.
.
.
.
.
.
.
Telling you about what I have experienced, the things I have witnessed, has no use. There is no point of application. Relating these things comes with no take away lesson. There is no message or meaning to them. There is no comfort for me in sharing them and no hope for you in bearing second-hand witness to them. They cannot be unseen, unread, unheard. All they can do, as Maria Stepanova observes (drawing on the work of Varlam Shalamov), is “destroy you from the inside out.”
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
Twice I have smelled the bodies of loved ones
Left hanging for days
It is not a smell
Easily forgotten
How can you bear second-hand witness to a smell? How can I communicate it to you? Why would I want to? What threshold must be crossed, to make me believe it’s worth making the effort to try? Does the path to personal or collective improvement or healing traverse
the bodies of all my dead friends?
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
On October 12, 1942, Ukrainian and German police officers surrounded the Micozc Ghetto. A tiny, little nothing ghetto in a tiny, little nothing town. They planned to murder the 1,700 Jews living there. The Jews fought back and were able to hold off the slaughter for two days. During that time up to half of the residents of the ghetto were able to escape. On October 14, 1942, the remaining Jews were captured and killed.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
I was five minutes too late
For my friend who was raped
In the alleyway one block from her home where I worked
When I saw her she was collapsing
Her voice writhing
Her body screaming a language
Incomprehensibly
It is not a sound
Easily forgotten
I think all of my friends have been raped. And I, too, have been raped. And we are, all of us, too late. And these stories we tell are the animal noises we make when we are being destroyed from the inside out. We are in pain. We
cry out.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
I have watched the firefighters wash
The blood of loved ones off the sidewalks
Into the gutter
Down the sewer drains
So that now you would never know
Somebody died right there
Nonetheless
Nonetheless it is not a sight
Easily forgotten
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
