Languages: Hebrew, German
Prologue:
Language gives people the chance to tell their truth. It is often dived into head first, as beginners take a confrontational approach. Sometimes, ambiguities remain when conveying a message, due to the fact that a direct translation does not always exist. Told from three different points of view, Through the Darkness explores multiple versions of fact, not necessarily pinpointed on the same exact juncture in time, but carried along the same woven string of moments.
Through the Darkness
Dara:
My first visit to the Western Wall already strikes me as one of those moments you never forget. The most extreme case of déjà vu, as if I must have been there before, even though I know I have not. As the IDF soldiers usher my grandfather and me to the farmost right side of the Western Wall, I can almost hear their harsh direction in thick German accents: “Vomen and cheel-dren to the right, men to the left,” they bark. A chill trickles down my spine. The wall fades out of view, replaced by the rust-covered train tracks and red-brick-adorned gateway to Auschwitz, their hue an uncomfortable auburn color; it is the blood of six million innocent Jews which they still desperately try to bleach away with words of denial, but will never completely scrub out, no matter how much elbow grease is applied.
In front of me, an eighteen-year-old boy in tattered shoes dances across the train tracks, the last moment of fleeting happiness before he is hardened with a rough shove to the left from an SS Gestapo man; he is forced with this one push to a predestined course towards emaciation, horror, and a hollowed soul. Further down the path of this innocent teenager from Nuremberg, which remains unforeseen to him at the moment, is a rifle which will later find an unexpected home resting in his hands. Seventy years later, from the fragmented segments of a story passed on, I can envision him carving the words “Durch die Dunkelheit,” meaning “through the darkness,” into its wooden canister with the pocket knife he received from his father for his thirteenth birthday. Slowly, the eighteen-year-old fades out of view, and the brick building is replaced with what physically awaits me in the present moment, a tan wall stuffed to the brim with varying notes in each crevice. The boy’s tapping footsteps are gradually converted into the confident tread of my grandfather, the survivor he has become years later. Our fingers skim the rough surface of the holy wall together, and I can’t help but notice his are drumming a beat, as if they are dancing.
Itai:
It was one of those moments you never forget. The morning of my eighteenth birthday, a false pretense of festivity. The alarm pierced my ears at 0400 hours, jolting my body into its automatic combat position for the next three years with a loud “crunch” of the straightening of my spine. With every ounce of full body contraction, my footsteps tiptoed down the stairs and begged not to be heard by my family, who was dozing off from the night before. Cold coffee served as a prelude to two fried eggs and vegetable salad, the last home-cooked breakfast to warm my stomach and my soul before three years of service. Nonstop training, fighting, and preparation awaited me outside the door of my quaint home in Rishon LeZion, on the journey to becoming a member of the Israeli Defense Force. Quietly, I sealed my childhood away, safely preserving the intact innocence of the memories within it, as my lean fingers turned the lock on the front door. I treaded away from home in a failed attempt at silence, as if ballet dancing across broken glass.
The dazed expression on my thirteen-year-old sister’s face through the front window as I departed still haunts me. Annabelle was a ghost-- her body was there, but her mind drifted off. Her olive colored eyes traveled with me through the darkness of the early morning hours, a reflection of the entire Milky Way galaxy centered around the dense matter of her onyx pupils. Blinking through tears, my vision shifts to the present moment, where I stand guard outside the Western Wall. The observation of my surroundings is followed by what feels like a sharp punch in the stomach. Annabelle is here in front of my own eyes. Squinting in disbelief, my retinas refocus. She is gone, alone, like the day I deserted her. A grandfather walks towards the holy wall, a young girl trailing behind him in a trance. A version of my sister, left behind once again. Taking it all in while someone she loves moves forward without her.
Abel:
Through the darkness, I clamber up the mossy mountain’s edge to the cemetery. I am the most unconventional mortician, the grave digger for sacred texts, not humans. I am guided by space itself, a vast infinity, a haven to comets and nebulae and all the vast mysteries the world has to offer. With each footstep I trudge up the summit of Mount of Olives, I am another stair’s distance closer to heaven. The sweet, lustrous perfume of the night wraps around me in a blanket of damp dusk. The comfort lies in being alone, but also, being one of millions. The letters I carry with me from the Western Wall, torn out favorite pages of books, fragmented sections of cursive sentences, anecdotes scribbled onto bubblegum wrappers, journal entries passed down through generations, each represent individual people. If their faces could be summoned by my solitude, they would emerge from the words they’ve written like a phoenix from the ashes, swarming around me on their journey upward towards the night sky. Lately, I’ve been guilty of watching others through my window during the day in order to shroud myself in their secrets as twilight approaches. Their lives become mine in a transitive, interconnected web, woven together in the common fibers of hope for the future.
On this night in particular, a teal sticky note catches my eye. Ironing out the creases with my fingers, there lie three words: “I bear witness.” My job as an undertaker is to bury each and every note that has been pressed into the wall; the Jewish tradition holds that any piece of writing with the name of the Lord on it must be treated with the highest respect, not to be simply thrown out or burned. Tonight though, my dirt speckled fingernails preserve this one note above ground. It belongs to the girl I observed today, the one lost in thought walking beside her grandfather, and for some reason I cannot get myself to put it to eternal rest. Stepping out of the cemetery, I place her note onto the last tombstone in the fifth row, displaying the name Leila. Now, she can bear witness for someone who never had a chance, never had the gift of life, the gift of experience. Below the ground, my daughter, Leila, rests in her cradle.
Dara:
Further down, on the stock of his gun, the 1944 version of my grandfather inscribed the words “zu den Sternen.” Through the recounted tales of his actions, I’ve realized that letters wedged into chinks of a wall, wisps of painful memories, journal entries, and reflection are our rocketships to the solar system; it is here, in zero gravity, where we can soar beyond the bounds of our troubled pasts. I think my grandfather knew this all along. He was hyper aware from a young age, his words always profound. Crouching in trenches during the Battle of the Bulge, an out-of-place American soldier fighting against his German homeland, and a Jew nonetheless, he would run his finger impulsively across this comforting phrase he had engraved. It served as a constant reminder to let his neck tilt his eyes towards the night sky above, facing perpetuity, and find serenity in the midst of dehumanization.
“Durch die Dunkelheit, zu den Sternen”
“Through the darkness, to the stars”
Epilogue:
The truth of the engraved fighting rifle in this story belongs to my Poppy, who is now ninety-two years old. Language was used to clear up the ambiguities of his past when he received an apology in May of 2017 from a German woman named Doris. In a letter written in broken English, an attempt to make things more personal, she explained that her family had unjustly purchased his home when Hitler and the Nazis “Aryanized” Nuremberg. The missing conjunctions and usage of “v” in place of “w” in her script handwriting were mere translation errors, insignificant in the larger picture of her heartfelt message. Doris was able to admit that the deeds of the Nazi’s would have been “lessons filled with numbers, data, and facts… a faraway past,” had she not delved deeper into her family history on a recent trip to Israel. It was there where she also began to learn Hebrew, something that her grandparents’ generation would have frowned upon as the language of the wretched “Judenschwein”. Instead of retaliation, my Poppy chose the same path of progression as Dara, Itai, and Abel. He concluded his email back to Doris with the poignant line, “I have lived my life by looking forward, not backward. I hope you will do likewise.” It is his truth, his survival. The method he practices is not the same as forgetting the past, but rather using those words, those stars in the night sky, as reasons to live thoroughly.
Hirschmann is a junior from Livingston, NJ.
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