Mischling Read Free

missing, we should have been able to watch them leave us, should have known the precise moment of our loss. If only we’d seen their faces turning from us, a flash of eye, a curve of cheek! A face turning—they would never give us that. Still, why couldn’t we have had a view of their backs to carry with us, just their backs as they left, only that? Just a glimpse of shoulder, a flash of woolen coat? For the sight of Zayde’s hand, hanging so heavy at his side—for Mama’s braid, lifting in the wind!
    But where our loved ones should have been, we had only the introduction to this white-coated man, Josef Mengele, the same Mengele who would become, in all his many years of hiding, Helmut Gregor, G. Helmuth, Fritz Ulmann, Fritz Hollman, Jose Mengele, Peter Hochbicler, Ernst Sebastian Alves, Jose Aspiazi, Lars Balltroem, Friedrich Edler von Breitenbach, Fritz Fischer, Karl Geuske, Ludwig Gregor, Stanislaus Prosky, Fausto Rindon, Fausto Rondon, Gregor Schklastro, Heinz Stobert, and Dr. Henrique Wollman.
    The man who would bury his death-dealing within these many names—he told us to call him Uncle Doctor. He made us call him by this name, once, then twice, just so we could all be acquainted, with no mistakes. By the time we finished repeating the name to his satisfaction, our family had vanished.
    And when we saw the absence where Mama and Zayde once stood, an awareness collapsed me at the knees, because I saw that this world was inventing a different order of living things. I did not know then what kind of living thing I would become, but the guard didn’t let me have a chance to think about it—he grasped my arm and dragged me till Pearl assured him that she’d support me, and she put her arm around my waist as we were led away with the triplets, away from the ramp and into the dust, onto a little road that led past the sauna and toward the crematoria, and as we marched into this new distance with death rising up on either side of us, we saw bodies on a cart, saw them heaped and blackened, and one of the bodies—it was reaching out its hand, it was grasping for something to hold, as if there were some invisible tether in the air that only the near-dead could see. The body’s mouth moved. We saw the pinkness of a tongue as it flapped and struggled. Words had abandoned it.
    I knew how important words were to a life. If I gave the body some of mine, I thought, it would be restored.
    Was I stupid to think this? Or feebleminded? Would the thought have occurred to me in a place free of flame-licked winds and white-winged doctors?
    These are fair questions. I think of them often, but I have never tried to answer them. The answers don’t belong to me.
    All I know: I stared at the body, and the only words I could summon weren’t my own. They were from a song I’d heard played on a smuggled record player in our ghetto basement. Whenever I’d heard the song, it had improved me. So I gave these words a try.
    “‘Would you like to swing on a star?’” I sang to the body.
    Not a sound, not a stir. Was it the fault of my squeaky voice? I tried again.
    “‘Carry moonbeams home in a jar?’” I sang.
    It was pathetic of me to try, I know, but I had always believed in the world’s ability to right itself, just like that, with a single kindness. And when kindness is not around, you invent new orders and systems to believe in, and there, in that moment—whether it was stupidity or feeblemindedness—I believed in a body’s ability to animate itself with the breath of a word. But it was obvious that these lyrics were not the right words at all. None of them could unlock the life of the body or were powerful enough to repair it. I searched for another word, a good word, to give—there had to be a word, I was sure of it—but the guard wouldn’t let me finish. He pulled me away and forced us to press on, anxious to have us showered and processed and numbered so that our time in Mengele’s zoo could begin.
    Auschwitz was