A Book with No Name

I don't remember the name of my book. Which I know is a rather strange thing to say about a book that made such an impact on my life. This one taught me a lot of lessons though, not all of them good ones. Not all of them about myself either.

It was the year we read the Diary of Anne Frank for class. It was 6th or 7th grade and I was a dragon of the library with a voracious appetite for books. Anne had me curious so I briefly halted my fascination with mythology and vampires and checked out a fiction book about the holocaust. At least I think it was fiction.

It went so much farther than Anne Frank did. This book talked about the conditions of the camps. How they made people line up for hours every day, no matter what the weather was like. How they made them stand there, even if they were in a freezing puddle. How they would yell at them and the words they would use. (This would get me in trouble later.)

The book also described a kind of brothel. How the heroine survived by 'choosing' her Nazi instead of standing there and letting the Nazi choose her. Her method worked until it didn't. A complaint from whoever they were with would send a woman either to the normal camp or to the gas chambers. She got lucky in that when she was complained about, she was rescued before they could kill her.

The women in the brothel had better food than the women in the other parts of the camp and were more likely to survive to be rescued later. But if they got sick or pregnant, they would be sent immediately to the gas chamber.

Why anyone would write this book as fiction, I don't know. Maybe it was cathartic. Or maybe it was to muddy the waters of what it was really like. My memories have become vague with time, but parts of the book stuck with me because I couldn't unread them.

I thought, even at the time, that it was fascinating they had it in the school library. It felt illicit. It's not that it went into any pornographic detail or anything, but it did talk of things that I knew some people would object to me seeing.

The trouble came when it was time for us to make a poster about the Diary of Anne Frank. I drew the camps. I drew the lines of people and the woman yelling at them. I drew it because it was horrible. I wanted people to know it was horrible. But I don't think my teacher or the principal understood my intent.

Thinking back on it now I can see how it must have looked to them. Oh my god, is this child a Nazi wannabe? Does she want to hurt Jews and say these things? They never asked me what I meant or why I drew it, they just told me I shouldn't have and threw my poster away.

That book changed how I viewed libraries and the adults around me. Because they didn't ask and maybe wouldn't have listened if they did. They just judged on the face value. Remembering that now that I'm an adult, sometimes helps me not do that same. Sometimes. I try.

I would not be surprised if that book remained in the library until the purge of today's politics. Maybe they figured out from my protests that it was there and removed it back then. Could be I only think they didn't listen.

Life is funny sometimes.