The Pearls

Rough draft of a passage from When The Leaves Begin To Change, my Holocaust novel I am working on slowly...

“We must not remember them for the way they died. Naked and broken, filled with lice and poverty and emptiness, their faces hollowed out and their eyes gazing into an empty world they can no longer see.”

My father and I sat on the hard splintered planks of our wooden bunk, which we now shared with eight other people. We looked at the wise old man as he spoke, the wrinkled eyes, his slightly gapped teeth, wanting intensely to believe it was true.

“That is not who they were,” he continued, turning his head to look among the different groups of people in the room as he spoke. I followed his gaze and saw a young girl with dark chestnut eyes, maybe eight years old. He was staring at her intently, almost piercing straight through her. 

Her mother was shot this morning as we all watched, while she was holding the little girl in her arms. The SS officer said that she had looked him in the eye. The little girl held her mother, a young brunette woman in her early thirties, while the crimson blood flowed over her like a blanket. After an hour like this, when the brooding black flies began to swarm, Jackson had finally pulled her off, screaming.

The old man held her attention from across the room, as the tears came freely and she hiccupped a few times. “Close your eyes,” he whispered, so quietly commanding that we all did so without asking why . “See the ones you have lost. Hold them in your mind.” I thought of Elizabeth, and the way her body fell after three days of frostbite on the train. I could see the life leaving her soft green eyes, smell the urine as her body lost all control. I knew the others were seeing the same thing in their mind’s eye; I could hear their deep, uncontrollable, shaking sobs mixing with my own, creating a song of grief that words alone could not capture. The old man was quiet and I wondered what he was thinking, how this could help.

“Now,” he finally spoke, our eyes still closed, the mourning hanging thick in the air, a raincloud ready to burst open and drown us all at any moment. “Remember them at their best. See the snapshot in your mind, like a picture.” I thought of Elizabeth on her wedding day, all pearls and perfume and glamour. I remembered her smile beaming ear to ear, the tears of joy in her eyes as she said, “I do”, the way her groom had smiled as he wiped away his own. I heard others in the room laugh a little despite themselves, despite the thunder rumbling loudly inside all our spirits, no doubt remembering babies and weddings and first kisses and joy.

The old man glanced around, clasped his bruised, wrinkled hands together and said simply, “This is the picture you hold. This is the snapshot. Hold the life, not the death. This is what you remember.”

I squeezed my eyes shut tightly and breathed out for what felt like the first time. 

I took the snapshot. She was beautiful, almost glowing.

I remembered the pearls.