What’s Going on in my Head? A. Evrony

1-4-3-2-4-8. The soft black numbers sit carved almost in perfect alignment across my grandfather’s left arm. He sees my eyes tracing their shape and quickly pulls down his sleeve. I am five, and this is the only memory I have of not knowing about ‘IT’. The black shadow that has always lurked around my family and appears once a year during the designated Memorial Day-the Holocaust.

The idea of the Holocaust was not questioned by me. I accepted the fact that something terrible had taken away all of my grandfather’s family. Despite this, the concept of it was difficult to understand. The places mentioned- Auschwitz, Bergen-Belson, Berkeneau, were colourful long syllabled words that flowed mysteriously from my grandfather’s mouth. I wanted to know what exactly had happened during those dark six years. I spent hours searching eagerly through the dusty holocausts books my family had collected. Within the delicate pages lay a different world, an unimaginable hell; Here were tortured men, with hearts of shattered tile; Here were pictures of living skeletons staring blankly at me, bones piled high into the sky, black smudges where faces of children should be, bodies that had lost their humanity long ago. My eyes struggled to cope with what was being shown. Once I began it was hard to extract myself.

One book, with a picture of a beaming teenager on the cover caught my eye. I eagerly reached for it and read ‘The Diary of Anne Frank’. Every word was devoured late into the night until reality was hard to separate from fiction. Soon I was not in a suburban home but in the secret annex in Holland, grasping for rays of sunlight coming through the boarded up windows. I was the girl hiding in the attic, the Nazis coming to get me.

As I became older, the idea of the holocaust and its tragedies began to sicken me. All the horror stories merged into one long continuous tale of suffering. Selfishly, I wanted to be free of this clinging past. Each Memorial Day was met with indifference and a vain attempt to not dwell on what had occurred.

This year’s Memorial Day arrives swiftly. I find it hard to explain to my friends what exactly is going through my head. Not even I am capable of sorting through the contrasting emotions that strike at me like individual claws. As my family drives to the Irish synagogue, the rain beats hard across the car window until it’s impossible to see outside. We reach the concrete pathway and open the huge glass mosaic doors decorated with stars of David. After an hour, the time has come to say ‘Kaddish’, the prayer for the dead. We descend down the steps and the Rabbi begins:

“God full of mercy
grant rest
to the holy
to the souls of our brothers and sisters
O Earth! Do not conceal their blood
they will meet their rightful destiny at the end of days
let the ashes of the children be a warning that hatred is destructive
and that man has unlimited capacity to cruelty.”

I reach for my mother who has started to cry softly. The words slowly strike me and I begin to cry as well. The tears arrive with the realisation that I can never detach myself from the past. IT happened. IT hit my grandfather’s family and will always be a part of me. This sorrow that I feel is something deeper than emotion; it is a legacy of the past, an intrinsic part of my identity. I cry because I know that I will always have a responsibility to tell of what happened, however painful it might be, so this evil will never happen again.

Tags: Head Wrecked