I remain convinced that in the life just before this one, I was a Jew in a concentration camp, and even a kapo, the head of a work crew in a concentration camp.  Kapos were universally despised for their collaboration with the Nazis.  Over the course of many years, I found out, bit by bit, how a Jew, any Jew, could become one of these evil creatures.  Here are the details of my “conversion”:

I am locked into a smallish room with only me, my wife and my daughter in the room.
The two of them are bound to one of the walls with their hands behind their backs.
They are in great pain.
My daughter is making such sounds that I think “I didn’t know a human being could make that sort of sound.”

I remember: my wife is on the left, my daughter on the right.
From the sounds they are making, I know they are both in indescribable agony.
And whatever is causing them pain—burning? crushing? electrical current?—is hidden behind them and is inaccessible to me.

I cannot free either of them.
And I cannot stop whatever is putting them in agony.
I love them.

It is the most fiendish torture ever devised.
I am free to act, yet I am helpless.
To save them—I must kill them.

I alone can put them out of  their misery.
I love them so much.
I don’t remember how long this goes on, me standing there, they in pain.
Yet somehow I’m in more pain than they are.

I don’t remember which one I strangle first.

= = = = = = = =

I am haunted to this day by what I did.

I dimly remember the love in my wife’s eyes when her turn comes.
I sense now that it is her love that has kept me going my whole life.
It has kept me going through all my disappointments and betrayals.
And her love still keeps me going.

I’m so crazy with the pain of that event that I barely wish to live day-to-day.
I know she forgives me; how could she not?
I only wish to join her.
I know that my wife will be the first one I see when I die.
Perhaps I’ll even see my wife before I see That One, the one who opened my conscience.
And I sense somehow from “backstage” that there’s a small “audience” of spirits who love me, patiently waiting for me to come “out of the wings and on to the stage.”
I can die at any time and they’ll all be there, waiting for me.

God is good.
I love God.

.                        Lou Gottlieb                             2/17/2022