Ranjit Souri's Open Salon Blog

SOPHIE'S CHOICE, by William Styron (1976)

Tue, 20 Apr 2010 10:04:21 -0400

SOPHIE’S CHOICE by William Styron (1976, novel, 515 pages)

Sophie’s choice is a towering literary accomplishment. This book—winner of the National Book Award in 1980—presents a carefully-researched fictional treatment of the Holocaust. The book is a parade of surprises and offers terrific prose on just about every page.

The protagonist, Stingo, is a young aspiring novelist based on Styron. The central relationship of the novel is among Stingo, Stingo’s friend Sophie, and Sophie’s lover Nathan.

William Styron is a brilliant satirist who somehow is able to fill this heart-wrenching story with passages that make one laugh out loud, such as this one in which Stingo describes his first sight of Sophie’s lovely body:

As [Sophie] went slowly up the stairs I took a good look at her body in its clinging silk summer dress…. Her behind was as perfectly formed as some fantastic prize-winning pear; it vibrated with magical eloquence, and from this angle it so stirred my depths that I mentally pledged to the Presbyterian orphanages of Virginia a quarter of my future earnings as a writer in exchange for that bare ass's brief lodging--thirty seconds would do--within the compass of my cupped, supplicant palms.

And here, Stingo describes his first encounter with the beautiful Leslie Lapidus. Stingo is narrating this event probably 20 years after it happened. In the scene being described, he is a virgin in his early 20’s, and the setting is a beach:

Somewhere in the halcyon future, I think I must have reasoned, I would meet a cuddlesome, jolly girl who would simply gather me into her with frenzied whoopees, unhindered by that embargo placed upon their flesh by the nasty little Protestants who had so tortured me in the back seats of a score of cars. But there was one matter of which I had no inkling. I had not yet considered that my dream girl would also lack any inhibition about language; my companions of the past would have been unable to utter the word “breast” without blushing. Indeed, I had been accustomed to wincing when a female said “damn.” You can imagine my emotions, then, when Leslie Lapidus, a scant two hours after our first meeting, stretched out her resplendent legs against the sand like a young lioness, and peering into my face with all the unrestrained, almond-eyed, heathen-whore-of-Babylon wantonness I had ever dreamed of, suggested in unbelievably scabrous terms the adventure that awaited me. It would be impossible to exaggerate my shock, in which fright, disbelief and tingling delight were torrentially mingled. Only the fact that I was too young for a coronary occlusion saved my heart, which stopped beating for critical seconds.

Stingo the narrator, like Styron the author, is very well-read, especially in terms of the Holocaust literature. Therefore, along the way, the reader who jots down notes and follows up with a bit of research can actually learn about the Holocaust. (I used this book as a jumping-off point to lead me to several other forays into the Holocaust literature.)

Styron offers well-founded cognitions (through the narration of Stingo and sometimes of Sophie) of the events of the Holocaust—for example, here is an observation by Stingo:

Real evil, the suffocating evil of Auschwitz—gloomy, monotonous, barren, boring—was perpetrated almost exclusively by civilians. Thus we find that the rolls of the SS at Auschwitz-Birkenau contained almost no professional soldiers but were instead composed of a cross section of German society. They included waiters, bakers, carpenters, restaurant owners, physicians, a bookkeeper, a post office clerk, a waitress, a bank clerk … the list goes on and on with these commonplace … pursuits. There needs only to be added the observation that history’s greatest liquidator of Jews, the thick-witted Heinrich Himmler, was a chicken farmer.

In creating fictitious stories about the Holocaust, there is always the danger of cheapness, or of sentimentality, or of inaccuracy in terms of what the Holocaust was like. But Styron tells this story with grace, with a sense of respect for the tragedy, and—as far as I can tell from all of my other reading about the Holocaust—with basic truth about the Holocaust that testifies to (I gather) a bulwark of personal research on the part of Styron.

I have a recommendation: Before you read Sophie’s choice, read Death dealer: The memoirs of the SS Kommandant at Auschwitz, by Rudolf Hoss. While not a necessity, treating the Hoss book as a prerequisite will give you a deeper understanding of some of the events in Sophie’s choice.

If it can ever be said that a particular novel is an essential contribution to the Holocaust literature, then it can be said of Sophie’s choice.

DEATH DEALER by Rudolph Hoss (written 1946-1947)

Fri, 16 Apr 2010 10:04:34 -0400

DEATH DEALER: THE MEMOIRS OF THE SS KOMMANDANT AT AUSCHWITZ by Rudolph Hoss (written 1946-1947) [1: See endnote #1]

As SS Kommandant at Auschwitz, Rudolph Hoss oversaw the murder of hundreds of thousands of prisoners (Jews and non-Jews). [2]

After the Nazis fell, Hoss went into hiding, adopted a false identity, and farmed. He was captured about a year after World War II ended. He was tried in Poland, convicted, and sentenced to die on gallows constructed at Auschwitz, just a few feet away from Auschwitz Crematorium I.

While Hoss was on trial, Jan Sehn, the attorney who was prosecuting Hoss at the trial at the Polish War Crimes Commission in Warsaw, asked Hoss to write his memoirs.

These memoirs were written between October 1946 and April 1947 while Hoss was in jail and on trial. Early parts were written to help Hoss remember details of the events, for the sake of the trial. But as time went on and Hoss and Sehn developed a more cordial relationship, Sehn asked Hoss to write about some of the major SS officials and to re-create some of the important documents to the best of Hoss’s memory. Hoss, who marveled at how well he was treated by the court authorities and prison guards, obliged, and kept writing almost to the very day of his hanging, April 16^th, 1947.

Hoss is not a gifted writer; but his memoirs are invaluable as Holocaust literature. In the preface to “Death Dealer”, Steven J. Paskuly writes:

Rudolph Hoss’s memoirs are perhaps the most important document attesting to the Holocaust, because they are the only candid, detailed, and essentially honest [factually if not emotionally –rjs] description of the plan of mass annihilation from a high-ranking SS officer….

The overwhelming impression that the reader gets of Hoss is that he is a man who largely does not express—or perhaps has learned over the years to not even feel—emotion.

Here Hoss clinically describes the gassing process at Auschwitz. Bear in mind that the largest gas chambers at Auschwitz could and often did kill 2,000 people in a single gassing:

The extermination process in Auschwitz took place as follows: Jews selected for gassing were taken as quietly as possible to the crematories. The men were already separated from the women [and usually the woman and children were together]. In the undressing chamber, prisoners of the Sonderkommandos [4] … would tell them in their own language that they were going to be bathed and deloused, and that they must leave their clothing neatly together, and, above all, remember where they put them, so that they would be able to find them again quickly after the delousing. The Sonderkommando [5] had the greatest interest in seeing that the operation proceeded smoothly and quickly. After undressing, the Jews went into the gas chamber, which was furnished with showers and water pipes and gave a realistic impression of a bathhouse.

The women went in first with their children, followed by the men, who were always fewer in number. This part of the operation nearly always went smoothly since the Sonderkommando would always calm those who showed any anxiety or perhaps even had some clue as to their fate. As an additional precaution, the Sonderkommando and an SS soldier always stayed in the chamber until the very last moment.

The door would be screwed shut and the waiting disinfection squads would immediately pour the gas [crystals] into the vents in the ceiling of the gas chamber down an air shaft which went to the floor. This ensured the rapid distribution of the gas. The process could be observed through the peep hole in the door. Those who were standing next to the air shaft were killed immediately. I can state that about one-third died immediately. The remainder staggered about and began to scream and struggle for air. The screaming, however, soon changed to gasping and in a few moments everyone lay still. After twenty minutes at the most no movement could be detected….

The door was opened a half an hour after the gas was thrown in…. Work was immediately started [by the Sonderkommando] to remove the corpses….

The Sonderkommando now set about removing the gold teeth and cutting the hair from the women [this hair would be used to manufacture socks and other clothing for German troops]. After this, the bodies were taken up by an elevator and laid in front of the ovens, which had meanwhile been fired up. …Crematories II and III could cremate two thousand bodies in twenty-four hours….

I think it is worth noting here that in this two-step process (the murdering in the gas chambers, followed by the cremation in the crematoria), it was the crematoria that were the limiting factor: It took 30 minutes for a large gas chamber to kill 2,000 people; it took the crematoria 24 hours to cremate those same 2,000 people.

At times Hoss displays a possibly sociopathic lack of appreciation of what his victims were facing, by his own hands:

In Auschwitz escape was not difficult. Since there were many possibilities, it was easy to set up a situation to escape. The guards were easily fooled. With a little daring, and a little luck, it could be done.

And more of this phenomenon is evident when Hoss makes statements such as

The Jews [in Auschwitz] did damage to each other whenever

they could.

…and even worse…

…the Jews…lack a feeling of solidarity. In their situation you would assume that they would protect each other. But no, it was just the opposite.

In making these types of statements, Hoss never acknowledges that (1) He and his cohorts were the ones who put the Jews into this situation, in which desperate animal-like behavior was practically inevitable; and (2) He too might likely have behaved as the doomed Jews did if he had been in their position; and (3) There were also many instances of Jews helping one another in the concentration camps. [6]

And here, Hoss takes it a step further and actually feels sorry for himself for what he went through:

Hour upon hour I had to witness all that happened. I had to watch day and night, whether it was the dragging and burning of the bodies, the teeth being ripped out, the cutting of the hair; I had to watch all this horror. For hours I had to stand in the horrible, haunting stench while the mass graves were dug open, and the bodies were dragged out and burned. I also had to watch the process of death itself through the peephole of the gas chambers because the doctors called my attention to it.

Incredibly, he does not even consider here what his victims went through during these same events.

While reading Death dealer, I was also reading William Styron’s novel Sophie’s choice, and in it Styron quotes the German Jewish political theorist Hannah Arendt as follows. This statement seems a convincing explanation for Hoss’s self-pitying in the passage above. Arendt writes:

The problem [that the Nazis faced] was to overcome not so much their conscience as the animal pity by which all normal men are affected in the presence of physical suffering. The trick used … was very simple and probably very effective; it consisted in turning those instincts around, as it were, in directing them toward the self. So that instead of saying: What horrible things I did to people!, the murderers would be able to say: What horrible things I had to watch in the pursuance of my duties, how heavily the task weighed upon my shoulders!

The gist of many Nazis’ self-defense after the fact was “Orders are orders.” And Hoss was no different:

According to Himmler’s orders, Auschwitz became the largest human killing center in all of history. When he gave me the order personally in the summer of 1941 to prepare a place for mass killings and then carry it out, I could never have imagined the scale, or what the consequences would be. Of course, this order was something extraordinary, something monstrous. However, the reasoning behind the order of this mass annihilation seemed correct to me. At the time I wasted no thoughts about it. I had received an order; I had to carry it out.

Historians agree that Hoss’s memoir is essentially honest even though there are unintentional errors in dates, numbers, and so on. And Hoss does not hold back on some poignant moments, such as this one:

I also watched how some women who suspected or knew what was happening, even with the fear of death all over their faces, still managed enough strength to play with their children and to talk to them lovingly. Once a woman with four children, all holding each other by the hand to help the smallest ones over the rough ground, passed by me very slowly [on their way to the gas chambers]. She stepped very close to me and whispered, pointing to her four children, “How can you murder these beautiful, darling children? Don’t you have any heart?”

Hoss’s final letters to his wife and children, written when he knew he was about to be hanged within a few days, are included in this memoir. And, I almost hate to admit it but I must be honest: I found these letters heartbreaking.

Even this monster, the greatest mass murderer in history, had a family that he clearly loved. He writes to his soon-to-be widow:

On you, my poor unfortunate wife, destiny has put the heaviest burden on us through our sad fate. For in addition to our unlimited pain of being torn apart, there is the burdensome worry about your future life and the worry about the children.

And in a letter to his children:

Your daddy has to leave you now. For you, poor ones, there remains only your dear, good Mommy. The love and care of a mother is the most beautiful and valuable thing that exists on this earth.

One would think that, as he faced his impending exit from the earth, maybe Hoss would finally face up to some sense of the human tragedy that he had caused. After all, what the courts were now imposing on him and his family, he had imposed exponentially more horrifically on hundreds of thousands of people who had done him no wrong. Yet still, in these very last of his writings, he expresses no insight that would tie in his own death-tragedy with the death-tragedies that he caused en masse.

Death dealer sometimes makes you want to reach across the decades and continents and strangle its author. However, the book is of singular importance—a unique and invaluable contribution to the Holocaust literature.

THE LOST by Daniel Mendelsohn

Wed, 14 Apr 2010 08:04:44 -0400

THE LOST: A SEARCH FOR SIX OF SIX MILLION by Daniel Mendelsohn (non-fiction, 2006, 513 pages)

Daniel Mendelsohn’s great-uncle, Shmiel Jager, and Shmiel’s wife and four daughters were all “killed by the Nazis”, and for decades, these four words were the extent of what was said about their fate within Mendelsohn’s extended family.

Mendelsohn, a classicist with a Ph.D. from Princeton, decided in 2001 to attempt to find out what exactly happened to Shmiel and family. Mendelsohn’s investigation spanned five years and took him to Bolechow, Poland (the town where Shmiel and family lived and were murdered), as well as several other cities and countries and continents including, improbably, Sydney, Australia and Stockholm, Sweden.

Here is part of a description of the first Bolechow Aktion (mass killing), which took place in October of 1941. Mendelsohn quotes this from the testimony of a witness named Rebeka Mondschein given in Katowice, Poland in 1946:

On Tuesday 28 October 1941 at 10 am, two cars arrived [in Bolechow, Poland] …. In one car were Gestapo men in black shirts. In the other were Ukrainians in yellow shirts and berets with shovels …. The latter immediately drove to Taniawa to dig one large grave. From the city hall in a half hour a Ukrainian was assigned to each Gestapo man and these pairs went with a list set by city hall for the town. The list consisted of the wealthiest and most intelligent Jews.

…At 12 o’clock, they started taking [Jews] from their houses and the streets. The Gestapo men, Ukrainian militia members and innumerable young Ukrainian civilians…chased [the Jews] to Dom Katolicki [a large public hall].

…Nine hundred people were packed into the hall. People were stacked on one another. Many suffocated. They were killed in the hall, shot or simply hit over the head with clubs….

…[Those who survived in the hall] were kept in this way from 28 to 29 October without food or water…. [Then] they were taken…to the woods…. About 800 people were shot there. There was a board over a ditch onto which people were forced and they were shot and fell into the grave.

And here Mendelsohn describes a scene from a later Aktion, recounted to him by a witness named Pyotr while Mendelsohn was interviewing witnesses in Bolechow:

… as the last of the Jews of Bolechow walked naked [through the streets of Bolechow], two by two, to [their] deaths … they called out in Polish to their neighbors [who were watching from their windows]—“Stay well," "So long, we will not see each other anymore," "We'll not meet anymore."

These and the other Aktions described in this book were perpetrated by the SS-Einsatzgruppen, the Nazi killing squads that terrorized much of Eastern Europe during the latter years of the Nazi regime.

Mendelsohn interviews many witnesses both direct and indirect, who had known Shmiel and Shmiel’s family or had known others who knew them. Their accounts are sometimes conflicting, and rarely crystal clear, and in the end that dynamic becomes largely what this book is “about” on a meta level. Rather than story as a “string” that takes you linearly from A to B and so on to Z, story becomes a tangle of strings that sometimes meet, sometimes form obstinate knots, and sometimes veer off in different directions only to meet again at a later point.

I have only one complaint about this book: The presentation of the photographs.

First, the photographs are not on the same pages on which they are referred to. For example, one important photo is of Uncle Shmiel in his soldier uniform, with an unknown fellow soldier. This photo is discussed at length, but not shown until several pages later. And this type of odd placement happens throughout the book.

Second, the photographs are not captioned. Add the above problem to this one, and it is difficult to know what exactly all the photos are, and how they fit in.

Of course these two problems (as I perceive them anyway) were clearly choices made by the author and/or editors. I speculate that the idea was to have the reader experience the mystery – the not knowing quite the information you want to know – that the author experienced almost continually throughout his investigation. After all, while Mendelsohn was traveling from continent to continent and interviewing people, he heard stories of many people he did not have photos of, so he had to imagine. If this is indeed the reasoning behind these choices for the photography, I understand, but still I found these choices annoying, and they took away from rather than added to my enjoyment of the book.

Still, this book offers great reward to the committed reader. It is a complex book—not a beach read—and it is well worth the effort. I highly recommend it.

The lost: A search for six of six million is part memoir, part history, part treatise on narrative, part thriller, and part investigative journalism; and has won numerous awards including the National Book Critics Circle Award and the National Jewish Book Award.

I close with a recommendation: Before you read The lost: A search for six of six million by Daniel Mendelsohn, you should read the excellent Masters of death: The SS-Einsatzgruppen and the invention of the Holocaust by Richard Rhodes. While not an absolute necessity, reading the Rhodes book first will give you valuable context for understanding many of the events in Mendelsohn’s story, since the Aktions described in Mendelsohn’s book were perpetrated by the SS-Einsatzgruppen.

MASTERS OF DEATH: THE SS-EINSATZGRUPPEN... by Richard Rhodes

Mon, 12 Apr 2010 10:04:50 -0400

MASTERS OF DEATH: THE SS-EINSATZGRUPPEN AND THE INVENTION OF THE HOLOCAUST by Richard Rhodes (2002, 335 pages)

When most people think of the Nazis’ “Final Solution” (the plan to exterminate all Jews), they think of the gas chambers.

But the gas chambers were only Part II of the Final Solution.

Part I of this grotesque plan was a wholly different form of mass murder, performed by the SS-Einsatzgruppen.

The SS-Einsatzgruppen (special operations units) were killing squads that traveled from village to village (or town to town or city to city) in Eastern Europe, immediately behind the advancing Wehrmacht (German army), with the sole purpose of mass-murdering most or all of the Jews in each locale.

It was only after months of this process that the Nazis decided they needed a less traumatic (for the perpetrators) and less public way of killing. Thus, the gas chambers and crematoria were born only after hundreds of thousands of Jews had already been murdered in their own villages, towns, and cities by the Einsatzgruppen and its henchmen. And even after the gas chambers and crematoria were put into operation, the Einsatzgruppen kept working. In all, of the six million Jews murdered during the Holocaust, fully 1.5 million were killed by the Einsatzgruppen.

Early in the World War, there was some dissension within the Nazi party about whether mass extermination of the Jews was an advisable strategy. But the Nazis’ propaganda machine worked tirelessly, especially on its SS members.

Here we have the words of Heinrich Himmler, the second most powerful man in Nazi Germany, succinctly stating the Nazis’ rationalization of the desire (or, as the Nazis would call it, the need) to murder the Jews, in either a speech or a letter (Rhodes does not make it clear which) to the leaders of the Einsatzgruppen:

Be clear about it, in the battle which will decide if we are defeated there will be no [mercy] for the Germans, all will be starved out and butchered [at the hands of the Jews]. That will face everyone, be he now an enthusiastic supporter of the Third Reich or not—it will suffice that he speaks German and has a German mother….

Then it is a matter of indifference if in a town one thousand [Jews] have to be put down. I would do it, and I would expect you to carry it out. About that there is no doubt.

Rhodes points out in a different section of the book:

Characterizing a victim group as a relentless threat to a perpetrator group is the fundamental mechanism of genocide. It allows perpetrators to interpret their violence as defensive and therefore both justified and unavoidable….

There were four or five Einsatzgruppen at any given time, each consisting of up to 3,000 men. The leaders of the Einsatzgruppen tended to be highly educated—many with Ph.D.’s or law degrees. Each Einsatzgruppe was responsible for a particular geographical region.

There was tension between the German army and the SS-Einsatzgruppen, at high levels and lower levels, especially early on. At high levels, the leaders of the Wehrmacht believed that the strategy of mass-murdering Jews in their towns and cities was ill-advised, especially in terms of world public opinion. At lower levels, the German soldiers of the Wehrmacht, who were of course risking their lives to serve their country, were resentful of the SS-Einsatzgruppen members who fancied themselves soldiers but spent their days risklessly murdering unarmed, defenseless civilians.

One of the most notorious Einsatzgruppen leaders was Franz Jeckeln, who, through a process of trial and error over a series of mass killings, developed a process that the Nazis called Sardinenpackung:

[Sardinenpackung] involved forcing victims to lie together face down and side by side [in deep mass graves] and killing them with Genickschussen [shots to the back of the neck], then forcing the next group of victims to lie down on top of the torn, bleeding corpses of the victims who [had] preceded them to form another layer, ignoring the victims’ terror and horror in the interest of efficiently filling up the killing pit.

This process would continue, layer upon layer, according to the depth of the particular mass grave.

In this way, according to an internal SS-Einsatzgruppen report, 33,771 Jews were executed in Kiev on September 29^th and 30^th, 1941. Thus, in units of thousands at a time, in locations throughout Eastern Europe, the SS-Einsatzgruppen murdered its 1.5 million Jews, plus Slavs, Gypsies, mentally and physically handicapped people, and others.

Eventually, the horrors of this violent mass killing—horrible even for the perpetrators themselves—led the Nazis to experiment with gas vans, in which victims were killed through the introduction of the van’s own carbon monoxide exhaust into the van’s cabin. These gas vans eventually led to the infamous gas chambers, which were more efficient than the gas vans in two ways: (1) Of course the gas chambers were much larger than the gas vans—with the largest gas chambers having a capacity of 2,000 people; and (2) The gas chambers employed the pesticide Zyklon B, which killed more quickly and reliably than carbon monoxide.

Not only were the gas chambers less traumatic for the perpetrators than were the mass shootings in the victims’ hometowns; but also the gas-chamber killings could presumably be hidden from the world, while the local mass-murders could not.

Rhodes offers detailed graphic descriptions of many mass murders perpetrated by the Einsatzgruppen.

However, far from being a simple blow-by-blow description of the gory events, this book also offers theoretical analysis…

The control of violence is a fundamental responsibility of government. Governments control violence by monopolizing it. They authorize military and police forces to use violence but deem criminal any other individual or institutional use. From this basic division, which evolved across five centuries in the West as governments enlarged and centralized, the common belief has emerged that government violence is rational (or at least deliberate and intentional), while private violence is irrational, aberrant, the product of psychopathology rather than deliberate intention. In fact, [however,] violence is violence, whether public or private, official or unofficial, legal or illegal, good or bad.

…and empirical synthesis…

The notorious gas chambers and crematoria of the death camps have come to typify the Holocaust, but in fact they were exceptional. The primary means of mass murder the Nazis deployed during the Second World War was firearms and lethal privation. Shooting was not less efficient than gassing, as many historians have assumed. It was harder on the shooters’ nerves, and the gas vans and chambers alleviated the [psychological] burden. But shooting began earlier, continued throughout the war and produced far more victims if Slavs are counted, as they must be, as well as Jews. “The Nazi regime was the most genocidal the world has ever seen,” writes sociologist Michael Mann. “During its short twelve years (overwhelmingly its last four) it killed approximately twenty million unarmed persons…. Jews comprised only a third of the victims and their mass murder occurred well into the sequence…. Slavs … were the most numerous victims—3 million Poles, 7 million Soviet citizens and 3.3 million Soviet POWs.” Even among Jewish victims, Daniel Goldhagen estimates, “somewhere between 40 and 50 percent” were killed “by means other than gassing, and more Germans were involved in these killings in a greater variety of contexts than in those carried out in the gas chambers.”

Richard Rhodes is a Pulitzer-winning historian (having won the Prize for his 1986 book The making of the atomic bomb). In the exhaustively-researched Masters of death: The SS-Einsatzgruppen and the invention of the Holocaust, Rhodes has written, I believe, the definitive history of this not-widely-known but important chapter in the history of the Nazis’ killing machine.

LIGHTNING AND ASHES by John Guzlowski (2007)

Sat, 10 Apr 2010 09:04:33 -0400

LIGHTNING AND ASHES by John Guzlowski (2007, 86 pages, poetry)

This is a book of poems about the Holocaust.

This book was written by John Guzlowski, both of whose parents were Polish Catholic survivors of Nazi concentration camps.

I cried while reading this book.

Here is one of the poems. It is called “What the War Taught Her”.

My mother learned that sex is bad,

Men are worthless, it is always cold

And there is never enough to eat.

She learned that if you are stupid

With your hands you will not survive

The winter even if you survive the fall.

She learned that only the young survive

The camps. The old are left in piles

Like worthless paper, and babies

Are scarce like chickens and bread.

She learned that the world is a broken place

Where no birds sing, and even angels

Cannot bear the sorrows God gives them.

She learned that you don’t pray

Your enemies will not torment you

You only pray that they will not kill you.

Here is another. It is called “What My Father Believed”.

He didn’t know about the Rock of Ages

or bringing in the sheaves or Jacob’s ladder

or gathering at the beautiful river

that flows beneath the throne of God.

He’d never heard of the Baltimore Catechism

either, and didn’t know the purpose of life

was to love and honor and serve God.

He’d been to the village church as a boy

in Poland, and knew he was Catholic

because his mother and father were buried

in a cemetery under wooden crosses.

His sister Catherine was buried there too.

The day their mother died Catherine took

to the kitchen corner where the stove sat,

and cried. She wouldn’t eat or drink, just cried

until she died there, died of a broken heart.

She was three or four years old, he was five.

What he knew about the nature of God

and religion came from the sermons

the priests told at mass, and this got mixed up

with his own life. He knew living was hard,

and that even children are meant to suffer.

Sometimes, when he was drinking he’d ask,

“Didn’t God send his own son here to suffer?”

My father believed we are here to lift logs

that can’t be lifted, to hammer steel nails

so bent they crack when we hit them.

In the slave labor camps in Germany,

He’d seen men try the impossible and fail.

He believed life is hard, and we should

help each other. If you see someone

on a cross, his weight pulling him down

and breaking his muscles, you should try

to lift him, even if only for a minute,

even though you know lifting won’t save him.