6 Jew

In grammar school, at Broad Street Elementary, it was my custom to leave home at least half an hour early in the morning to walk the two blocks to school in order to meet my friends at the playground and—on every day that weather permitted—to play softball.

In 1953 when I was ten years old and in fourth grade one day was different.

The ball diamond was empty.

Puzzled, I entered the old red brick school and walked to my classroom to investigate this mystery. There I found my good friends Jack, Duke, and Larry all huddled around a single desk and, curious, I hurried over to join them. For Show and Tell, my good friend Mike Overbey had brought to school A Pictorial History of World War Two. My circle of friends at his desk and I all looked over Mike's shoulder and stared at the hills of gray, emaciated corpses at the liberated death camps, their black mouths slack and agape, and at the bulldozers pushing piles of the dead into huge pits, their dead eyes staring into the void.

Eyes.

We were awestruck, stunned, speechless.

We stared too.

Eyes.

For this I had not been prepared. I was not ready. I could not stop looking. I could not not look. A child, I was resilient, as most children are, and from that hour forward my life as a child moved on, but this experience imprinted itself upon my memory and upon me and changed me in a way that I could not and did not realize for twenty years and more. It was only in my fifties and sixties, when upon request I tried to explain to others the origins of my lifelong interest in and commitment to nonviolence, that my memory of this incident arose from the depths of me and demanded to be the story first told and then—when I arrived at the moment I had looked over Mike's shoulder and had seen the horror in the big book open wide before him—at each and every telling hot tears would rush to my eyes and the words of my anecdote would snag like fish hooks in my throat and swell to a lump and for a few seconds I would cry. One image in particular has never stopped haunting me.

Eyes.

On the side of one of the hills of the dead, near the bottom where it had tumbled and slid and come finally to rest when it had been flung, lay the emaciated body of one man in particular, his arms and legs grotesquely twisted and bent in attitudes possible only in violence or death, all muscle absent, wasted, beneath the pale gray skin, his limbs no bigger round than axe handles and broomsticks and—most horrible and for me the most unforgettable of all—his hairless bony head turned and twisted at a broken angle on the skinny bone of his scrawny neck, his bony chin and jaw a-hanging, his black mouth open wide in an eternal and silent moan, scream, howl, and groan, and his open and enormous black and white dead eyes staring at me and meeting my own in this incomprehensible enormity of suffering, prejudice, hatred, cruelty, murder, genocide, war, death, and void. Though I tried and tried then, though I try and try and try now, I could not and I cannot find light in his dead eyes, I could not and cannot meet mind in his dead stare.

Nothing.

In my mind and memory at age ten his body and face displaced the tortured and murdered Jesus to whom my Lutheran family and Christian community had introduced me and for years, as sure as if I had worn his image around my neck on a chain of tooth and bone, this nameless dead man became my own private and personal crucifix.

Jew.