Fairy Tale in Dachau
I ride the impeccable Autobahn from Munich to Dachau in 1976 in order to expiate the sin of an abortion. I was my mother's first-born. She was her mother's. This would have been mine. I clasped my belly and crouched to the floor twenty-four hours later as my pregnancy hormones leaped to their deaths and I screamed inside my head, What have I done? I must immediately undo it.
Just like I had felt all my life about the Holocaust, witnessing my parents' suffering, unable to go back and undo the deaths, as if I had caused them myself.
I decided to punish myself by travelling to Germany, my heart of darkness, alone.
I stand in a gas chamber in Dachau with a sign proclaiming "No one was ever gassed here." Ha! My grandfather was in this concentration camp, starving, with people dying all around him, quickly whisked to the crematorium to hide the evidence. These Germans who now manufacture the world's most non-toxic toys murdered my aunts and uncles as children with the world's most toxic pesticides. Of course they are lying. Giving and taking. Preserving history while reducing it to pablum. This is the bare concrete room I have always imagined.
This is the closest I have ever come to a grave of my ancestors. I feel relief in the stillness, the solid reality of this clean room in a white building meant to hold poisonous showers, validating my life-long nightmares despite the disclaiming sign. I can breathe now. It is immaculate instead of filled with excretions and stench. The screams can no longer be heard.
Outside, the lawn between the showers and the ovens is a perfect patch of grass, each blade standing erect like a little green soldier, all alike, very Aryan. Certainly leftover cyanide-based Zyclon-B pesticide from the gas chamber was used to purge the lawn of weeds, bugs and vermin. Very efficient. No waste. Perfectly recycled.
Two children in red hooded ponchos, their backs to me, flank a woman in front of the round metal doors of the ovens of the crematorium. It is a grey ashen scene, a light rain falling. Only their raincoats are in color, slick with rain. I wonder what the woman is saying to them. They are so still and well behaved. I snap photographs to stay grounded, not get sucked into the past, but also to help me ponder the scene for later.
When I get home, I tuck a photo in the corner of my mirror. They are after all Hansel and Gretel, about to be pushed into the oven by the evil witch. Or maybe she is their mother, so weary of her flashbacks and nightmares of concentration camps that she is getting rid of her bickering children the only way she knows how.
“I wish I had died in the concentration camp not to live to have such rotten children,” I remember my mother screaming at me and my sister in one of those very bad moments that marred our externally perfect childhoods. My sister and I raced up the stairs as my mother sobbed at the foot of them. It's your fault. No, yours, we whispered back and forth. We were only six and nine. We hated each other for causing my mother so much pain.
Or maybe the Dachau family are ghosts from the Brothers' Grimm, reassuring me that this was all just a fairy tale gone awry and none of it was real. Not the miserable years my parents spent in camps. Not the phobias and panic attacks I developed thereafter, with no one to help any of us, no one understanding the effects of the massive traumas rippling through survivors' families. Not until many years later. Too late for us. So that all of us, my parents and siblings, the lady with the two children, were completely on our own figuring how to extricate ourselves from the all pervasive Zyclon-B gas still circulating in our bloodstream, poisoning our minds, robbing us of sleep and the ability to feel that we were still alive.
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Author's Note
Published Fall 2012 in the Rose and Thorn .http://www.roseandthornjournal.com/Fall_2012_Prose_6.html
Other stories by Gloria Garfunkel
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SHRED THE SAFEHOUSE
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EVIL AND POISONS THAT LURK IN OUR LIVES
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The first paragraph is genius and third. They elicit the torrent of memories not witnessed but handed down to the next generation, finally so tragic and painful, how to climb out? The dear young sisters on the steps trying to imagine what their mother said or meant. The lie at the museum or historical site on the sign.
Most revered difficult risk, fave.
Even the word "abortion" can raise a flag w/ editors, I learned when I pinned it in the first line of a story. The story was rejected by that editor, but I kept it "for me." I just took it out of F'naut hiding if you want to see it, "Almanac."
Abortion, like mental illness and the Holocaust, are meant to be hidden in polite society, never to be discussed. As a formerly very radical feminist in the 1970's I don't buy this silencing by the religious right. I can't say it was the right thing to do, but it was done, more devastating than I ever could have imagined. So why not write what I know? We're not in a self-censoring repressive society. Or are we? I know I took a risk writing the word, but so be it. If writers don't take risks, who will?
Gloria, I want to comment on your story, but I can't yet. It's power profoundly affects me. The two red hooded ponchos set against the ashen greys and rust seem such a pronounced contrast from what was to what might be... maybe. Wow. Read it 4 times and I'm not done yet.
The writing is fine . I’m just going to Fave it, although how do you Fave this really? I can’t talk about it here.
Agree, Steven. I felt the same way. Did it, but I can't claim it.
Stunning. Thank you Gloria for this inside view of a world still unknown to many. The story reads like it happened a few days ago.
In some ways, leaving readers speechless is the highest compliment. Thank you David, Steven and Clark for your exceedingly encouraging words.
To paraphrase Yeats and Delmore Schwartz "In Memories Begin Responsibilities." If ever a story brought this home, this is it. Powerful and emotionally thought provoking.
The ghosts of the past and those of the present, beautifully intertwined.
Powerful story. I was most affected by the mother's distress, “I wish I had died in the concentration camp not to live to have such rotten children,” and the children's despair. How can we ever climb out of a world like ours? And yet, what else can we do? *
Daniel, Sally, Beate: your comments move me and I appreciate them to no end.
brilliant beyond words. these words are in your blood for certain-it is as if sliced your very skin with a knife and the words poured out-bleeding their truth-so how else can we perceive them/ receive them/ but through our own bodies? the circularity of the abortion to your childhood-barely even using words to indicate that Dachau never ends-the lies of Dachau are not lies you shall ever tell-you are the truth-teller-the truth serum-yes-your priority is to help yourself but ha! look what happened! your words help us all-wow, Gloria! keep writing! ***********
My parents and their parents and their parents, on and on, survived hunger, disease, occupation, revolution, and civil war in Ireland, which infected my childhood with horror stories and hatred. I won't compare that to the fate of European Jews in the concentration camps and the crematoriums used by Hitler and the Nazis in their horrendous campaign of genocide, but it does help me understand the depth of emotion expressed in your story: which is brilliantly written and, in that sense, a joy to read. *
Thank you Bobbi and J. for your profoundly encouraging comments. Everything you write, Bobbi feels validating and true. J. , we were both children "infected" with horror stories but even as a child I knew how much luckier I was than those infected by the events themselves. Thank to both of your for the generous, thoughtful comments and faves.
The writing itself has great power.
That's a high compliment. Thank you.
"no one understanding the effects of the massive traumas rippling through survivors' families"
You bravely take on that important mission, Gloria. Thank you for venturing into the "heart of darkness, alone."
When you say, "Wow!" it can be either a great thing, or a bad thing. This is the first time in my life it meant both at the same time.
Wow!
Thank you both Bill and Steele for your very powerful comments,
brutal, chastening. you need to publish these stories, they're wonderfully well written.***
Thanks. I find it so discouraging to try to publish. I need an agent.
The act of abortion is empowering, it is choice, it is self-preservation for many women. It is the opposite of interment in a concentration camp because it prevents hunger, and it promotes freedom. There, I got that political statement out of the way.
As to the family dynamic, I agree with Beate: “I wish I had died in the concentration camp not to live to have such rotten children," is a terrible utterance. What a burden to put on little girls. I had a childhood friend whose parents were campt survivors and although I didn't have a word for her personality (anhedonic, I later learned) I noticed that she was never lighthearted like the rest of us kids.
I lost many family members in the death camps, too, but have never had the courage to go there and witness. Your writing in this piece has a rawness that succeeds beautifully. *
Gita that was so beautiful and empowering you made me cry. Have to go blow my nose. Thank you from the bottom of my heart, Comparing the abortion and what my mother said...