So Little Time

Szadek Ghetto, 1940

Empty schnapps bottles were overrated, and not very useful either.

But it would work for now.

Stick the bottle in, dig, clear the dirt, breathe.

What was it worth? Digging out pieces of his town, feeling much like the devil who was digging into the innards of his soul. 

His soul. 

Long unlodged from the socket it had once been carefully placed in, it crashed around his skeletal frame like some freak bumper cars tournament.

“Soul” The loftiness of the words mocked him - and he froze - wondering if he still had one at all.

But he must.

He felt it - it was there - keeping him warm at night when he snuggled next to the worms lining the walls of the room.

Room?

Ha! It was as big as his bathroom used to be, and was sleeping forty grown men….but at least from here on they would only be shrinking.

They were barely teetering on this sloping brutalized coil, carved out somewhere in a sub-orb of the old world. The old world - where a life was worth more than the potato peels he gathered in the black air which was no longer called ‘night’.

They just called it ‘the darker night’. Now there were only nights. Day? What was that? Maybe it was what they would find outside the ghetto. When he finished digging. 

Dig, clear, breathe.

-  -  -  - -

“How much longer?”

“Give it another week. It’s taking - “

“It’ll be too late, I heard they will - “

“Shtill! Someone will hear - “

“But we need it faster. Three days. By Thursday we’ll be transferred.”

“Transferred - “

“To the camps.”

 -  -  -  -  -  

His feet knew how to move soundlessly. That was how the game worked. Soundlessly.

There was something invigorating about a silent match-off with the devil. Breathless, hopeless, soundless, but winning. But - 

Camps.

The word spilled into his gut burning up in the acid left from the linings of his empty stomach. 

That wasn’t a silent game.

The camps were a noisy parade of demoralizing labor. Even sheep to slaughter weren’t asked to shoot their own babies. Echoes of the death-seeking angel boomerang through the stale air. Stale with death. With - 

Gas.

In the camps, the oppressors were the silent ones.

Seeping into innocent blood until a pile of souls were released, escaping to the heavens.

He would have it ready by Thursday.

 -  -  -  -  -  

“Is it rea - ?”

“Tomorrow. Same time.”

“How many come?”

“I don’t kill. Whoever can do it.”

“But what if they - “

“They catch us? So we’ll die. But maybe we’ll live.”

“I’m not ready to go”

“No one is”

“Mama, she can’t - “

“Shoin! Farshteis?”

“We need a name. What will we call it? ”

“The Escape. The Great Escape”

 -  -  -  -  -  

It took a long time for tomorrow to become today, but finally, it acknowledged the thirty brave men who waited.

And waited.

They would wait for the right time. Timing was key. 

Soon it was time, as the silence zapped at every taut brain cell in his mind.

“Shoin!”

They slipped in - one at a time - shtill - go! 

He would be last.

What was the rush?

Where was he running?

He would wait.

He was only 21 and he had seen enough. He can wait to see more.

His little legs barely hitting the stone-lined ground, he ran. Mama! A note! From Rebbi! Mama’s heart fills with a potpourri of glitter confetti as she reads. “Aron is blossoming like a cedar tree. He is diligent in his studies, and I see a great man emerging from the young boy you have raised. May you continue to see only joy from him.”

It was a festive night, that night. Papa lifted him on his shoulders and laughed a hearty laugh, and the whole house vibrated with the pride of holding such a boy inside its walls.

Mama brought out a gooey cake filled with chocolate cream and lemon-flavored vanilla pudding. He can taste it now - the tears of happiness falling down Mama’s cheeks into his mouth. It was the best thing he had tasted all night that night.

Bye Mama, he whispers.

If you think he is holding back tears you don't understand.

Tears are created by sad people.

In the ghetto, no one was sad.

People get sad when their hearts are broken.

They no longer had hearts.

Only souls.

And souls don’t cry.

He pushed another man inside, a soul slipping through his hands, into what might be the day seeped into the covers of night. 

There would be another man waiting there. Maybe he would bring them across the borders of humanity. Shuffle them over to mortal soils.

Maybe.

You never knew who was what. He might have been a hoax who informed.

You never knew but you listened to your soul.

It was all he had left.

The Great Escape. 

Ha!

To think they were escaping.

But no matter how far they’d land, they would never escape the eyes.

They came in so many forms.

Haunted pupils of children shaking in terror. He could no longer see the white of Sara’s eyes and she was only 8 years old. Haunted eyes.

Pleading eyes, sometimes closing mid-plea. The pleading eyes always belonged to the skull of a hungry skeletal being. Someone’s brother. Or worse yet, a helpless mother. But of course, the fathers were the worst. Once able-bodied men, now broken faceless - almost two-dimensional. Their eyes pinballed through his veins; the aches landing in places he didn’t know ‘aches’ can reach.

Now he knows they can reach everywhere.

It was good none of them were really here.

The Great Escape.

The eyes.

The terror.

He wasn’t really there.

No one was.

They had escaped long ago.

A reserve of strength was buried somewhere between where a heart beats and a breath rises into one's throat.

Somewhere there they found the ability to rise above the earthly existence around them. 

To see a piece of bread as a heavenly gift that can be used to satisfy the scorching gorge of emptiness in their perishable belly, or use it to nourish another soul, give hope.

Eventually, they shifted focus. They didn’t even see the hatred in their oppressors' eyes...

All they saw were opportunities. Lessons. Ways to make the horrors a little less gut-wrenching for the soul sitting next to them.

Their bodies were abused, begging for relief, but they didn’t feel a thing.

His turn.

His brother grins - a rare moment of hope - an incongruent symbol of life invading a graveyard of tears.

He breathed the foul air into his flaring nose one last time and felt the familiar wet mud caressing his fingers. The wind blew a mouthful over the starless night - and then he saw it.

A star? There were never stars.

They had long escaped, along with the Brenner family who had been killed that first ugly night.

But there it was - a star!

Cosmic dust brushed against his cheek and he knew it was going to be okay.

He stuck his deformed fingers (from all the digging, but it was worth it) into the tunnel - 

“Halt!”

Maybe he could still run - try to make it - if he moves quickly -

But the other men. They were safe...they would escape.

He was destined to be a great man. He knew it. Changing lives, raising children, teaching them the life he knew and loved. He was supposed to live, to make Papa and Mama proud. They were relying on him...

So many thoughts to sift through. So little time.

When there isn’t time to think, you do what you were brought up to do; what is pumping in your bloody veins.

When there is no time, you show who you really are, deep down inside. 

He halted.

The star tilted her fingers, wrapping them over his skull in joyful mourning.

A shot rang out.

No one would know of the Great Escape made by a lone man. 

A hero with a soul.

And our star fades into oblivion.

There is no one left to shine for tonight.