Monsters exist, but they are too few in number to be truly dangerous. More dangerous are the common men, the functionaries ready to believe and to act without asking questions.” ― Primo Levi
Dachau, May 1938
(Six months before The Night of Broken Glass)
Part I
The little girl overheard Mama tell Great Uncle Benjamin, “I feigned interest in marketplace pork.”
He answered, “You can’t fool Nazis. You should be true to yourself.”
The little girl was pecking the piano one key at a time, black and white, high and low tones. Uncle’s happy songs lay hidden inside the sounds like secret buried treasure, with a beauty that stretched from one side of the keyboard to the other, sweet sounds that rose and fell, music that told a story she wasn’t allowed to repeat, not even in whispers.
She wondered why the sons and daughters of Abraham and Jacob’s Traditions should anger anyone. The child searched and found only dissonance under her fingertips when she added more than one key. Uncle had promised to come at noon the next day and lead her small fingers across the scales, but it would take work, an attentive ear, and love. She would practice. And learn.
But dark filled the sky And Uncle never arrived.
Papa came home and said Uncle had been taken. Papa had missed capture by a shadow.
He’d found a way to leave Munich with her and her mother, a passageway as narrow as the eye of a needle used for silk, dangerous, yet their only hope.
And the little girl followed, believing that Uncle would come someday and lead her hands into music because she could work, and listen, and love as well as anyone.
Part II
Benjamin felt the heat of the men next to him, a herd, silenced by fear so strong it had an odor, gut-wrenching and rancid.
One of the guards outside the gate glanced at Benjamin and then looked down. The guard’s face looked familiar.
Benjamin and the young guard stood beside a message bent into the metal: Arbeit Macht Frei, Work sets you free.
The guard had been his student, a youth who expected a golden sound from a flip of the wrist and a closed ear.
Benjamin’s six-year-old niece tried harder.
He imagined her waiting for him as he dropped his shoes next to the others, outside the sign marked brausebad, the bathhouse, the place of cleansing, perhaps the beginning, perhaps the end, but never destruction.
He prayed that even if he couldn’t return, and his niece didn’t learn his song, she would create her own.
previously published
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