Fire Pit

As if it were iron

It stopped me

Inhaled all

And sought me

Born to a machine

It lives

With arms outward

Screaming

Grasping

Choking

Blink

Blink

Breathe, breathe, breathe

Original write date: 5/23/1996

I visited Dachau, Germany November 1988.  It was an experience I will never forget.  Driving into Dachau, the overcast sky seemed to have fallen hanging closer to our heads.  The townspeople walked with the burden of living like a coat too heavy to wear.  We had no idea how to get to the Dachau site.  My mom parked on the street asked me to get out and ask for directions.  As I approached what looked like a toll booth plaza, I didn’t even have to say anything as I was handed directions printed in many different languages courtesy of the local police department on John F. Kennedy Plaza.  I had to travel from America to wind up in Germany at a police station named after an American President.

It was an election year, and I was not yet old enough to vote.  I remember another mother and daughter on the plane with us, the daughter had a Mondale pin on her coat.  How exact opposites we were because if I could have voted I would have voted for Bush.

By the time we got to Dachau we had been in Germany for several days.  As we parked and got out at the site, the very air was different.  The pain of thousands still hung in the air with crushing pressure making it difficult to breathe.

I was teenaged blasé about the importance of the events that took place there.  We started to walk the grounds before going to the museum.  To my great shame, I recall walking by the barracks where they slept at the concentration camp thinking, it’s not so bad.

God heard me.

We came to a turn in the path, and as I turned, I saw the crematorium.  It was as if God thumped me in the head for I could not walk any further.  I was struck at the site.  A blink, and a million images flooded into my head of the torture, of the panic, of the cruelty, of the dead, of the never-ending screams.  I could see and hear.  Unending sympathy, empathy, a never-ending connection to the Jewish people instantly replaced the teenaged blasé boredom.  I was forever changed by that moment.  I couldn’t continue any further.  I couldn’t walk to the crematorium.

I had been so struck.

My mother and I went through the museum, we ate dinner, we found a hotel for the night.  Then, after having a shower and getting into my pajamas did I feel myself come out from the shock of witnessing the crematorium.

It was such an experience and I had so many other life changing experiences afterward it took me many years later to put it into words.

Yeah, God heard me.  He let me see the truth.  He let me feel it.

Years later when I auditioned for The Diary of Anne Frank and didn’t make it.  I asked to help behind the scenes.  I got to do the costumes, and something else I can’t remember.  The memory was still very present in my mind, so I organized a field trip for the actors to go to the Florida Holocaust museum, which is where I bought Sophie’s Choice.  I wanted to impart some of the importance that I witnessed and experienced to the actors, so they could use it, if nothing else, in their performance.

Upon leaving the museum, the actress who played Anne’s mother said to me, “Well, it was interesting, but I didn’t get much from it.”  You could have bowled me over with a feather (it’s an expression).  I was so stunned, here is a woman older than myself who was also a mother, but could not find anything from the museum to take with her.  I still don’t know how to understand that, other than not everyone is emotionally able to receive at each moment.  Some people go their whole lives, and are not emotionally available to receive.

Yeah, God struck me.  He let me know.  I am ashamed of my callousness still.  Because the truth is I am not an uncaring or calloused person.  It’s one of those hard-wired things you’re born with that do not change.  God made me that.  I guess the betrayal was painful to God, so He told me so.  As it turns out, the betrayal was painful to me as well.  To knowingly go against your own nature is a pain that cannot be described.