our fears and broke it then left it on the table and stood up to stand with us in nerving solidarity.

The rumble Nazi squad broke like a log through the door upstairs where all the Jews were not waiting and unleashed an arsenal of lead and physical brutality blistering our ears; leaving behind a blood bath drowning, they rumbled back down stairs, one of them severely opening our door, looked intensely, observed the broken telegraph, and made a hasty decision to let us live, to live as gossip mongers of the Nazi wrath. We plunged into nervous chaos, everyone left the building except for me and two others, the night arrived, and I, against all warnings, walked up stairs. When I walked through the frame that once held the door of safety, mangled bodies echoed their agonizing screams, breathing it all into my skull, petrified tersely holding my head while my eyes bled I rushed down stairs feeling freshly possessed by twentynine Jews, now all hiding and escaping inside of me. My memory of my life in occupied Poland ends there.

The next recollection that I have of the war years I am in England, chatting in the comfort of an elegant and cozy inn; the conversation of the night is about my guilt. Did someone use the telegraph to call in the Nazi dogs? Was it me and did I want it broken because of my guilt? Were the twentynine Jews now in possession of my body taking revenge? I drank my tea while a comforting voice from my host spoke: “It was not you, everyone tries to find themselves at fault when tragedy strikes, it is a way of explaining the inexplicable to the self, if you are guilty it simplifies the inopportune horror.” I remember agreeing with him, I drank my tea, no sugar.

At some point during that interminable war, before Sir Winston Churchill would single handedly accomplish everything right to end the war, I died of natural causes. I think in a place called Bedford, if there exists such a town, I went to my death quietly and was born again in 1959 in South America; a place where many Nazis went during their sabbaticals. Some people say I look German.