months since we left Auschwitz.
Magda Ęirts. at is her answer to death’s beckoning. She meets a
Frenchman, a guy from Paris, who lived before the war on Rue de
something, an address I tell myself I won’t ever forget. Even in the
depths of this horror there is chemistry, person to person, that gallop
in the throat, that brightening. I watch them talk as though they are
seated at a summer café, little plates clinking between them. is is
what the living do. We use our sacred pulse as a Ęint against fear.
Don’t ruin your spirit. Send it up like a torch. Tell the Frenchman your
name and tuck his address away, savor it, chew it slowly like bread.
* * *In just a few days at Gunskirchen I become a person who cannot walk.
Although I don’t know it yet, I have a broken back (even now I don’t
know when the injury occurred, or how). I only sense that I have
reached the end of my reserves. I lie out in the heavy air, my body
entwined with strangers’ bodies, all of us in a heap, some already
dead, some long dead, some, like me, barely alive. I see things I know
aren’t real. I see them all mixed in with the things that are real but
shouldn’t be. My mother reads to me. Scarlett cries, “I’ve loved
something that doesn’t really exist.” My father throws me a petit four.
Klara starts the Mendelssohn violin concerto. She plays by the window
so that a passerby will notice her, li a face toward her, so she can
beckon for the attention she craves and can’t ask for outright. is is
what the living do. We set strings vibrating with our needs.
Here in hell, I watch a man eat human Ęesh. Could I do it? For the
sake of my own life, could I put my mouth around the skin le
hanging on a dead person’s bones and chew? I have seen Ęesh deĕled
in unforgivable cruelty. A boy tied to a tree while the SS officers shot
his foot, his hand, his arms, an ear—an innocent child used as target
practice. Or the pregnant woman who somehow made it to Auschwitz