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October 4 - October 14, 2018
If it weren’t for Hitler, I’d be walking with Rebekah home from schule, not waiting in line for a train.
Some days, I took my pulse to remind myself that was the most important thing. If my heart still beat, I could still go on.
The world was an absurd place, and it kept on spinning, getting more absurd with every rotation.
Try being not white in a room full of white people. You find the nonwhite people in the room real fast.
“Death is one way of going home, Ellie. But you’re not going to die. Berlin has enough ghosts. Germany has enough ghosts. Europe has more than enough ghosts. Choosing to be a ghost is disrespectful to all the real ghosts.”
“Home is a fantasie,” he said after another block. “We make up our homes and our ideas of home. Some days, I can’t even bear all the guilt I feel at finding my home in a city that nearly everyone wants to leave.”
“The people never mentioned in history books still made history,”
“If all of you die, what will happen to your story?”
Simple borders and demarcations made such a difference in someone’s future, hopes, and dreams, and the promises they could make. How pointless the world could be.
Personal connections created a community, and community wasn’t the opposite of individualism. We were collectively a whole made of millions and millions of moving parts, each of us our own gear interlocking with another gear and turning the world a little farther in the right direction.
But it didn’t feel like enough for me. That people had to suffer so that the wheels of history could turn.
Words lost meaning here in the ghetto. They meant everything and nothing in the same breath.
We told stories because our bones were full of ghosts whispering, Tell the story. I
“I’ve told you two stories that end in freedom,” I protested. “How much happier could you ask for?”
“We wouldn’t like the daylight if it wasn’t for the night. We wouldn’t notice the stars if not for the endless dark of night. All the story, like you said? That’s the important part. The sad parts are all about surviving. We are a people who survive. We endure. We will endure this too.”
I didn’t believe in magic, but I could try to believe in the kind of magic that might set me free.
Even though I’m an East Berliner, I know that on a fundamental level, I am German and all of Berlin is one city. The wall’s a false divide.
It was too many people trying to be alive at the same time.
It was an escape from aboveground. This was underground. This was subculture. This was what we all dreamed about when we fell asleep at night. Some people practically lived here because it was easier than being up there.
He was a kaleidoscope boy born at the wrong time in the wrong place, too bright for here, too much for everywhere else.
History is not singular. Events do not happen in a vacuum. Altering history is far more complicated than the death of one man. If we knew how to go back in time and prevent genocide, we would. We’d have many more genocides than just the Holocaust to fix. History is riddled with deaths. We’re all here because of ghosts.”
“Sponge,” he whispered, and I smiled. “Soak this up. Keep it forever.”
What could change if we started to measure society’s successes not in wars won but in moments in which we countered injustice? When good did win out over evil.
