Lullaby

A dream last night. Adream last night, I was standing behind a tall SS man who was drowning a newborn Jewish baby under a faucet. He was singing. I couldn't make out his words, not above the rushing water, but I knew what they were. He was singing, "Here you go, little Moses, down the stream." I knew these words because in my waking life I'd read them in a survivor's testimony in Henry Greenspan's On Listening to Holocaust Survivors: Recounting and Life History. The child had just been born in another room. Carrying it, the tall SS man entered the adjoining room where the survivor-witness was sweeping, held it upside down under a tap, turned on the water, and sang as though singing a lullaby as he drowned this baby—"Here you go, little Moses, down the stream."

I believe I was not that SS man in my dream. I saw his whole body from behind, was not fused with him—unless, of course, my memory censored my dream to make it bearable for me; unless these divisions between and among dream personae are false. But, in any case, it did not occur to me in this dream to interfere, to try to save the baby. In my powerlessness as a reader of history, it may be, I had projected myself into the helpless witness that the survivor had been.

In Greenspan's book the witness did not say he had not seen that SS face, but I could not see it in my dream. The SS man's back was to me as he bent over the sink. I'm not sure I could see the child as he held it upside down under the water, but maybe, for just a moment, a durational traumatic moment that would abide in me, I did see the baby, right through that SS body, saw one of my own four grandchildren. At one time or another I would sing to each of these children, "You are my sunshine, my only sunshine," a lullaby that always moves me. "I bowed my head and cried." But my grandchild would be there with me when I finished that song.

Apparently the survivor did not know the name of that SS murderer. Maybe he was a doctor, maybe an orderly of some kind, or an officer passing through. He must have enjoyed what he was doing and enjoyed his own obscene wit. Was he singing to himself or to the sweeper? His song addresses the baby—"Here you go." The SS man, the sadistic, brainwashed brute, holds the newborn under the water—this happened to happen not in Auschwitz but in Hamburg—by its feet and sings to it as he fills its nostrils and mouth and drowns it.

I have read a hundred Holocaust books, seen films, heard survivors speak in person and on tape, have immersed myself in that history, have had many nightmares over the decades as I've visited, only visited, atrocity. In all senses, I am shadowed for the rest of my days. I knew and felt this baby's death before, but this is now again the first death after which there is no other, no worst there is none. The beast of my own German blood holds the newborn upside down under the running water and sings, "Here you go, little Moses, down the stream."