College, Collapse, & World Walking

I entered the University of Washington in the fall but by April had officially withdrawn, had dropped out suddenly and was on my way to New Mexico, Arizona, Texas, maybe Mexico. Encapsulated as I was in secret pursuit of the Next Deep Thought, when I started school I was largely unaware of the Summer of Love, Haight-Ashbury, psychedelic drugs, draft card burnings, peace rallies, the women's liberation movement, and the like. I was vaguely cognizant of the Vietnam War in an offhand way—I had my college deferment so it bore little importance for me—and because I never watched television and seldom read the newspapers I was spared the daily communiqués of its ongoing horrors. This too would change once classes started.

High school acquaintances who'd been drafted or enlisted out of some jingoistic sense of patriotism were failing to return from Southeast Asia. Those fortunate enough to make it home came back angry and altered men, vacant-eyed, dispirited, oftentimes crazy and dangerous. Despite all the tie-dye and patchouli, it seemed the Age of Aquarius was fated to wither embrocated with gun oil, petroleum jelly, and ritualistic virgins' blood. I may have started school sheathed in short-sightedness and numina, but I'd finish full sprung from the thigh of experience, wide-awake, naked, scourged and striped as a penitent.

At least, I wanted to think so. With sober eyes I supplemented my Bible readings with eastern philosophy (the Bhagavad Gita, Upanishads, the Tao Te Ching) Hermann Hesse, Gurdjieff and Ouspensky, Richard Grossinger, the Dead Sea Scrolls, anything I might use to append my beliefs. I started filling large spiral-bound notebooks with haphazard thoughts, philosophical and literary criticisms, blasphemous theologies, a daily compulsion clearly feeding on pathology. Truth became onomatomania, an oft-repeated mantra whispered under my breath, no longer fixative and reassuring but a miasma of uncertainty that turned my world on its ear. Like a caged animal I howled long into the night, paced in repetitive circles, rolled in my own somatic juices. Reality had gotten the best of me and the only way back to the Golden Age was through insanity or brain damage, an unrealistic choice. I ached all over. Whenever possible I would turn my face into the rain slanting from the sky as sharp as shrapnel until I proclaimed myself washed with shame, numbed by icy indifference. Often I would run back and forth across the dusk-dull campus, scissoring my arms like a sprinter, striking and slicing the air, with absolutely nowhere to go. Limned with inertia I was no layabout; I never failed to make classes and always completed my assignments on time, finished my essays and theme papers, an exemplar of the dutiful student yet utterly aware that my heart was breaking and not knowing why.

It was during this time I started attending a discussion group that met Monday evenings around a colossal cigarette-scarred table near the back of a coffee-house on 39th and Brooklyn. Mostly we were philosophical Marxists and Socialists with just enough Existentialists stirred into the mix—among whom I liked to consider myself—to deflate the radical rhetoric and dampen an always-mounting fever pitch. We drank black coffee from thick stained mugs and chain-smoked Winstons and Marlboros until all the ashtrays were overflowing and the filters smoldering. In between the excitement of the inevitable conflagration—a discarded UW Daily or yellowing copies of the Helix would sporadically flash into flame—we argued about class distinctions and hegemony and commodity fetishism and alienation while considering most people ignorant of history and asleep at the wheel. In order to differentiate ourselves from the efflorescent hippies and sweater-vested preppies we dressed like Northwest laborers in drab flannel and denim and steel-toed boots and ribbed watch caps—"grunge" long before there was such a notion—while nursing our paper cuts and writers' cramps. Outsiders stealing a look through the nicotine-ambered windows might have mistaken us for crazed longshoremen or fishermen or loggers, amped and agitated on usurious amounts of caffeine. We didn't understand that despite all appearances we were just like everyone else—even the hippies and preppies whom we believed damned fools—playing dress-up and brandishing labels as if we were nametags stitched into our clothing. We erroneously assumed we were composed of metaphysical elements imbued in the very terms we used to identify themselves—American, Liberal, Pragmatist, Christian, Socialist, Democrat—as if our adherence to words and language was somehow more real and of greater significance than the throbbing realities of our own flesh, breath, and blood. We were becoming who we thought we were—names, appellatives, cognomens, and denominations—and not what we really were: mortal men and women, creatures of habit, illuminated mammals squatting and shitting in the dirt. We crossed our arms atop our chests and leaned back in smug self-importance, as ridiculous as any human beings that ever trod the planet.

During my second quarter at the University, in late winter, after the sky promised blue through the dappled-gray clouds and the sullen gardens began popping alive under a flurry of crocuses and daffodils, I received a telephone call informing me my best boyhood friend had died in a car accident, in Portland. Apparently he'd taken a corner too fast, rolled under a double-parked delivery truck, and was beheaded. Filled with shock and grief, I couldn't bring myself to attend his funeral. A short time later I received a second phone call telling me another friend had drowned while canoeing on the usually calm Skykomish River. I couldn't attend that funeral either—I had stopped short at the cemetery gate blinded by fits of weeping. Two weeks later I received yet another phone call, then another, and another still. All told in two month's time I'd lost six friends—young men and women with whom I'd come up through school, palled around, gone to movies, camping, ballgames—to ridiculous accidents, and although I wasn't given to superstition or peculiarly susceptible to notions of fate and destiny, I would've been lying if I said I wasn't weary and anxious or frequently looking over my shoulder to see what might be gaining on me. More than once I'd find himself standing in open doorways, holding on to the doorframes for dear life, waiting for the world around me to stop shaking, to stop shaking, to spin down and stop altogether.

Trampled by months of tragedy, scared, emotionally scarred, sick to my stomach, by the second week of Spring quarter I realized I could no longer continue in the sciences, in school, in anything requiring systematic thinking. In the middle of math class I stood up, tossed my textbooks into the trash, and promptly dropped out. My academic advisor was flummoxed, my parents confused. I didn't care. Because I'd recently read Leary and Castaneda I decided I needed to head south, if not to chase enlightenment then at least to escape the affliction of Seattle. I'd nearly convinced my friend J to go along with me, but in the end his cooler head prevailed, and so was forced to play out my Francis of Assisi scenario alone. With no money, no tent or sleeping bag, and only the clothes on my back, I left home in April, the cruelest month, stirring the dead out of the memorial land, breeding lilacs and warm rain, mixing dull desire among the roots of one unforgetful spring.

Seattle had no hold on me now nor science nor the specificities of school nor the symptoms of that profound malaise that had befallen me heart and soul. I was free and headed south—where south I could not say nor why nor for how long—armed with only a rudimentary knowledge of Spanish, enough to beg pesos, food and water, shelter from the sun, and a deep yearning to arrive somewhere outside or far removed from the uncertainties of destination or intention. No decisions had been made, no plans drawn up, no itineraries scheduled. I simply stepped outside one cloudy morning and started walking. I had purchased a hooded waterproof jacket specifically for the journey, with a removable liner if it should get too hot, and a pocket knife, and brought along a battered copy of T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets as a kind of talisman because it was thin and would fit neatly inside my pant's pocket. Strangely, I did not think I'd want for anything else. I had convinced myself I needed to go naked—or at least as naked as decency and the local judiciary allowed—so started southward without the small luxury that carrying a backpack, tent, or sleeping bag might afford, without even a change of clothes, toiletries (except for a toothbrush), or first aid kit. Acting on recondite orders only I could hear, I was determined to go it alone, powerless against my impulses, without any preconceived ideas or expectations, accompanied by the apparitions of my six lost friends whose faces appeared as sunlight playing over the trees, the chorus of their voices quavering in the leaves. I hadn't a clue what the future held for me, whether I would even be alive in a year, the victim of highwaymen or smugglers or mustachioed banditos, throat slit at the side of the road, or return home a changed man, altered, metamorphosized into a new creature. I didn't care. This wasn't about me, but something grander, more rarefied, unspeakable and mysterious.

The first day I walked all the way to Sea-Tac, twenty-five miles, and slept in the terminal stretched out like a malamute on a row of seats. There were others sleeping, scattered around the airport, waiting for late or early flights, and no one gave me a second thought. The next morning I discovered some good samaritan had placed an old army blanket over me with a note—keep it—and I took this for a sign. I was free to take with me anything that was found or given. On my way to look for food at one of the fast-food places, I rescued a discarded daypack from one of the trash bins. It had a broken strap, that was all, so I crammed the blanket into it and slung it over my right shoulder. At McDonalds I waited for a family with three small children to get up from their table. I guessed they'd leave behind an array of uneaten food, and they did. After they left, I sat and fed myself until I was quite full. And old man stirring packet after packet of sugar into a large styrofoam cup of coffee watched me with knowing bemusement. "Hey, kid?" he said.

"Yeah?"

"It's a shame, ain't it? How much folks waste."

"Not for me it isn't."

"You ever think of looking in dumpsters? Behind grocery stores? Seven-Elevens? Apartment buildings. It's a goldmine out back. You should see what people throw away."

"Thanks for the tip."

"Think nothing of it. The pleasure was mine. And enjoy the blanket."

Back on Pacific Highway South, I guessed the old man might have been an angel, not the heavenly kind with halo, harp, and wings, but the real kind, the flesh and blood kind, the kind that does good for no other reason than goodness itself, not for reward, not to earn brownie points with God, but to simply help people. I couldn't know it at the time but I would encounter dozens of such angels along the way, the beneficiary of dissimilar acts of kindness, generosity, charity, bigheartedness.

Overhead, the gray clouds were beginning to brew. And then the rains came, fast and sudden like water spilling from a fount, to wash away my sins. I cinched the jacket hood tight around my face then punched my hands into my pockets. The rain was cold, the wind biting. I considered putting my thumb out to hitchhike, but reconsidered. Was hitchhiking permitted? Was begging? If a ride was offered, that was one thing. But to solicit? Was it wrong to ask? Today it felt wrong, but tomorrow maybe it wouldn't. After all, it was a long way to Mexico. I'd never been to Mexico, California even. I'd been as far south as Eugene and already that was a world apart from Seattle. Warmer. Drier. A whole lot smaller. When a big rig passed it honked and threw a flat wave of water on me from the road. Had I been deliberately targeted by the driver? Splashed wet for somebody else's amusement? Is that how it was going to be? Not that I minded, not really, I merely wanted to fortify myself with all the necessary mental accoutrements before heading into the game. And was that all this was? A game? But everything's a game, a sport and a pastime. Another truck passed by and I got wetter still. I shook off the water and continued south.

From behind I heard a car horn and the splatter of tires. Now what? I turned slowly, not sure what to expect, ready to brace for the worst if necessary. It was an older Japanese import, faded yellow, consumed by scabs of rust and decals and radio station stickers. The driver cranked down the window, leant out, and offered a ride. "Not today, thanks," I refused, unable to look directly into the driver's hopeful face. "Suit yourself," he said with a resigned wave, easing back into traffic.

Two weeks later, in downtown Portland, I wanted to find the street where M was killed, guillotined in his Shelby by the hydraulic lift of a produce truck. My intent wasn't morbid or ghoulish, on the contrary, I wanted to sanctify the site, consecrate it, educe some profound sense of M's sudden passage into the shadows of eternity. I had to ask directions three times before finding the corner of 84^th and Sacramento streets, just two blocks from the gym where M had been training. M had dreams of becoming a professional fighter, a contender even, and the local boxing promoters saw something in him. He'd won his first three bouts, earned a little prize money, and dropped all of it into a shiny new Mustang. Just off Sacramento there was a small mom-and-pop grocery squeezed between the flophouses and warehouses, large nondescript buildings of no obvious industry. When I entered the market a delicate bell chimed overhead and the wizened woman behind the counter glanced up from her Kanji newspaper to eye me suspiciously over her glasses. In two weeks I had already found or been given a growing pantheon of items, including a backpack, sleeping bag, and pup tent, all riding my shoulders now like an idiot monkey. I maneuvered cautiously toward the cashier, counter careful not to knock anything off the shelves. The old woman took one final drag from her foul cigarette then crushed it out in an ashtray erupting with butts. "You not old enough to buy beer so don't even ask," the old woman scolded. "You damn college kids! You come down here think you can fool Mama but Mama too smart for you. Cigarettes you want, okay, but beer, no. Wine, no. Marlboros and Winstons, okay. Kents. Tareytons. But no Mickey's. No Oly. No Rainier."

I shook my head and held up both hands in an exiguous attempt to dampen the outburst. "I don't want buy anything," I explained. "I only want to ask a couple of questions. About an accident that happened."

"Accident?"

"A few months ago. Out front I think. A young man was killed. His car hit a truck. Where you working then? Do you know what happened? He was a friend of mine. In Seattle. I've come to pay my respects."

The old woman looked past me with unexpected sadness in her eyes. "I was working," a man's voice said.

I turned stiffly, still mindful of the backpack. The man was several years younger than the old woman, with a shock of black hair and large white teeth that didn't know whether to smile or frown. He wore an apron and was wiping his hands on a bar towel. "I'm the one who called the police. So terrible. You heard what happened?"

I nodded yes.

"It was a good thing Mama had a doctor's appointment that afternoon or I'm sure she'd have nightmares. So terrible."

The old woman said something that sounded like hageshii, then reached for a cigarette. She clawed at a book of matches with a trembling hand. Blue smoke contaminated the heavy air.

"You want to know what happened?" the man asked.

I shook my head no. "I'd only like to see where it happened."

"Fair enough," the man said moving toward the door. "Follow me."

Outside the man showed me a spot in the middle of the street where someone had painted an ideogram, about six inches high and wide.

"That's where it happened," the man said. "You'd never know it looking at it now, but at the time… Let's just leave it there."

"Who painted that symbol? You?"

The man shook his head no. "I think Mama might have, but if you ask her she'll deny it. She's got a reputation to uphold."

"What does it mean?"

The man stepped up to the sidewalk thinking about getting back to work. "Peace," he said, leaving me to his thoughts. "It means 'Peace'."

I waited for the man to enter the market before removing the battered copy of Four Quartets from my pocket. I opened to a dog-eared page and started reading:

I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love,
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.
Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:
So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.

When I finished I closed the book and tucked it into my pants. I knelt and touched the ideogram with my fingers then leaned forward to press my forehead against it. Because the backpack made me top-heavy I misjudged the distance to the road and tipped suddenly and banged my head and opened an old childhood wound. Droplets of blood dribbled a wet constellation across the white Kanji character, forming Cygnus maybe, Grus, or Sagitta. Suddenly my eyes burst with tears and my chest heaved. When I finally caught my breath I raised up to my knees and tore at my shirt and rolled in the middle of the street, distressed at the sorry state I imagined M's immortal soul must surely be in, paying God's terrible penalty for having died without the protection of Jesus.

After Portland, I allowed myself to finally hitchhike. Before Portland I was on a kind of pilgrimage, a sacred sojourn of sorts, but afterward I knew my 'commission' had somehow changed. I was fulfilling a different errand now and the faster I got there—wherever there was—the better, even though I still considered my journey little more than a tramp's tour. To my fortune, I discovered hitchhiking was legal on the interstate in Oregon. I could stand alongside the freeway and thumb rides without harassment or hassle. A mile outside of Beaverton I was picked up by Tesia, a feisty old gal with fiery orange hair driving a red Karmen Ghia. She ended up taking me all the way to Sacramento. There was barely enough room for both me and my backpack but after a bit of elaborate maneuvering we managed to wrangle it into the cramped space in back. She'd brought her dog along for company, an ornery Boston Terrier by the name of Bruno, who snored and farted nonstop from atop a befouled ottoman pillow behind my seat. Tesia paid no heed to Bruno's funky emissions either because she'd become accustomed to them over the miles or else her olfactory nerves had long been scorched and lost their effectiveness. I should have been so lucky.

Where winter had been bitter cold and the start of spring unusually wet, these last days unfolded in a kind of languid near-delirium and proved unseasonably mild. Overhead, a honey yellow sun glowed in palest sky while a long fleet of white clouds tacked the western horizon. The little red sports car hugged the highway alongside the Willamette River dividing the valley into two halves, a hundred miles of crop and pasture land as far as I could see, fields of corn, alfalfa, and ryegrass, cherry and hazelnut orchards, carrots and onions. I looked out the window at passing blurs of yellow and green, while Tesia chattered on endlessly, happy for human contact. Earlier she'd asked me who I was and where I was going and after explaining myself she began commenting but her comments were quickly sidetracked along the way.

"I usually don't pick up hitchhikers," she had said with a slight accent, "but you seemed to have an aura about you, like the Mark of Cain or something, except in reverse, at least I hope in reverse, I'm assuming so, I just knew it would've been wrong of me not to pick you up, to have left you stranded by the side of the road."

Sometimes when she spoke she gestured with her hands so the large silver bracelets she wore would slide up to reveal six small blots tattooed on the inside of her forearm, black-and-blue like a row of tiny bruises. I had read enough history to know about the Wannsee Conference and the Nazi's "Final Solution," the concentration camps at Auschwitz, Birkenau, and Monowitz, IG Farben and Zyklon B gas, the churning crematoria, so now regarded Tesia with a kind of preternatural awe and wonder. She represented to me much more than a survivor; she was a living monument to that dark time when God closed His eyes and Hell took the reigns. There were many questions I'd wanted to ask her—how did you get there, what was it like, how did you survive?—but I thought it best to wait her out, sit quietly and listen, to see if sometime during her loquacious chatter she'd offer me an opening. In the end I needn't have worried about finding a suitable segue.

After waxing poetic for hours on a variety of subjects—Nixon, Vietnam, hippies, spaceships to the moon—Tesia shifted to her childhood. "When I was a little girl," she began, "before the Great War, we lived in Kraków, in the Kazimierz District, in a lovely apartment near the Vistula river. After the war, Papa got a job with the interior department and we moved to Zakopane, to live in the shadow of the Tatra Mountains. Our new home was a lovely alpine chalet constructed entirely out of tree-trunks and a far cry from our urban lodging on Wàska Street. Because there was tobogganing, bobsled runs, and skiing six months out of the year, I became quite adept at winter sports and comfortable living amongst the ice and snow. I think this comfort saved my life.

"In 1929 I returned to Kraków to study physics at the Jagiellonian University and after earning my doctorate was kept on to teach. I was married by this time and had two small children attending elementary school. In 1939, two weeks before classes were to begin, nearly two million German troops invaded Poland and Kraków fell victim to the blitzkrieg. Professors at the University and other members of the Polish intelligentsia were outraged and urged insurgency against the occupation. In November the Nazis countered this rhetoric with 'Sonderaktion Krakau', a covert operation where the indignant professors were invited to meet with German representatives only to find themselves arrested by the Gestapo. I was among these 183 detained. We were taken by truck to the old prison on Montelupi street and held there for four weeks without charge. None of us were allowed to call our families or contact a lawyer. In December we were again transferred, this time by freight train to the Sachsenhausen camp north of Berlin. Our heads were shaved and we were given prison-striped uniforms crawling with lice. The conditions at Sachsenhausen were incredibly barbaric. There were daily beatings and executions, either by shooting, hanging, or torture. In the spring of 1940, after scientists and scholars from around the world protested our treatment, as well as several governments and the Catholic Church, a hundred of our professors—those beyond the age of forty—were released. Because I was twenty-nine I wasn't eligible, but sent instead to the women's camp at Ravensbrück, in East Germany. Ravensbrück, like Sachsenhausen, like Dachau, like Oświęcim—which I would learn later—bore the identical phrase posted above its iron gates: Arbeit Macht Frei—Work Makes You Free.

"While at Ravensbrück I witnessed an act so callous, so indifferent to human life, it has stayed with me to this day. Two young boys were playing outside a barracks when one of the boys threw a small rock toward his playmate. The rock was tossed wide and took a strange bounce and by chance hit the boot of the SS-Hauptsturmführer. As an example to the other children, the Hauptsturmführer dragged the boy to the front of the crowd, removed his sidearm, put it against the child's head, and without hesitation pulled the trigger. 'This is what happens to naughty children who throw stones,' he warned as he kneeled to wipe his boot.

"Within months of arriving at Ravensbrück, I was transferred in secret to the rocket facility at Peenemünde on the Baltic Coast. I'm unsure how they learned of my abilities as a physicist but I found myself assigned to Walter Dornberger who, with Wernher von Braun, was developing the A series of missiles. These would later become the V-1 'doodlebugs' and V-2 rockets fired on Britain by the thousands in '44 and '45.

"I was in Peenemünde for over a year, and while my work was for all purposes slave labor I was much better off had I remained in the camps. Because I resented cooperating with Dornberger I sought to subvert his efforts as often as I could, but I was eventually discovered and returned to Poland for re-education. I spent two weeks in the labor camp at Plaszow near Kraków before being transferred to Oświęcim fifty miles away. This would be the last time I would be transferred. Perhaps Oświęcim is not a name you easily recognize because it is a Polish name. The world knows Oświęcim by its more notorious German name after the Nazis teutonicized it and forever poisoned its once lovely memory. I was sent finally to Auschwitz."

Tesia paused. I was completely entranced, sitting motionless in the passenger seat, almost forgetting how to breathe. I'd been focusing so intently on Tesia's face, her eyes, her mouth as she talked and steered the road, watching her memories flash and flare like prairie lightning, the simple act of my respiration had been reduced to the barest mechanics, a spartan autonomics. According to her story she wasn't yet sixty but she looked years older. Her skin was papery and lusterless, the flesh of her face nearly translucent, withered and rawboned, her eyes sunken, her hair thin and unnaturally orange. And yet she exuded life, it roared through her withered veins and undulated from her frame like heat from a radiator. The closer she had come to death, walked among its rank and ruins, the more she was imbued with life, transfused and permeated with it, enkindled with vital flame.

"I arrived in Auschwitz in May 1942," Tesia began again, "and it was unexpectedly beautiful. The konwalia were in bloom, the yellow forsythia, pinwheel daisies. Tall green poplars lined the fence and walkways and effectively screened the horrors of that terrible place. Birds sang joyously concealed in the skyward branches and I remember Beethoven swelling from the Victrola in the Blochführer's office outside the main gate. Overhead the now familiar Arbeit Macht Frei had been wrought in a cambering scroll, but seeing that dashed the last of my remaining hopes. I knew the meaning of the camp's dark intent and what it most certainly entailed. While I'd been fortunate in the past, I had no reason to think I'd ever leave Auschwitz alive.

The Germans might have been monsters and assassins but this in no way derailed their organizational skills. There were three-hundred of us on the train from Kraków and in less than an hour we had been deloused, uniformed, tattooed, and processed into barracks, that is those of us who'd been handpicked to remain in Auschwitz. Half were not so fortunate, as if the notion of fortune could be applied here. They were sent on to Birkenau for immediate extermination and disposal.

"Years later, when I would learn the details of the Endlösung der Judenfrage—the 'Final Solution of the Jewish Question'—drafted by Eichmann and Heydrich in 1942, only then could I truly understand the horrors of Auschwitz. While I lived it, while I witnessed atrocities first hand, impromptu beatings and executions, the utter disregard for human life, I was not yet able to comprehend. When transcripts of the Wannsee Conference were made available during the Nuremberg trials I could finally see the underlying motives for the destruction of the Jews and finally it made sense. I recognized the twisted logic involved, the tangled discursivity. The Holocaust was fueled by a sustained suspicion, by envy and economic blame. During the Great War members of the International Zionist Movement worked with Britain to help bring the United States into the conflict in exchange for its promotion of a Palestinian homeland. Because the United States did enter the war in 1917, which lent to both a German defeat and subsequent sanctions by the British-controlled League of Nations, a belief arose amongst the German people that it was because of the Jews the war was lost and, more importantly, the German economy plummeted in the subalternate aftershock. During the ensuing depression, anti-Semitic sentiments were further spread by a belief that shrewd Jewish merchants were still getting rich while the rest of Germany was starving and losing their homes. In other words, the Jews were to blame for the state of the German economy and getting rid them would be good for business.

"The serpent of history is insidious, its venom subtle, as it squirms into our hearts. Poisoned and benumbed, it becomes easy for us to forget, to gloss over, to reimagine, to fantasize. We see what we want to see, hear what we want to hear, believe what we want to believe, because history—like politics, like religion, like faith—is both selfish and subjective. Like children at the candy barrel, we pick and choose confections that most ingratiate our finicky palates. We ignore what may be good for us, harder to consume, more difficult to swallow, and favor only treats that melt sweet upon the tongue. We are all babies wanting our own way, afraid to grow up, hiding under our blankets. Even I, a Jew, a scholar and scientist, who survived Auschwitz, who lost everything and everyone, my husband, children, parents, even I should have known better. But it wasn't until the Nuremberg Trials that I was finally able to curse Yahweh and dare Him to strike me dead. The time had come. Just as God forsook His people, it was time I forsook Him. There was so much evil in the world, suffering He could have prevented by just lifting His little finger, and I finally understood God's true nature. I cursed and called Him zajebany świnia, a fucking pig bastard, and dared Him to prove Himself to me once and for all, to strike me dead with a bolt of lightning. For three days I stood in the courtyard in the rain, without food or water, without sleep, pissing and shitting myself, cursing and daring God to show His hand. Just as nothing had come of my prayers in the camps so too did nothing come of my curse in the courtyard. I'm still here, still alive, still kicking, breathing, kvetching. From that moment God became dead to me. He should have died to the world because the horrors of the Holocaust was enough to disprove the fantasy of a personal and loving God. But, as I have said, the serpent of history is insidious and mankind is benumbed by selfishness and denial."

I didn't know what to say. I opened and closed my mouth but could not form any words.

"You are a Christian, yes?" Tesia asked.

"Yes."

"Then are you the type of Christian who believes people can only escape damnation by accepting Jesus Christ as their savior?"

"That's what I was taught, yes."

"But that's not what I have asked. Is this also what you believe?"

I considered my friend M who had died unsaved. I assumed M was in Hell for all eternity paying for sins he accrued during his short twenty-one years on earth. "It is a difficult teaching but, yes, that is what I also believe."

"So, what else do you believe? As a professed Christian? Is God sending me to Hell because I cursed Him or simply because I am a Jew? Because I've rejected the worship of Jesus as nothing more than a naïve cult? And not just me. What about those six million other Jews who died during the Holocaust? By your faith do you believe God has sent them also to Hell, to go from the frying pan and into the fire, for not believing in Jesus?"

"I…," I began, but didn't know how to continue.

"To put it bluntly, what exactly is the difference between Adolph Hitler's plan and God's plan? Don't both condone a kind of ethnic cleansing, torturous punishment, an utter lack of compassion and understanding? Don't both separate the wheat from the chafe. Divide the sheep from the goats? Don't both keep the ovens always hot and stoked and burning? It seems to me it is Hitler who made God's plan alive on earth."

"The difference is that God gave us a way out," I wailed, "through Jesus Christ. With Hitler there wasn't a way out. There wasn't a choice!"

Tesia laughed. "Don't you see? If God is a god of love you shouldn't have to make a choice. True love is unconditional. As a parent, there's nothing my children could have ever said or done that would make me stop loving them or want to teach them a lesson by constructing a bonfire then sentencing them to live inside it. Nothing! Even if they did things against me, cursed me, hurt me, even if they ended up murdering me, as I lay dying I would still love them with all my heart. Now I, a mere mortal, a woman, now I'm capable of conceiving this kind of love, but you're saying God is not. That God needs to be appeased, demands justice, seeks respect and adoration, and why? Because His ego is so fragile? What kind of god are you worshipping? That doesn't sound like any definition of a god to me? It sounds petty and human. More like a Hitler or Stalin. So if that's your idea of God than your God is too small, too picayune, all too human."

"I don't know what to say," I whispered. I was growing visibly upset.

"Okay, listen," Tesia said, seeing my discomfort. "Let me share with you a little secret. If you want to know the truth—whatever the truth—you must not hesitate. You must go straight into the lions' den, pry open their mouths, peer down their throats, then find the courage to stay put and listen to the silence. Truth lies not so much in what is said but in what is not said, in what you are not told, in those things that they—whoever they might be—don't want you to know, in what you yourself don't want you to know. Everyone's pretending, don't you see? Pretending not to know something. And it's because of this pretending that there are wars and terrorists and political parties and a thousand different religions all claiming to know the Will of God. Once you've understood the teachings of silence then truth itself cannot be far behind. Truth is the silence, don't you see? Anything that is spoken, written, read is not real at all. "

I frowned, confused, but nodded anyway.

"You are on this journey because you're searching for answers. Thankfully I no longer have the need to search. I found the courage to stand up to God and in reply I've been given the only answer that means anything. Silence! Even after all these years it's still as plain as the nose on my face."