Kovno

I sat in my home, alone. My parents were gone and I surely knew that their fate had been sealed. What a feeling it was, to be alone in my home. I couldn't bear the idea of sleeping alone in my home that night. In the distance I heard shots fired. I thought how did such a thing happen to me? I decided to run for the main gate, and there I was accosted and placed into a labor unit - in the middle of the night. There were others working, crying, being beaten. That morning I knew that everyone had been killed. I heard the sound of one machine gun, then two, then three, then four - all firing simultaneously. I saw the intense and bright light of a spot light. I heard a man scream, murder, murder, then he shouted Sh'ma Yisrael, and then silence. I knew that everyone had been slaugtered - my whole family. I was so in shock that I couldn't weep. I saw them bringing wagons filled with clothing down from the Ninth Fort. Piles of coats and on the top of one pile sticking out from the rest, I saw my sister's burgundy colored coat. I thought, that's it - they're all gone. It stood out from the rest of the black clothing I saw. Her coat. There it was.

The land of the living is truly an odd place. What it must be to be left among the living, among the murderers, among only the ghosts and the memories. The lucky ones had been killed. Odd, so odd. It makes me somehow understand why I have a flood of emotion when I see a co-worker eating her lunch using a real, stainless fork. The sound of the tines against her teeth. The gentleness with which she lifts macaroni with red sauce, up to her mouth. A reason begins to emerge - as if an answer to a question asked long ago, finally arrives, like a relative presumed dead, stepping off a bus, lost for decades. Why we cherish one another. That thing which elevates sinew and blood and fat from the stuff of warm mammals to the photograph, to the fork, to the Torah. The fight against nature - our own murderous kill switch.

I'm sorry. Life is cruel. The faces of God are many, and if we are created in God's image, then God is cruel. But there appears to be so convoluted a collection of reasons for our cruelty - our sadism. We're granted a set of laws which at once says not to murder, but then sanctioned the efficient and gory removal of a cow's trachea, warm, pulsating. And to have that cow on a bun, on Pico Boulevard, brazed and tasty, with sauce made from the embryos of chickens. We've got an excuse. We're abused, pushed, frustrated with just gravity sometimes. But what's God's excuse? Who so pushed God to God's limit that God saw fit to fashion creations with the sharp and grinding molars, good for tearing apart meat? Surely it wasn't the same one who inspired God to allow the dew to fall upon the leaves, who made the beauty of women like the caress of summer breezes. Could the same muse have shown God the opposing facets of a diamond, one shining, another blackened and pitted? It's like a comedy, a silly play where the absurd coincides too perfectly with the stark.