Death Dreams

When I was a wee girl, I was the last in a blended family of six kids, the youngest by twelve years. I was born in 1938, a time of infamy. Hitler was rattling sabers in Europe, about to invade Poland, and everyone who paid attention knew the world was in for a major bloodbath.

As the youngest, I was mostly ignored and left to my own devices. It was inconvenient to send me to school because it interfered with the parents’ desire to party and travel. I didn’t to go to school until the 4th grade, when the truant officer finally put his foot down.

Spending most of their time alone was not the best for a small two-legged critter. There is a limit to the number of blanket caves under the grand piano, carton airplanes and imaginary friends one can have or build. I made everyone read to me while I watched the page and learned the alphabet. By the time I was five I could read newspapers, magazines and simple books. It must never have occurred to anyone what I was reading and seeing because I had free reign.

When at home, I was on my own with no one to make me toe the line. As long as I was quiet, I was ignored. TV, the Internet, tablets and video games were in the far distant future. My major sources of entertainment, in addition to the home library of current novels, were the New York Times, The Mamaroneck Times and Life Magazine. Life was my favorite because of the photos. Every week I read it cover to cover. From 1942 to 1945 this four-to seven-year-old child looked at photographs of war-torn cities, total destruction of civilization, and the endless piles of cadavers and skeletons from the concentration camps, the vilest of the vile history of mankind. My nights were filled with nightmares. The SS was coming for us. We were going to die horribly in camps when Hitler invaded the United States one of those long lightless nights when air raid sirens plagued the air. Because? . . . we too were Jews.

It was a long time ago, almost eighty years, but those images never disappeared, still imprinted on my brain. I can’t remember who I went to prom with, but I can bring up the heap of naked bones the soldiers found when entering the camps. Forever captured by the relentless cameras of Life Magazine and the other journalists who lost their meals and hearts on entering but persevered to be witnesses to history. The ones whose eyes saw what the Holocaust deniers of today try to obliviate as they spew their false narratives. Those people, Jews, the Roma, people of color, homosexuals, intellectuals, all deserve to be remembered, and I still remember them vividly.

But that was then. Somewhere along the way the nightmare disappeared, probably about the time I was in high school with other and better things to occupy my mind. Then real life came along, work, family, kids, and took my mind to other places.

Until now. I’m old, retired, again have time on my hands. Television has replaced Life Magazine and the images of war, cadavers, thoughtless murder of multitudes again floats in front of my eyes, bringing back the desecration I remembered from my childhood. I wake in the middle of the night once again, those images regaling me with horrific death and I have trouble sorting then from now. But maybe it is all the same. As a species, humanity is destined to repeat its own demise time after time. I have now understood the real dream is only the short calm of peace we manage to enjoy in between the constant chaos and death.