1999
July 1999
She’s sitting in small shack warmed by a small electric oven, lost in the aroma of cinnamon buns slowly baking. The stove is old with enamel edges that are flaking down to bare steal. She’s been there since dawn, waiting as the hours ticked by, hoping that passerbys and truck drivers would stop for gas and a snack. Sitting in a clearing on the corner of two forgotten highways, her shack is nothing more than a plywood box with a view. Moisture leaks in through the haphazardly stapled membrane covering the unfinished siding. The roof is partially shingled, but a fall wind storm has torn at its integrity. She’s listening to the steady drip of water, not rain but a mountain fog, condensing on a single pain window and running down the wall. The bare studs and loosely packed bubble gum pink insulation give the illusion of a dwelling, while the passing storm clouds and jagged peaks paint a more ominous picture out the window.
She casts her mind back to some ravens she’d seen playing near the garbage bins in her youth. Back then, her mother and her worked the pumps together. She was supposed to be helping refill the windshield wash basins, but she’d wandered off to follow a family of ravens who were wandering off across the dirt lot. They hopped gleefully sideways and yammered incessantly in their distinctively playful clicks and caws. She followed them down to the bins bordering the forest, the large steel enclosures they used to keep the bears out of their trash. To her horror, and the ravens’ glee, someone had dumped a bag of garbage next to the bins during the night, and the murder of birds were whooping and hollering, sorting the best shiny bits and rancid meat to steal away. Their call rang in her ears. The joy and playfulness. The conversational tones and complex sounds. The skill with which they sorted and teased the trash apart.
Her mother was livid: “Why didn’t you stop them? This is your mess to clean up!”
Now she sits trapped in her daily routine, alone, waiting for someone to drive past or for the laminated plywood sheets to dissolve like cardboard revealed outside after a long winter.
1972
August, 1972
J is flying down a straight stretch of highway with the wind whistling through the split windshield of his 1947 Cadillac Series 62. His strong arm is dangling out the driver’s side window, his massive fingers, scarred and tanned, clutch the slow burning embers of a Marlboro cigarette. The black cadillac soaks up the road, undulating too and fro, up and down, with its gas shocks controlling its two tonne body over the cracked asphalt. It is noon on a high plane, and J and his partner roar past truck stop cafes in the August sunshine. Ravens heckle the cars which stream past neglected telephone poles which have sunken lazily into the soft shoulder. J’s beard is full, reaching down to the collar of his tattered plaid shirt, and his sleeves are rolled up high.
Flicking his cigarette butt into the ashtray, he switches hands on the wheel, his left hand traces familiar patterns between his thumb and forefinger. The scarred leatherette of the steering wheel is peeling where his fingers rub; the center of the wheel is crowned with an ornate chrome molding. He relieves his right hand of responsibility so it can settle into the lap of his companion, whose bare legs are tucked up into his side on the spacious bench seat. The seat, black fading to brown, is cracking along it’s quilted edges, and is partially covered with a Navajo blanket bought along the highway. John takes his hands off the wheel to pull the sticky rubber gasketed quarter window open to reduce the incessant buffeting through his long loosely bunched hair. His lips never stop moving. He aimlessly turns the chrome knobs on the radio, scanning for Little Richard, The Band, Dylan, The Supremes or The Doors, taking a moment to sing along with each song before changing to the next station. His leather boots protrude from a pair of worn out jeans, the hem of which is rolled twice. His right foot buries itself in the carpet, pushing the cadillac’s tired v8 hard, as it flies towards the sun. J’s lover grins, smiling amorously across at his relaxed eyes. In his drawl – his consummate enthusiasm -- he is yammering on. He fantasizes about his next meal and the antique car he is coveting. “Holy dukes,” he says. He laughs with his head tilted back…
Our mother is somewhere nearby doing a little tap dance to celebrate his arrival. He is back in his wheelchair. She kisses him gently on the forehead, warming all around her with her smile.
1943
February, 1943
Chana Z__________ is marching along a narrow tree lined woods in Southern Poland. Her face is gaunt and skeletal. Her strong cheekbones are made more pronounced through starvation and illness. Her knees are bony, devoid of the muscle and tone she was known for; they are mere slivers of their former beauty. Still she walks passing fields of dirt and debris. Her arms are weak, her back ladened down with the few possessions still left to her name: scraps of Shabbat tablecloth; the base of a silver candlestick; a couple scraps of a Siddur, ripped from the spine and storied away deep inside her worn clothes. The air is frozen, it is early February 1943, and her short breaths hang in sparkling clouds of ice before her bulging tired blue eyes. Her curly hair, once full and thick, is tied in thinning whisps out of her eyes and tucked loosely into a scarf made from an old bedsheet. The road is torn by vehicle traffic with deep gouges in the thick mud, as it cuts straight as an arrow through the remains of small farms, along the perfectly flat steppes of southern Poland. She had been marching for two days, having left Lodz the previous Shabbat. They were heading south, passing Kielce after dark, heading towards Krakow.
Chana remembered these roads from her childhood. She took wheat to market in the back of her grandfather Wolef’s farmyard cart. The smell of wheel grease and the deep caustic scent of wood stain mixed with the sweet smell of hay. Now she focuses on the old village outside Lodz, and of her summers spent in the country helping the family. Her father Gavriel would take her to Mniow each August to work on the farm before the harvest. She remembers begging to stay until the fall, to build a Sukkah from all the farmyard straw. On good years they would buy grapes to hang, and would braid garlic stocks together into long fronds. On starry nights they would lay after dinner looking up through the leaves towards the stars, which would glitter and move in the dense fall air. But her frozen feet bring her back to reality, as the ice cracks beneath her, and she stumbles and falls into a deep muddy puddle. Breaking through shards of ice, her ankle is trapped and twists. She hears her tibia crack under her meager weight -- the under nourished bone splintering as she falls. Before she can scream, a gruff hand, gloved in thick leather grabs her by the scraps of her collar, lifting her clean off her feet and pushing her forward. She tries. She stumbles and cries in pain. She can’t. The thousands of other marchers flow past her like the determined rivers of the Sandomierz Basin.
There is yelling between officers. German. Incomprehensible and unrelenting. Lokshen putz she thinks - noodle dick - her father’s favourite insult.
She is pulled once again by the back of her shirt, out of the line of marching bodies, towards a deep snow bank. She looks out through a row of trees, small pines lining the road, the peaks of which are heavy with snow, which sag towards her, opening a small gap through which a view of a snow covered field reveals itself. She is forced to her knees, but strains to keep an eye on the view. Across the field she notices a small farmhouse, with white washed walls and rosy red trim. The single story cottage opens onto a barn, the back of which houses a small stack of hay bales, steaming as they are caught in a long ray of sunshine. The pain in her leg reverberates up her spine. She can’t move. She watches the steam spiral off the hay, remembering her time spent in the Sukkot with her grandfather, the sweetness of the horse manure and the chirp of birds preparing to migrate south. She drifts so deeply into the embrace of memory she doesn’t hear the shot to the back of her head.
Chana Z___________ was born in Lodz, Poland. She died in 1943 near Kielce, Poland. She married Hillel Scislowski on Unknown.
Death Notes: Source Pages of Testimony
Last Name Z___________
First Name CHANA
Father's First Name GAVRIEL
Mother's First Name FAJGA
Permanent residence LODZ, POLAND
Place during the war LODZ, POLAND
Place of Death SHOT IN WOODS NEAR KIELCE, POLAND
Date of Death 1943
1939
November 1939
William is sitting by the window. He is looking out over the frozen grounds outside. He notices a row of small saplings that are struggling to stay standing against the heavy hoarfrost that adorns their delicate branches. His eyes trace the long sloping lawn that leads down towards the edge of a thick woods. The branches of oak and elms reach like spidery arms from the darkness of the woods. Little mementos of his life sit on a solid oak table that is screwed into the wall of his room: an official seal, a copy of his law degree, and a picture of his youngest child -- one of the few things he holds dear. A cold wind whistles through the thin window pane as the trees in the distance bend towards the forest floor, and the clean air, air so dry it cuts through his nostrils, washes away the bleach and starch of his room. William has been here over a year; a recovering writer, sent to a sanitorium in northern Ontario.
He was put away when he failed to defeat his need to write under the influence of hooch. He can’t remember why he wrote in the first place. The demons must have been exorcised by shock therapy and isolation. He is without motivation or concern. He is merely a frame of a man, sitting in a hard wooden chair, staring out the window, trying his hardest to remember what remembering felt like. His legs, even hidden by his grey slacks, are bony and underfed, and hang loosely down to the floor. His feet rest in large slippers and wool socks that cover his calves. His temples are devoid of fat and flesh, just the etching of veins and bone beneath his skin. His face is gaunt,and his eyes are tired and lifeless, as he stares into the woods, trying to remember why he was trying to remember what remembering felt like.
1998
June, 1998
She could see it all from her perch high in the cedar tree. She is above a small fork in the river, where two torrents converge to form a raging whirl. A low mist lifts from the valley floor to reveal a small white Westfalia van parked on a spit of gravel. There is a young boy out fishing, awkwardly casting his long line into the violent waters. He fights to reel against the confluence, battling for strength with his little hands. From above she sees the look of shock and surprise on the young child’s face, as a large coho salmon comes flying out of the water, fighting against the shock cord, desperate to escape. The child is stunned still. The father, in an attempt to be helpful, runs over, encouraging the child to pull against the line and land the fish. In the struggle the father gets excited, and being unsure what to do, he bludgeons the fish. The child bursts into tears -- the salmon sits slowly losing rich magenta blood which dyes the smooth grey rocks red.
Time passes, and her young are hungry. She’s bound to the nest in order to protect and care for her recently hatched chicks. Their nest is immense, worked on for consecutive summers, constantly built safer and more secure. The old cedar tree is strong, and she has grown to love their view up and down the misty valley. Below, the father is consoling his son, the young daughter is tucked away keeping busy, trying not to be involved. To her amazement the family clambers out to a large rock in the middle of the converging streams, and ceremoniously lays the salmon across the rock.
She knows exactly what they are doing; they are burying the salmon. They are offering the poor creature back to nature. She dives out of her nest, her strong brown wings thrown open. She glides down, talons outstretched, and grabs the fish between her razor sharp claws. Vigorously beating her enormous wings, she climbs back to the nest to feed her young this unexpected treat.
2007
June 2007
The railyard is swamped with copper coloured tailing ponds that are trapped between gravel embankments, the result of relentless erosion. Traces of wasted industry are everywhere, left to fester and rot. The earth is red, the mud a thick oxide clay, filled with copper, iron and carbon; puddles of stagnant water ooze with rainbows of spilt oil. The rails themselves are flaking and disintegrating in the moist air. There is a complex interleaving of raw steel rail -- a boundless maze. The sky is crisscrossed with entangled systems of power and motion; as many forgotten lines as functioning ones slice across the grey sky in chaos and disorder. Trains wait while cargo is loaded and unloaded, and passengers shuffle silently in and out, while pneumatic brakes hiss and worn doors creak open and closed. Alien soviet locomotives with bulbous bullheaded noses sit forgotten on dead end tracks. Rust flakes and floats on the breeze like discarded feathers. Ghosts shimmer along the surface of the ponds and evaporate into wisps of steam. Soviet ghosts, romantic eastern ghouls that make real communist literature and the wistful idealizing of the east block, but also the ghouls of the transported, displaced and murdered.
Meanwhile, in another world nearby, a swan swims lazily towards the edge of a marble lined pond. With a slow reach of it’s crooked neck, it grabs a scrap of bread off the edge of a reflecting pool. The water is part of a park, which leads for miles down the center of a germanic town, lined with neatly planted trees which sway gently in the breeze. Groups of young men run in circles playing soccer on long evenly cut grass lawns, while cyclists glide smoothly down the paved paths that crisscross the highly designed space.
Yet in the trainyard a young man, a teenager, sits at the window of a stopped passenger car, staring out the window with sullen eyes. His face shows the wear of travel, his hair matted and long, his beard unkempt and forgotten, and his clothes worn thin and unwashed. His mind has wandered from the view outside, to the ghosts of thin bodied Jews in pajama stripes, being marched in droves through the cattle gates and loading docks of these rail sites. His mind is on black and white photos seen as a child, of piles of clothing and goods stripped from his family and left to decay -- forgotten in transport. Now the blood red earth holds the traces of their journeys, not of their bodies, but of the cruel and deliberate efficiency of their passing.
With a violent shudder, a squeak and a tremendous thump the old train moves on, the bodies of the passengers being carried eastward, but the mind of the young boy lost somewhere between.
