I Wish I Had a Heart Like Yours, Walt Whitman

GROWING UP IN BERGEN-BELSEN

GROWING UP IN BERGEN-BELSEN 1 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. 2 The year I began to grow breasts, my body, once private and belonging to me alone, began to belong to others. This was the year boys began to smell strange, like objects that never dried out, like the rank hug of air in the bunker at the end of the street with its odour of concrete and its gun slits flush with the ground; the moist neck of the stairwell in summer. Twenty-five years since the end of the war and still we had dreams 11 of finding soldiers in full battle dress with every single bone intact; with their helmets and pistols and bayonets. This was the year my body ran away with itself and I spoke less and less, while even the thoughts of the boys I ran with began to sweat as they signed up for that life-long apprenticeship to their wet dreams. I had no knowledge of the soul, but what I did know was ruinous and simple: that the body was punishment enough; and so, as revenge for their every snub and humiliation, this was the year I began to draw my teachers naked, limbs akimbo, floating on the white, unlined pages of my school notebooks. 3 We invent ways to live with the body. And then it is taken away. I grew terrified of touching the pictures of the sick and the dying in National Geographics and Sunday supplements, washing my hands over and over, opening doors with my elbows, or not at all. It wasn’t guilt: the guilt of children is local—shame over someone else’s Cat’s-Eye or an Aggie dropped into a pocket as it dribbled out of bounds; an apple lobbed on a dare through the school bus window; the countless insects starved by mistake, year after year, locked in jars with parts of the green world they could not eat. 12 4 Then came the year I stopped eating, convinced that appetite itself was murderous. You quickly discover, said a camp survivor, that you will kill your own child for a crust of bread. 5 The white mare injured in the pasture, who lay in the grass on her side and ran, like a dog in dreams, on the growing blanket of her bleeding; the tadpoles I collected who chewed the tails of the weakest among them down to tatters; a rabbit, clipped by the car in front, flopping in the gutter as we roared past awash in smoke and grit. How could I not believe that our sufferings came back to the fact of the body. Roil of minnows in a hand net. The frantic epilepsy of pale, thin bodies like the sound of distant clapping. Despite what you might have heard, the birds do sing in Bergen-Belsen. They sit in the trees, fat wallets of song. And I grew up with other, common myths: lampshades and handbags of human skin; hair of the murdered made into wigs for the whores of the SS guards. And myths are terrible in the way they worry upward, in layers, like bones or pearls, around kernels of truth and hurt: one small event, a single word—it’s this brush with the truth that gives them their terror. And their power. And this was how I came to language, with such fear in my small body. And it would burn down through me like a wick. 13 ...