(1) This isn’t a coda, though you want it to be.
(2) You just finished Sarah Helm’s “If This Is A Woman: Inside Ravensbruck: Hitler’s Concentration Camp for Women,” a camp that imprisoned, terrorized, and murdered so-called “deviant women.” And it was the only camp strictly for women under the Nazi regime. The number of deaths is unknown, but most likely in the hundred of thousands. The ones who were chosen for experiments were known as “rabbits,” their legs sliced open and infected with bacteria as well as debris and glass to simulate the wounds of soldiers. Others were injected with petrol or phenol, shot, gassed, cremated. For a week you have nightmares about this camp and others. You have these nightmares because your grandmother lost most of her family in the camps and back then, to be a refugee was shameful. You have these nightmares because your grandmother did not need to speak about her experiences; her final years revealed their toll. You knew even as a child it was not madness or dementia. And now you dream of Ravensbruck because the story of the camp is not only a Jewish story of genocide. It is the story of the savagery and deterioration of the human spirit. And in that collective sorrow and disbelief that blinds you to future and present hazards, you don’t want to total its sum, its sum of this past year, only one year of destruction.
(3) There exists a word for dehumanizing the human: Untermensch. It was used by the Nazis, but it originated in the United States of America, coined by Harvard graduate, political writer and eugenicist Lathrop Stoddard in The Revolt Against Civilization: The Menace of the Under-man. Stoddard was furious for the Nazis using his term, not because he didn’t believe in white supremacy– he did and was against the Axis pact with Japan because he found Asia a threat to the idea— but for the reason it caused conflict and war among white Europeans whom he wanted united to preserve “white world-supremacy.”
When it came to determining which lives matter, Stoddard’s and the Nazi regime’s goals were and were not the same. And you know, beyond the collective sorrow, this exists in the U.S., that it exists blatantly and completely. That somewhere right now, guilty men not found guilty are breathing sighs of relief that they will determine what lives matter.
(4) The greatest gift you ever received is being the child of two different peoples. And the greatest gift you know is not always being accepted. Because in carrying that frustration and anger, you’ve learned to love languages. And eventually you learn it is not to explain yourself but to speak your own humanity as an act of will.
(5) And there are times language betrays you. Sitting here with these words– what can they do? You want to act. You want to enact change. You wish to do it without the use of force. You want to change not just the law but the violence within the culture. It makes you angry that you do not know how to do this. The anger must not win. But the anger must not end either.
(6) To dehumanize a child is the ultimate act of violence.
(7) You remember first watching Elmer Fudd in a Looney Tunes cartoon; he kept shooting himself by accident, but would reappear unscathed in the next scene. His relentless hunt of Bugs Bunny was comical because you knew he’d never catch the rabbit. You don’t know how you knew this; you just did. Years later, in Jerusalem, you shot your first gun; you were so small and unprepared for the force that knocked you down. Your tights were torn, the back of your leg bleeding, but you wanted to do it again. Again. Again. You were ravenous for another shot and later, ashamed.
(8) Tamir Rice was murdered. It was a crime.
(9) That 2015 is ending and 2016 beginning are empty yet necessary markers to measure progress. If you need a date to begin again, or rather start over, so be it. Once you lived your life waiting for Shabbat to come, that day of rest, that day of peace, even though you parents went to work after morning prayers at your shul which was never welcoming to your Mexican mother. It was only in watching your parents together, when your father would rub your mother’s tired shoulders as she lit the candles for the Havdalah, that you could hear the Sabbath past, present and future, the same song of all its songs, but each in a change of key. Once you believed that and felt at peace. Sometimes you still do.
(10) Your grandmother always told you the best of people died in the concentration camps, that horrendous things had to be done in order to stay alive. She’d splay out her hands, as if showing you these things in her rough, heavily lined palms. Then she’d tell you some of the things she did to stay alive. Your mouth would go dry. You’d play a game of checkers, and she’d never let you win only because you were a child. She’d show you how to win. She’d tell you that you had to win as much you could, no matter what. She’d then tell you: never be like me. She’d start to contradict herself, muddling language in a hodgepodge of Russian, Yiddish, English. Some German, which always frightened you. She’d forget the prayers for the Sabbath. She distrusted doctors, but relatives said it was dementia or perhaps Alzheimer’s.
You knew it wasn’t.
You knew she was speaking all the things that were done to her, that she had done, what had broken her, that left her broken. You knew she was speaking the truth in its ugliest, most brutal form.
Later you’d play checkers with her, but she’d stop speaking by then, and you would have to play for both of you. And only then would you always win.
This is the final installment of a 4-part series. Check out the first, second and third installments.