But You Did Not Come Back

...our family became a place where you screamed for help but no one heard, not ever.

Surviving makes other people’s tears unbearable. You might drown in them.

To everyone in the foyer reading the lists, or on the sidewalks waving signs and photos of their families who’d disappeared, I said over and over again: “Everyone is dead.” If they insisted, showing me family photos, I’d calmly say: “Were there any children? Not a single child will come back.” I didn’t mince my words, I didn’t try to spare their feelings, I was used to death. I’d become as hard-hearted as the deportees who saw us arrive at Birkenau without saying a single comforting word. Surviving makes other people’s tears unbearable. You might drown in them.

...our history, the history of European Jews...they will never forgive us for the evil they've done to us

If you only knew, all of you, how the camp remains in all our minds, and will until we die.

Still today, whenever I hear the word “Papa,” I’m startled, even seventy five years later, even when it is spoken by someone I don’t know. That word disappeared from my life so early that it hurts, and I can only say it deep in my heart, never out loud.

I was your darling little girl. Even at fifteen. At any age. I had so little time to save enough of you within me.

From my cell block, I could see the children walking to the gas chambers. I remember one little girl clinging to her doll. She looked lost, staring into space. Behind her were probably months of terror and being hunted. They’d just separated her from her parents, soon they’d tear off her clothes. She already looked like her limp, lifeless doll. I watched her. I knew what chaos and anguish runs through a little girl’s mind, knew how determined she was, clutching her doll in her hand. Not long before, a few years earlier, I too had left with a suitcase that had a baby doll inside it, and a little box to keep fishing flies in.

I listen to the radio, to the news, so I’m often afraid because I know what’s happening.

We knew the Nazis had lost, but it was too late, much too late to rejoice, our suffering had been too great, all we had left was a feeling of horror and loss.