I Wish I Had a Heart Like Yours, Walt Whitman

GROWING UP IN BERGEN-BELSEN: THE CHRYSALIS

GROWING UP IN BERGEN-BELSEN: THE CHRYSALIS This is not war . . . this is timeless and the whole world and all mankind are involved in it. This touches me and I am responsible. — Alan Moorhead, journalist, Bergen-Belsen, 24 April 1945 We all grow up among the dead. But for a child, I had so many. In fifteen minutes—less time than it took to kill hundreds—I could ride my white, three-speed bicycle, out through the front gate, over the cricket pitch, down past the pig farm and into Bergen-Belsen. The house I grew up in appears on a postcard mailed by soldiers of the Wehrmacht to their families sometime during their training in nineteen thirty-nine; contained, toward the end of the war, eight hundred sixty-nine Gypsies, Jews, and others— overflow from the camp next door as Stalin advanced and Hitler panicked and prisoners were shuffled west. And this past chose me, and I acquired my destiny and the shadow of that destiny followed me everywhere, and this is how I became possessed 18 by the memory of some task I had yet to do. The butterfly, remember, must haunt the body of its first self, hidden deeply there, and in a different form. And this is what it means to be burdened by the future and it must mean everything to dream yourself wings, wake, and pour into your life. I don’t remember how or when I saw my first photographs of Bergen-Belsen; of bodies being pushed and rooted forward and piling up against the broadbladed grin of an army ’dozer; of prisoners on their knees among stacks of bodies, on their knees and preparing a meal of turnips. Bodies like netted leaves on the wire and so much light as if the sky had simply lowered its forehead to hold them there. To speak of the world in terms of something else is a habit of survival. Say it: those were human beings caught up on the wire. And left hanging on the wire. And so much sky. Say it: this touched me 19 and I am responsible. This was the year of my greatest discovery: the barbed and buffed lime-green locket of a peacock butterfly tethered, still, to its stem and lifted, carefully, out of the nettles. It was the only evidence I had of a magic so real it felt like a dream. Imagine being able to break down the body you have and rebuild it, then, into something better. And if I could vanish into myself and come back into this world, I would want some evidence of welcome, I would want to rupture back toward a light that’s familiar, and this is why I packed that jar with twigs, and bruised leaves, and grasses. And this was my undoing. Overnight that butterfly emerged and became caught up in such a world and when I woke it was a slender failure between the collapsed tents of its wings. How is it we can rupture so hard toward a future while the world 20 for which we burn has other plans. After this, my jars stood empty because I could not undo that wound, and I could not undo history, the house into which I was born, or the fact that I had stood, quiet and still, on the very ground across which human beings had been bulldozed into pits. I cannot change the fact that a poem is a gesture of welcome, and why would I want to, because for those of you who have vanished into yourselves, this is how you come back, now, into the world: here it is. 21 ...