Page 35 - Witness

FALLING
It is so hard to be coherent about Majdanek.
It is still all too raw for me to worry about punctuation and sense. Some days it would seem as if I had never gone. Others, like today, I neglect my work to read books about the Shoah, to go over my pictures, and to cry. It seems
that if Majdanek is real, school and society as a whole should not be....
...what happened [during the Shoah] wasn’t okay, and there are so few words that we can use to comfort each other. Our language rings hollow, and when we try to form sentences, we detract from the feeling of the shoes that we caressed through the grates and from the coarseness of the soil at Treblinka, as it ran through our fingers. I have given up any pretense of understanding. All that I know is this: at Majdanek, I was terrified of falling into the ashes.
—Excerpt from an essay by Lisa Gruschcow, 15
FROM ONE WHO HAS TASTED ASHES Long I stood
staring at the mound numb
death is not a concept
not an event
it has a shape, mass, dimensions. So I stood and stared
mouth agape
here is death
in this pile of bones and ashes.
It is cold
the wind blows
I cannot feel the cold not on the outside
it happens
quite natural
wind, ashes
a strong gust
I squint my eyes something in there they start to tear
then
a taste of grit in my mouth
how can one swallow when one has tasted ashes
how can one dare to spit them out.
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—Mark Charendoff, March of the Living, 1990