The Memories of Their Souls
A work of fiction.
Fearless reporting, a behind-the-curtains look at how journalism is made — and an unabashed point of view. Welcome to Chills.
I wrote this after visiting Auschwitz last October. It is a piece of fiction. With the complexity of being a non-religious Jew brought up among Holocaust survivors and as someone who is horrified by what Netanyahu is doing to the Palestinians, it seems a good time to share. Thanks, as always, for reading.
The tunnels ahead were cavernous — higher than the tallest giants in fairy tales — and there were more of them than I could count at the outset. Twisting throughout pine-laden mountains, they led one to the next in an echoey silence. Nobody had ever trod these paths, I thought with a shiver, no cars had ever sped through.
I made my way with caution from one gray, rocky tunnel to the next, all shaded by spiky evergreens and the angry iron of the sky, pregnant with a downpour yet to be birthed.
When I emerged from the labyrinth of tunnels, I looked out upon a landscape that reminded me of a Mayan ruin: mostly buried outlines of buildings spread across hills and dips, a grassy expanse tinged blue by the storm to come. It was twilight too early.
I cautiously made my way through an entrance buried in the field and down a granite set of stairs. They emptied into a space resembling an airplane hangar, only larger, more hectic and with no obvious exits. Thousands and thousands of people moved about; abandoned suitcases told of a kind of chaos. Men wore suits, some wore hats that had been in style in the early 20th century. Women wore their sturdiest dresses and least painful shoes. Canceling out any sartorial efforts were blinding interrogation lights caged by iron latticework that flooded the space.
Soldiers paraded about in stentorian uniforms conferring with one another, but we in the crowds didn’t think much of them either way. We only wanted to trade information — why were we here? What was this place? What will happen now? We knew full well that under the ever-strengthening fascist regime we were in no place good. We were [name your race/religion/ethnicity]. The good places for us had long since vanished.
Our urgent questions were quickly silenced as spotlights illuminated rows and rows of men and women wearing nooses. Surrounding them were a dozen as many prisoners. Thousands stretched out in every direction. These sections were spaced out evenly, in adherence with the fascist need for order. A man shouted an abrupt order in a language I didn’t understand, and the people with nooses dropped to their deaths. Within a speck of a second, the thousands of others in the areas between the hanging men and women erupted into violent flames — a conflagration. They were reduced to immediate ash.
Horror.
The hangings we could handle, if not understand. The burning made us want to die before the flames touched us too.
I felt a kind of time-shift as I stood frozen in place by the unthinkable scene I’d just witnessed. Wails rose up around me. My father, I realized, he was there with me too, and it was of the greatest importance to me that I not lose him in this hellscape. Neither in space nor in time and certainly not to the hands of death, despite that decision visibly slipping from our control. This was our new reality, one that was tempered by the generosity of our fellow prisoners, who offered up what others lacked: a sip of water in exchange for a prized bit of bread, a blanket in exchange for worn shoes.
Dozens of days went by, and I began to understand that many of my relatives were at the camp too. I slowly realized that we were in prisoners in a concentration camp — I knew because I’d just visited Auschwitz months before.
What year was it?
I dream too much; I am confused and stuck between sleepy hells and purgatories, the painful past and the present day. I deny the known and the unknown and the buried secrets that died with so many of my unidentified family members. It has only ever felt like there is no escape from this place I may or may not survive, except in my dreams. And I am most certainly dreaming. Aren’t I?
Right now, though, I feel fully, frighteningly, awake.
Why was I able to run and run and eventually find a doorway out toward the tunnels when I had previously been so utterly trapped with all the others? I had frantically traversed the camp and had found no exits. But here I was, stepping up onto the grassy plain, again at nightfall, walking confusedly toward a tourist parking lot. Because that’s what I’d been — a tourist visiting the decades-old memorial site of this concentration camp in 2024, not in the past. I’d been visiting as part of a commemoration of the prisoners and those who were murdered there. Right?
After exiting the tunnels, I spotted a woman who I easily identified as being from New Jersey by her accent when she called out: “Hon, you need a ride?”
I did. I very much needed a ride. A way out of this evil place filled with Boschian death.
“I’m trying to get home to New York City,” I told her. “Could you please drop me at any train station that might have a connection to New York?”
“Hop in,” she said.
Chatty, she started with a little banter.
“Were you here for the commemoration day back there?” she asked.
“I was held there when I was young, yes,” I said.
She glanced at me through the dashboard mirror with a mix of surprise and skepticism. I realized my answer had made no sense — it was coming out of the mouth of a woman in her 40s, in the year 2024. But I didn’t have the energy to explain that both things were somehow true at once: I had survived this camp, and I had also visited it in the present day, somehow at the same time. I didn’t have the words to explain. How could I have just slipped through time but still be the person in the compact car that was careening at juddering speeds through mountain paths toward home?
I doubted my new friend had suspended her disbelief. If anything, I think she chose to keep going only because I didn’t appear to be a threat.
I looked at her as she drove us up rocky hill after rocky hill in a car that seemed ill-prepared for such terrain and repeated: “I was a prisoner there. This visit was for me to pay homage to all the people I lost.”
Her red, layered hair whipped behind her as she turned to me. Yet she said nothing. Her eyes winced as she caught mine. I understood her confusion.
Before I left the camp to hitch a ride, I’d asked a faceless prisoner about my time-shifting paradox: “How am I supposed to go home now and leave you all here and just continue with my life?”
“You will always carry within you the memories of our souls,” she said. “You will never leave here. You have never left.”
Chills is self-funded, without ads. If you want to be a part of this effort, of revealing how difficult reporting is made — of sending me to places like Ukraine to report for you — I hope you will consider subscribing for $50/year or $7/month.
A wrenching story, maybe a work of fiction, but too real to many of us.
No. Not a work of fiction, I think.
A powerful reality instead. Even if the turbulence is in our own minds.