A Bit Of Courage For You
I often stay up into the night wondering about the people who went through the Holocaust. It’s hard to imagine what they had to deal with within an hour’s time — let alone a day, a night, a week, or a year.
Beyond the deprivation of their basic needs that lead to starvation, exhaustion, thirst, frigidly cold nights, and a body that lived at border of failure, I wonder what those people thought about when they went to bed at night.
Were they confident that everything would be over soon? Were they hopeful in dreaming of a life beyond the walls of Auschwitz, Chelmno, and Belzec? Had they already given up and were simply counting the days — tallying them into the bed frame or the cement wall — until it was their turn to visit the chambers, their turn to be shot in the middle of a field, or their turn to be burned alive in the ovens?
There’s been nothing in my life that compares to how horrible I imagine just one day of their lives in the walls of a concentration camp being. When I attempt to empathize with them and imagine what their lives were like, it quickly leads to the realization that I’m glad I didn’t have to go through that.
Sometimes it stops there. I don’t want to think about all the horrible things that they went through. I don’t want the world to be as dark as the Holocaust makes me see it. But, when I’m forced to look, I can see a little layer that gets me through the night.
I think about what one prisoner did to help another get through the day. I see a young man with brunette hair, tall and built, with a kind freckled face. He and a frail older man with a puffy gray mustache are moving sandbags to a newly cleared up storage room across the camp. They’ve been at it for half an hour.
The old man, who started slow, wheezes his way across the campground with every step. The sandbag is slipping out of his grip, which he compensates for by shuffling his feet quicker. After he’s taken five sandbags over into the empty storage room he collapses on them. Sweat is pouring off his brow as his face turns white.
I see the young man standing above him and asking him if he’s alright.
“I don’t think I’m going to make it,” the old man says between pants. “We’ve been moving heavy for three days now. Lumber yesterday, rocks the day before, and sandbags today . . . what’s tomorrow gonna be? Bricks? No, no. I can’t do it anymore. I’ll just lay here until one of the guards comes by and shoot me.”
Boots echo on the cement floor outside the room. The young man pulls the old man to his feet and points to one of the sandbags.
“Do you think it would fit better like this or the first way we did it?” He asks as the guard walks by.
The guard stops in the doorway, listens for a moment, and then lets out a grunt as he turns to patrol the rest of the hall.
“Ah, they’re just trying to get to you,” he pokes the old man on the shoulder. “You got plenty left, you just need some dinner.”
“Dinner? You mean a bite or two? And not just any bite or two. I bite or two of watered-down soup and the crust of a biscuit, if we’re lucky.”
“Well, that’s a meal worth remembering when it’s all said and done, isn’t it?”
“You mean when we end up in the showers, or a ditch, or the firepit?”
“No, I mean when we stroll out of these gates, standing on a Panzer, a big roasted chicken wing in one arm, a blond actress on the other, finally ready to go back home.”
“That’s certainly some imagination you got there.”
“Well, can you think of a better way to leave?”
The old man stares down at the sandbags and kicks one with his foot.
“No, I guess I can’t now that I think of it. I do wish I had a cigarette though,” he adds thoughtfully.
“Like I said, after we get some dinner in us, we’ll be ready to stroll out of here later tonight.”
“What’s our ticket to this free ‘strolling’?”
“Just move 50 more sandbags, that’s all.”
“Well when you put it that way, that doesn’t sound as bad as exploitive slave labor with the constant, overarching threat of getting shot at any moment looming over our heads, does it?”
“Well, they probably would shoot you. They know I’m the one who moves all the sandbags anyway. But no, it doesn’t sound that bad at all.”
The old man smirks.
“Yeah, I guess that’s true.”
When I think about the Holocaust, when I think about Soviet Russia and Maoist China, when I think about what Eli Wiesel endured in Auschwitz, when I think about Dostoevsky’s years as a prisoner and hard laborer in Siberia, I think about all the stories that will never be told.
I think about the little kind actions that a prisoner did for another. Sharing the last bite of a piece of cold toast, giving a few whiffs of a prized cigarette, or speaking a few words in the ear of a despairing prisoner.
I wonder about the prisoners who didn’t make it. The prisoner whose last meal was shared with a starving friend; who’s blanket was shared with the old man who had his taken away; the one who gave his last bit of energy to touch the shoulder of a dying prisoner in the night, to let him know he wasn’t alone.
These were some of the worst moments in our modern history. There were enough bloodsheds and suffering to last a cruel universe ten lifetimes over. But there were also moments of light even in those places where it was darkest.
These stories may never be revealed, except maybe at the end of time, when the gods tell of miraculous tales of these little creatures known as humans who, deep into a cold and starless night, carried the rest of the sandbags over to the empty storage room so that an old man — who never did make it to the liberation day with chicken, Panzers, and a blonde actress — could make it through another day.
