“Because you had no power over the fact that I was born, you took from me what I was born with—the person who was my love, the half that made me entire—and now I am lessened into this dull thing, a divided person who will live forever, wandering in search of some nothing, some nowhere, some no-feeling, to mend my pain.”
― Affinity Konar, quote from Mischling
“Work would never set us free, despite what they'd promised. But beauty? Yes, I thought, beauty might see us past the gates.”
― Affinity Konar, quote from Mischling
“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.”
― Affinity Konar, quote from Mischling
“Auschwitz was built to imprison us. Birkenau was built to kill us. Mere kilometers bridged their attached evils. What this zoo was designed for, I did not know - I could only swear that Pearl and I, we would never be caged.”
― Affinity Konar, quote from Mischling
“Everyone survived by planning. I could see that. I realized that Stasha and I would have to divide the responsibilities of living between us. Such divisions had always come naturally to us, and so there, in the early-morning dark, we divvied up the necessities: Stasha would take the funny, the future, the bad. I would take the sad, the past, the good.”
― Affinity Konar, quote from Mischling
“I love you,” I said into his shoulder. Peter stopped treading on my feet and cocked a half-closed eye at me in suspicion. “You don’t. You could—I think—in time. But you’re just saying that to me because you think you won’t have a chance to say it truthfully someday, aren’t you?” “Yes,” I confessed. “I am.”
― Affinity Konar, quote from Mischling
“I don’t know Russian.” “I can teach you that too. It is a good language for hating Nazis in. Perhaps better than Polish. We can save Polish for other things—that would make our fathers happy, wouldn’t it?”
― Affinity Konar, quote from Mischling
“I was a broken half afloat in a great nowhere, and the trains were determined to keep me this way. Let me say this about those days, when the war was still a war, but one soon to end, when refugees were roaming and tanks lay overturned on their backs like great tortoises and one was wise to avoid the marching streams of any soldiers, be they Soviet or German: These trains we never should have trusted again, they appeared to be our only way home. And so people packed themselves into the cars quite willingly and looked the other way when they failed to arrive at their stated destinations. I marveled at our collective belief in an eventual safety.”
― Affinity Konar, quote from Mischling
“Warsaw did not recognize our destructive aims, as it was too possessed by its own restoration to know us. But although it did not note our entry, I trusted the city to host our mission. It had been destroyed like we had been destroyed. It was gutted and drawn; vacancies had been cleared until the city was little more than a cellar, a tomb, a waiting room with a telephone that only said good-bye, but everywhere, I saw people crushing themselves to revive it, I saw them expelling every breath they had into the foundations of the felled synagogues. They had the power specific to natives - they compelled the leaves to remain on the trees, coaxed the flowers to bloom and the skulls to stay in the ground, buried where no dog might unearth them but we had the gifts of outside avengers. While they entrusted the city with life, we were there to ensure a death. Only when Mengele was finished would the leaves remain, the flowers bloom, and the skulls go back to sleep.”
― Affinity Konar, quote from Mischling
“my heart was busy falling into the blackest depths of me, a locale unknown even to Uncle, where it shed its skin, rolled in bile, assumed a new shell, and grew thorns. Thus armored, the resourceful organ climbed the ladder of my ribs and returned to its place. And I did what Pearl would’ve wanted me to.”
― Affinity Konar, quote from Mischling
“Tears must have been invented for that reason.”
― Affinity Konar, quote from Mischling
“It is difficult to realize that part of you might travel for a lifetime with someone you hate, entirely against your own will. You may know what I speak of--maybe someone remembers you when you'd rather be forgotten; maybe someone has a piece of you that is impossible to retrieve.”
― Affinity Konar, quote from Mischling
“All those innocents-I didn't wonder about their futures
that day as I left the abandoned house. I couldn't know their destinations, their triumphs, their troubles. The ones who integrated themselves into new cities and forgot themselves in new professions, either forming empires grand enough to blot out a past, or failing to thrive because they couldn't get the sound of their own blood out of their heads. The ones who married other survivors, and the ones who wouldn't marry because they had nothing to offer a
marriage bed but night terrors. The ones who took comfort and freedom in the soil of the kibbutz, and the ones who found themselves lying on a different set of tables, granting permission to other doctors to bum the branded memories from their brains, to take away, once and for all, the misery that he had imprinted upon us.
They were children, once.”
― Affinity Konar, quote from Mischling
“Because you couldn't make my zayde less than ash, you leave me gray and small, a twisted thing to be blown by whatever wind will have me.”
― Affinity Konar, quote from Mischling
“Because you had no power over the fact that I was born, you took from me what I was born with--the person who was my love, the half that made me entire--and now I am lessened into this dull thing, a divided person who will live forever, wandering in search of some nothing, some nowhere, some no-feeling, to mend my pain.”
― Affinity Konar, quote from Mischling
“Dear Pearl, I wrote, believing that someday, if only for a moment, she might leave the site of her capture--be it death, be it Mengele--and see this greeting and know that we were people, still, in spite of what we'd been told.”
― Affinity Konar, quote from Mischling
“The whole world will never look back. And if they do, they’ll probably say that it never really happened.”
― Affinity Konar, quote from Mischling
“And this is where I don't remember. This is where I want to wander my mind back and under, past the smell, past the thump-bump of the boots and the suitcases, toward some semblance of a good-bye. Because we should have seen our loves go 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 a 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, Friedrcih Edler von Breitenbach, Fritz Fischer, Karl Gueske, Ludwig Gregor, Stanislaus Prosky, Fausto Rindon, Fausto Rondon, Gregor Schklastro, Heinz Stobert, and Dr. Henrique Wollman.”
― Affinity Konar, quote from Mischling
“I joined him in stabbing the snow. Have you ever stabbed the snow to make sense of things? It is not something I recommend.”
― Affinity Konar, quote from Mischling
“Everywhere we looked there was a duplicate, an identical. All girls. Sad girls, girls from faraway places, girls who could have been our neighborhood's girls. Some of these girls were quiet; they posed like birds on their straw mattresses and studied us. As we walked past them on their perches, I saw the chosen, the ones selected to suffer in certain ways while their other halves remained untouched. In nearly ever pair, one twin had a spine gone awry, a bad leg, a patched eye, a wound, a scar, a crutch.”
― Affinity Konar, quote from Mischling
“We could also see birches in the woods beyond the thirteen-foot-high fences. And we could see women prisoners in the adjacent field; if the girls saw their mothers among them, they could throw their bread to them, hoping that they would not loft it back, as our rations were greater than anyone else's in the camp. We could see the labs we were taken to on Tuesdays and Thursdays and Saturdays, the two-story buildings of brick, but the rest of our view was limited. If someone had cause to pluck us up and take us somewhere, then there was more we might learn of Auschwitz, but otherwise, we did not see the section of camp called Canada, which featured a series of warehouses so overwhelmed with pillaged splendor that the prisoners named it after a country that represented wealth and luxury to them. Inside Canada's structures, our former possessions loomed in stacks: our spectacles, our coats, our instruments, our suitcases, all of it, even down to our teeth, our hair, anything that could be considered necessary to the business of being human. We did not see the sauna where inmates were stripped, or the little white farmhouse whose rooms were passed off as showers. We did not see the luxuriant headquarters of the SS, where parties took place, parties where the women of the Puff were brought in to dance and sit upon Nazi laps. We did not see, and so we believed we already knew the worst. We couldn't image the greatness of suffering, how artful and calculating it could be, how it could pluck off the members of a family, one after the other, or show an entire village the face of death in one fell swoop.”
― Affinity Konar, quote from Mischling
“We stood for roll call in that early-morning light, our noses twitching in an effort to shake the stench of ash and the unwashed. September's heat lingered in the air. It bounced off us in waves, haloed us with dust. This roll call was the first time I saw all of Mengele's subjects gathered together: the multiples, the giants, the Lilliputs, the limbless, the Jews he's deemed curiously Aryan in appearance.”
― Affinity Konar, quote from Mischling
“Tell me,' she said, her eyes trailing the fly's escape over the fence and into the fields, 'what does it feel like - to be of value?'
I said that I didn't know. A lie, obviously. I knew the feeling of value well, I'd known it until Mama and Zayde were taken away, and it still remained - though in an altered form - with Stasha, who valued me more than herself. But I wasn't about to boast of this to Bruna, whose frenzy had enlarged in such a manner that the whole of her quaked. The index finger of her right hand shook the most. She pointed it at a building in the distance, a building that I'd later come to know as one of Mengele's laboratories.
'Please,' she entreated, 'tell me when you understand? I would like to know.”
― Affinity Konar, quote from Mischling
“Late at night, when Pearl was fast asleep, her consciousness a safe distance from my own, I'd think of these tiny pieces of us and wonder if our feelings remained in them, even though they were mere particles. I wondered if the pieces hated themselves for their participation in the experiments. I imagined that they did. And I longed to tell them that it wasn't their fault, that the collaboration wasn't a willing one, that they'd been stolen, coerced, made to suffer. But then I'd realize how little influence I had over these pieces - after we'd been parted, they answered only to nature and science and the man who called himself Uncle. There was nothing I could do on their numerous, microscopic behalfs.”
― Affinity Konar, quote from Mischling
“Urgency threaded her voice as she offered her hand. It was gloved, but I could feel the warmth of it still, and thrilled to her touch before seeing that she regretted the gesture. She recoiled, and put the hand in her pocket. At the time, I thought she regretted touching me because a show of kindness could compromise her standing with colleagues like Elma. Years later, I would realize her sorrow arose from taking care of the children that Uncle claimed for his own. It must have been like stringing a harp for someone who played his harp with a knife, or binding a book for someone whose idea of reading was feeding pages to a fire.”
― Affinity Konar, quote from Mischling
“Though just a girl, I had ideas about violence. Violence had a horizon, a scent, a color. I'd seen it in books and newsreels, but I didn't truly know it until I saw the effects of it on Zayde, saw him come to our basement home in the ghetto with a red rag over his face, saw Mama go soundless as she bound his nose with the scrap torn from the hem of her nightgown. Pearl held the lamp during this procedure so that Mama could see, but I was shuddering so much that I couldn't assist her. I should be able to say that I saw violence happen to Mama when a guard came to our door with news about the disappearance, but I kept my eyes closed tight the whole time, sealed them shut while Pearl stared straight ahead, and because my sister saw it all, I felt the images secondhand, felt them burn on the backs of my eyelids - I saw the guard's boot glow and furrow itself in Mama's side as she lay on the floor. Pearl was angry that I was not an active witness, and so she forced me to take it all in, and when I begged her to stop subjecting me to such sights, she informed me that I had no say in the matter, because she would never look away, not ever, no matter how much it hurt me, because in looking away, she said, we would lose ourselves so thoroughly that our loss would require another name.”
― Affinity Konar, quote from Mischling
“Farewell, Horse. Our beloved. You were more innocent than Pearl on the day we were born. You were better than the best parts of us. You were who I wished the world could be.”
― Affinity Konar, quote from Mischling
“But in Auschwitz, I found that the room that really changes you is the one that can make you feel nothing at all. It is the room that says, Come sit in me, and you will know no pain; your suffering isn't real, and your struggles? They're only slightly more real than you are, but not by much. Save yourself, the room advises, by feeling nothing, and if you must feel something, don't doom yourself by showing it.”
― Affinity Konar, quote from Mischling
“Uncle Doctor. He entered whistling with a sprightly step, smelling of peppermint and starch, the long white wings of his coat trailing against each surface he passed and erasing them. I'd come to learn that he considered himself an expert at whistling, just he considered himself an expert on hygiene and culture and art and writing. But while his whistle was errorless, there was no mistaking its robotic lean. Even as it leaped about the scale, it was monotone at the core, a hollowing thing that couldn't know a feeling.”
― Affinity Konar, quote from Mischling
“As he placed the needle back on its tray, I realized that he'd complicated me; he'd imposed divisions on the matter I shared with Pearl, all that we'd both collaborated on in our floating little world. The needle made me a mischling, but the word took on a meaning different than the term the Nazis imposed upon us, all those cold and gruesome equations of blood and worship and heritage. No, I was a hybrid of a different sort, a powerful hyrbid forged by my suffering. I was now composed of two parts.
One part was loss and despair. Such darkness should make life impossible, I know. But my other part? It was wild hope. And no one could extract or cut or drain it from me. No one could burn it from my flesh or puncture it with a needle.
This hopeful part, it twisted me, gave me a new form. The girl who'd licked an onion in the cattle car was dead, and the mischling I'd become was an oddity, a thwarted person, a creature - but a creature capable of tricking her enemies and rescuing her loved ones.”
― Affinity Konar, quote from Mischling
Affinity Konar
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