On Poland, Indellible

Catharsis.

Questions. Questions of belonging. Questions of departure. Questions of niggunim, of womanhood, of Jewishhood.

Overwhelmed with a desire to fix everything in sight. Would like to be the salve to the broken-hearted descendants to survivors. Would like to redo the memorialization at Belzec, at Auschwitz, at Birkenau, at Madjonic. Would like to do Polish – Israeli dialogues. Would like to solve the problems in Gaza. Would like to restore this nation, Israel. Would like to eradicate the acceptance of racist mentalities of Israeli youth. To heal bodies. To heal souls.

I need to excavate that cemetery. To name the dead. To restore the spirits lost in space. I need the shamanic council, I need them all to stand at Belzec and shake with the unreal buzz of dead people unsettled. So many ghosts. They live in black hats. Avenge, not revenge. Nausea. Screams and piles. No one knew they were human. Dogs, buried en masse. Not even those soldiers, liberators, were prepared. Vomiting at the sight of the Jewish vermin. Extinction failed. They are insipid. We have taken over the earth. Am awaiting the rat poison’s return.

USA arrival. Hating the living in the name of the dead. All those deniers of the Holocaust. The word “holocaust.” The numbing out. Giant steel building to represent the unrepresentable. Make a giant and everyone goes blind. People can’t look giants in the eye. That thing. Was. Real.

Chassids at the grave sight. My body in charge. Shakes, leaking, exhausting. Pain before emotion. Entire body, one ache, all those ponds full of human ashe, spilling over in the rain. My boots coated in the Jewish dead. Do I bury my boots? Or walk that mud through the old city, scrape the Auschwitz remains at the Kotel.

Onlooking anti-Semites. Misbehaved Israeli children chiding the hatred. “Why do you care? American kids behave horribly, too.” “Because American children don’t represent the Jewish people.” Peoplehood. His anger at inter-marriage, “how can you suggest that after this trip?” Desperate to hold on to the past, forgetting that nothing can be held when squeezed. It always, undeniably, will pop.

Lost on MeaSharim, fear of my own people because of the length of my skirt. I dared them to mess with me. I dared them. I would have yelled about shame and solidarity and the burnt pile of my people underneath a filthy ugly museum exhibition. Muddy dead.

Hope and beauty and preservation. A book. A CD. A restaurant. And then the fat Chasids and the feeling, all over that shul, of murder, of disregard. Something horrible is still happening.

My cousin in America and the boys at school. They threw money at her feet and said “pick it up, You Jew.” Dirty Jew. She is a warrior, my dirty Jewish cousin, who stood and read to her hater classmates about who she is, what it means to be Jewish. And the apologies that ensued.

Chosen people, indeed. We should, according to plan, according to statistics, according to that extermination camp, those cells in the basement, that firing squad, those gas chambers. Oh, God, those gas chambers. Echoing with the unfinishing of lives. I lulled them all, those screaming wailing souls, with song.

I lulled the dead until so empty I could collapse. There is no love when everyone is torn up with grief. There is only kosher noodle soup.

According to statistics we should all be dead. Left and forgotten in shtetl after shtetl, wasting in the camps where the liberators turned their faces in disgust. An issue, this war, this Holocaust, long forgotten. The memory is an irritation, sand paper on an open wound. We did it too big, giant mausoleum for the giant dead, but no one can look, I said, a giant in the eye.

I tiptoed through history, waded along muddy banks of torture and slavery, starvation as a meal-plan at winter camp. The only real evidence, a bombed crematorium, a desperate attempt to cover a crime. You know the wicked by their guilt.

And then all those hearts, hearts of the destroyers, unclean. “We expect them to begin telling their stories now,” the guide told me. The surviving killers, on their deathbeds, she is referring to. We expect them to come out in tchuvah before they pass. “I raped 500 young women in three years and then bayonet killed my own babies.” Dirty Jews.

There was fresh graffiti near the old synagogue “Juden” and a $ sign. Mass graves of babies, the only marker, a fence. NAMES. Where are the names? A sword, a monument, candles, photos. Find the names. Excavate the dead. Why do healers convene in the Alps, together, secluded? I call upon the shamans, worldwide, to join me at Auschwitz. The mud is full of the dead. The graves unmarked. The names, afloat, drowned. Gone.

I need a council; I need an army of healers to wander with me. Arizona, on my mind. A boy whose soul is a reflection of a national dilemma. God is dying, everywhere. Help me. Bring. God. Back. Into these hearts.

I am so small and my body so weak. Help me, heal me, join me, I need to fight a giant war on the hearts of killers. A war of love, of resuscitation. “It is the government, not the Jews,” said my cab driver today. “I am Muslim. I like the Jewish. They believe in Allah. I can talk to them. It is the government, not the Jews. Jewish does not say kill people.”

Gripped by fear. Gripped by shoulder pain, knee pain, a stomachache, a headache, a cold, a lack of self-control. God, Baruch Hashem, sangoma, Bangladeshi monk, the writing teachers, the acupuncturists, the shamans, the rabbis, the priests, the seers, the believers, whoever you are. We need to cut through, like a meditator cuts thoughts, we need to cut the air, the culture, the social layers, the blinders. Help people fall over. Help people wail. Release, Yared, release the pain in the chest. Release the dead. Writhe at the emptiness, a body born anew no longer inhabited by ghosts. God, release us, release the Jewish people.

Questions of Judaism. Questions of solidarity. Questions of pork, of kosher sandwiches at airports. Questions of the beauty in secular eyes, the clouds in those who herald god. Give me a shovel, help me dig. We need to erect a monument to our suffering, to release it, to visit it annually and live between hearts and eyes the other 364 days.

I miss my grandmother. I saw everything that haunted her, the good, the beauty, and the absolute horror. Synagogues of gold, acoustics that echo pure glass, a countryside, a grove of trees. It looked like DC, only thinner, gaunt, those trees. The only witnesses to everything. Silent mourners. A group shot in the forest. A group. No. Group after group after group until they quit. Too expensive killing Jews with bullets.

You want to tell me I am stuck in the past? That Israel is stick on the Holocaust? Try to unglue yourself from a grave that large, the size of a football field, coated in imported volcanic rock. Imported stones to represent the immensity of the local dead. Representation an insult to reality. Nothing is needed to imagine. Just lie there, flat on the earth, long enough and it will rush through your system. You can feel them clawing for air, hear their prayers sang until choking on “gift-gas.” We fail at mourning. We, the people, by the people, for the people, fail at mourning, fail at witnessing. A woman of two nations, her people ruining themselves.

God help me. God help my people to mourn so that they may begin, anew, to see their neighbors. Grief blinds. Blind Jews with guns will shoot their neighbors. Clear our vision, unblock our sight, cleanse our hearts. 300 candlesticks in San Diego, a way of holding on, in case, just in case, they decide to do it again. History, says the Torah teacher, is already written. Your country will lose its Jews too. And the question is, are we left to preserve the Jewish people, or to restore dignity to the world? Or both? Or neither? The task is too great, this superhero expectation that I will fix a nation. Or two.