The Alphabet of Inadequate Language
A is for Auschwitz, where more than a million were gassed and then burned into ash. The word that could speak for everything that follows. A is for ARBEIT MACHT FREI, the words on the gates of Auschwitz. WORK MAKES YOU FREE. Except that the phrase is untranslatable, like so much else. A is for Atrocity. A is for Armenian Genocide, words that are illegal to say aloud in Turkey. A is for Atom bomb. B is for Buchenwald, where my father and my uncle were imprisoned yet did not die. B is for Bergen-Belsen, where Anne Frank did die. B is for Belzec, where half a million were murdered. B is for Babyn Yar, the ravine and largest-known mass grave. B is for Birkenau, the “sister” to Auschwitz. C is for Concentration Camp. C is for Crematoria. C is for Collaboration. C is for Communism. C is for Churchill. C is for Cambodia. C is for Children. One and a half million murdered children. Also the Hidden Children, and the Child Survivors. D is for Dictator. D is for Dachau. D is for Death Camp. D is for Death’s Head Insignia. D is for Deutschland. D is for Denial.
E is for Eichmann. E is for Extermination. E is for Einsatzgruppen, mobile killing squads. E is for Ethnic Cleansing. E is for Euphemism. F is for Final Solution. F is for Führer. F is for Fatherland. F is for Forgetting, which both is and is not the opposite of Remembering. G is for Gestapo. G is for Gas Chamber. G is for Goering. G is for Germany. G is for Ghetto. G is for Genocide. H is for Holocaust. H is for Hitler. H is for Himmler. H is for Höss. H is for Homosexual. H is for Hutu. H is for Hiroshima. I is for Identity Card. I is for Immigrant. I is for Ideology. I is for I Don’t Know How to Go On like This but I Cannot Stop Because the Words Keep Coming. J is for Jew. J is for Jude. J is for Jehovah’s Witnesses. J is for JEDEM DAS SEINE, words on the gate of Buchenwald. TO EACH HIS DUE. K is for Kristallnacht. K is for Khmer Rouge and for Killing Fields. K is for Konzentrationslager. L is for Lager. L is for Lynching. L is for Liquidation. As in, the liquidation of the Warsaw Ghetto and the Lodz Ghetto and the Vilna Ghetto, where my mother and her parents were forced to live before they escaped to a hiding place in the Polish countryside. M is for Mengele. M is for Mauthausen. M is for Maidanek. M is for Murder, Memory, Massacre, Motherland. N is for Nuclear Bomb and Neutron Bomb. N is for Nagasaki. N is for Neighbors, the ones who hid Jews and the ones who denounced Jews or denounced other neighbors for hiding Jews. N is for Nuremberg. The place of the trials. The place of a nearly impossible quest for justice. N is for Nazi. O is for Oven. O is for Other. P is for Pogrom. P is for Prisoner. P is for Parade. P is for Ponary, the forest near Vilna where 100,000 Jews were executed. P is for Poland, once home to more than 2 million Jews. P is for Perished. Q is for Quarantine. Q is for Questions That Have No Answer. R is for Reich. R is for Roma, whose numberless dead have never fully been mourned. R is for Rwanda. R is for Romania, the birthplace of my father’s father and the citizenship that saved my father’s life. R is for Relocation. R is for Refugee. R is for Roosevelt. S is for SS, for Stormtrooper. S is for Shoah. S is for Sachsenhausen and for Sobibor. S is for Stalin and for Synagogue and for Soap. S is for Sola, the ash-filled river at the edges of Auschwitz. S is for Sonderkommando, the special detail of prisoners forced to work in the gas chambers and crematoria. S is for Selektion. S is for Stolpersteine and for Secrets. S is for Silence. T is for Treblinka. T is for Theresienstadt. T is for Tattoo. T is for Twins, whom Mengele chose for special experiments. T is for the Thousand-Year Reich, for Terror, Trauma, Tenacity. T is for Tutsi. U is for Uprising. U is for Underground. U is for Über Alles. U is for U-boat. U is for Undesirable. U is for Understatement. V is for Vichy. V is for Victory. V is for Victim. V is for Vanquished. V is for Vietnam, the name of a country. V is for Veteran.
W is for Warsaw. W is for Wehrmacht. W is for War, and War, and War. X is for X. For everything that cannot be expressed in words, for each and every name of the dead that may have been forgotten. X is for Xenophobia, fear of the stranger, the Other. Y is for Yiddish, the almost-lost language. Y is for You, the one reading this alphabet and all the ones yet to be born. Z is for Zyklon B, the gas used to murder millions of men, women, and children in Auschwitz.
Now go back to the beginning. See under: A.
Survivor Cafe by Elizabeth Rosner
