“Forever let this place be a cry of despair and a warning to humanity.”
–the words of a plaque placed at the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum
Earth, 2017
The earth groaned like a pregnant hyena on the edge of giving birth, heaving to and fro, with great driving winds, until the soil shook and great shards of earth fell, leaving the dead bodies fully exposed. There were thousands upon thousands, millions even, of skeletons and ash, sifting through the strangely phosphorous dirt of history. Eyes became fully formed and animate; tattooed wrists, once fodder for maggots, were miraculously whole; and arms and legs moved perpendicularly, great oceans of flesh come alive, cresting from the mass graves of Warsaw and Auschwitz as if from a sodden womb.
Denizens of the neighboring towns descended to seal off the graveyards, as their oral traditions spoke only of rising dead with detached mandibles and endless bloodthirst. But these dead were not hungry for flesh; they simply were, victims of ghettos, concentration camps, and gas chambers, suddenly animate. When the press got wind of this great awakening, or the Rav Hitnaarut, of the Shoah victims the world over, they speculated at what strange alchemy brought so particular a set of dead back to life. Ultimately, no one knew, and in the unknown was terror.
So as villagers and city dwellers alike sealed and walled off their towns, the media created safe houses for this newest wave of most unexpected immigrants. Doctors set up offices right by the mass graves, seeking to study and contain. Still, not all of the dead were so conveniently situated, and some broke through the stone foundations of warehouses in the middle of urban centers or tore their way down from musty residential attics where specks of their ashes scattered long ago. The victims, it seemed, were upon the living, and however much humanity might try to forget, there could be no divide. And it wasn’t just The Czech Republic, Germany, and Poland that bore the load—the Shoah dead arose in America, Mexico, even Africa and South America, wherever so much as an atom of their being had been spread by winds as strange and fickle as their deaths were.
#
The Old City of Homs, Syria
Homs was hardly a fit host for so many of the newly arisen. Great tidal waves of obliterated concrete swayed to and fro in cold winds of winter that years before swayed gently off of bustling urban monoliths now home to leveled ash, sandbags, and snipers. The air, once full of sweet sea birds’ songs, was now peppered by drones whose discordant, metallic hum ravished whatever was left of the natural world.
Still, it was to this city that one of the first reported Shoah dead hordes gravitated, by the thousands, despite repeated bombings, gas warfare, and showers of soot, ash, and concrete. Amazingly, whatever bodies the dead now occupied, gray yet translucent, yet fleshly still, showed no signs of sniper fire, no charring except for that of their original Nazi tormentors. They were unmistakably human, yet moving like a feasting herd of elephants through the feeble streets, their eerie necks pivoting and turning as their great bulging eyes sought out something or
someone—what, no one knew.
At last, they grabbed stone and mortar and started, inexplicably, rebuilding the fallen homes of long-dead residents. Reporters, understandably hesitant, filmed at a distance while dead men, women, and children formed great lines and, as if picking a brick from one wall of time and placing it in another, moved about old stones, replacing them with fresh ones. When a particularly ambitious Alwatan writer, Jubril Toma, approached, the sweat beading, then dripping, from his acrid skin, and asked the first question of the dead, “Who exactly are you and why are you here?”, the dead took no note of him, and kept to their construction.
“The living speak to the living,” Jubril wrote, in English, “and, apparently, the dead to the dead.”
He watched as the old city resurrected and as the Shoah dead took to the houses, leaving behind the blood and mortar of the streets.
#
Kigali, Rwanda
Another of the Shoah dead wandered into the city of Kigali, a hive of endless activity, glass towers, serpentine streets, and Keep Kigali Clean signs. The unearthly man set himself up in the middle of one of the busiest intersections, stopping traffic in midstream. The dead had an eerie quality of suspending the living space around them, almost like a tiny bubble of the universe, as their translucent gray skins warned the living to approach at their own peril. At first, cab and bus drivers honked voraciously with their horns at the ghostly man, but when the man took to weeping, almost as if keeping a vigil, the honking ceased.
The dead man was diminutive, with receding hair, beadle-like glasses, and cracks where there used to be wrinkles on his skin, presumably, where the Zyklon B of the gas showers had damaged his skin in his last moments of life. But the tears, crystal clear, looked as fresh as his eyes, filling in the cracks.
The lips moved, and the cameras from the local media were quick to be on him. Yet, the words he spoke seemed almost trapped dimensionally. No one understood; the dead had a language all their own.
As the video feed of the man sitting, like Rodin’s The Thinker, weeping and pondering, made it to social media sites, code crackers descended like wayward locusts on the sites, translating what the words might have meant.
“When will you learn?” the Shoah victim allegedly asked.
The man shook his head again and then may have added, “In Lask, I was a shop owner. I made little trinkets for kids. There was one girl who liked toy sawdust dolls with painted faces. I made her a tiny brown-haired doll with braids and blue pie eyes. I never saw her go. The Nazis rounded up all the neighborhood children separately, for the gas chambers. I saw the broken pie eyes of the doll, but never the eyes of the little girl. And now, here a particle of her ashes have blown over the decades and here there are the remains of so many more little girls killed because they were Tutsi and not Hutu. When will the ashes stop stirring? When will you learn that the earth’s belly is full?”
The man, lost to historical record, was believed to be Alon Aderman, per local municipal tax records. Yet, his entire family line was annihilated by the Nazis, so none of the townspeople were alive to verify. Instead, the dead man stopped traffic for a few hours before simply disappearing with a wind-swept particle of dust, leaving some to speculate that he was an omen.
Kigali denizens whispered of a second coming. Reporters called the man a sign that Rwanda’s own dead might also walk again, some devoid of head or limb, ambling about to terrify the living. Churches suddenly filled, and doors bolted and locked, as the world watched, aghast at a horror of its own creation.
#
New York City, USA
Sitting in his New York skyrise apartment was Elijah Owens, perhaps the least successful Jewish pulp writer of his generation. It had long been rumored that there was tenuous link, on some stunted branch of the family tree, to Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster. But the only history Elijah knew was The Great Unspoken History, the respectful silence for the dead that had been taught to him by his parents and grandparents, two Holocaust survivors.
Elijah had grown not-quite-famous writing of dragon lore and sword-wielding angels, but he always felt that his writing was no more than the aftershocks of a generation of annihilation. His dragons were avatars for the Hitleresque troops that whisked away his grandparents to the camps when they were still young, and his sword-wielding angels were a desperate cry for a faith his grandparents once held dear, then found harder and harder to believe in as they aged into their deaths.
Elijah turned away from writing of dragons when this revelation hit him, and took up reporting, as if nonfiction somehow held more integrity than the purity of imagination. He’d had an odd career, working as a construction worker and as a reporter, and while fiction was his first love, the images of the Shoah dead, newly risen, especially of Alon Aderman, conjured up a memory he took with him always.
When death visited, finally, the side of his grandmother, whisking her away by fits of cough and pneumonia, she called Elijah’s father over and took him by the hand.
“What is it, Mother?” his father asked.
“I want you to know that our family lived because another family died in our place.”
“What?” his father asked.
“When the Nazis seized Lask, a dollmaker, an angel, I’m convinced,” she said, almost in a whisper, “made dolls for every girl in town. What we didn’t know was that as he brought the girls in to give them dolls, he sketched their features.” At this moment Elijah’s grandmother cringed as she said, “He created life-sized dolls and planted them all over town. It bought families like mine time to escape. It brought the Nazis on his family sooner.”
Elijah’s father stood there, simply listening. Yet his face, with its vacuous eyes, and his head, with its ill-timed nods, spoke of disbelief.
“We were captured along the street, along with other girls. Not all made it, but some of us were herded into the wrong car because of all the commotion one dollmaker and his life-sized dolls created. I never saw him again. I never went back home. I couldn’t. But if I could, I would say thank you for saving our family. We survived because of a clerical error his sacrifice made possible.”
Elijah’s grandmother never did finish her last words; if she had, they might have gone something like, Find this man’s family. Say thank you and ask G-d’s blessing upon them. As it was, Elijah’s father, consumed with grief over his dead mother, did nothing but mourn.
Clerical Error, the working title of Elijah’s memoir of his family’s time in the Holocaust, and of the generations of trauma that followed, sat quietly upon his computer screen, the great work he could never finish. And yet, seeing a dollmaker from the same town as his grandmother sparked a sense of mission in the writer. Perhaps he could fulfill what she might have wished. Perhaps he could also interpret the dead and translate for them.
He packed up his laptop, his grandmother’s doll, and what he had of his memoir and headed to the one place he knew he might find an answer.
#
Valinsa, Poland
Valinsa was one of the tiny ghetto towns that never did come back after the war. Nearly seventy percent of its thriving mercantile class fell to the dank stench of tank tread and cattle car, to be breathed in as the smoke and disease promulgated by the fires of the Warsaw ghetto. Even after so many decades, not much had changed when the Shoah dead reformed from the ashes.
It was almost as if time reversed itself; ghostly ghetto Jews walked backwards in great strident winds, their bodies flying from the earth and air, reassembling, then marching backwards from Warsaw and into their homes, suitcases still in tow. Of great embarrassment was that the graves of so many of the anonymous dead were still being discovered, that there were so many bones still to unearth nearly a century later. Time truly had forgotten what generations of men had sworn never to forget. Yet the Shoah dead took no notice of broken ground or of broken promises. Families reunited, and the young grew up, day by day, in a time that seemed to dwell in the town and towns like it, isolated from our own cruel hours. Those around Valinsa stood speechless as they saw the doctors, teachers, and inventors that might have been, but were lost to the ashes of furnaces not fit to cremate cattle. Even the doctor who would’ve helped in the treatment and cure of AIDs, had he lived, was reduced to ash and smoke.
As striking as the images were, there were other ghosts that appeared besides the corporeal ghosts of the Shoah dead, eerily timeless. Giant, long-decimated factories formed on the horizon, acrid cattle cars, meandering camps, and lice-infested barracks. These were accompanied by putrefying town gallows, for those who dared to defy, and finally, in the distance, so high they might reach the clouds, were the ashes. The ashes were endless. They choked the air and consumed the clouds so plentifully they blocked the sky, and the sky adjacent to the sky, starting from Valinsa, then spreading until all the earth was a sunless mass lighted only by the fires of the concentration camp furnaces.
#
Circling Amersterdam, Netherlands While En Route to Kigali, Rwanda
Elijah never reached Kigali to say his thanks. He prayed to the ashes of the air that forced his plane into a holding pattern that grounded him on a connecting flight from Amsterdam to Kigali. He had at least made it halfway in his journey, and a certain calmness overtook him when he realized that in the home of the most famous Holocaust diarist in history, he might find momentary solace. Since his youngest days, he’d considered Anne Frank the Jew he admired the most, the writer he’d pattern himself after more than any other had he been able. But his words never matched hers, and so he avoided typing more of Clerical Error and instead examined the skies from his coach window seat.
The ashes truly were swirling everywhere, but they were not only ashes, but ghostly forms, particularly of babies, that caused most in the airplane to shriek. The ashes buffeted the
plane as they did the apartments in the distance, but curiously, no matter how bad travel conditions were, the Internet and the media worked without delay. If anything, the connections for cell phones, ISPs, and broadband users were remarkably acute. And so Elijah adjusted the monitor on the seat in front of him to call up the news. There, he saw emergency pictures of Kigali, among other places throughout Rwanda.
“The dead,” Jubril Toma, the Syrian reporter, fresh on the scene, said, “have now come out of the graves of Rwanda. Entire families of beheaded dead now walk as they once were, miraculously whole and glowing in God’s light. They’re on their way somewhere. The dead are up and marching.”
The Rwandans, Hutu killers among them, stood, staring from their homes as they once had when the killing gangs took to the streets, lists in hand. This time the hordes of the newly risen were the righteous, victims all, walking back to homes that had been desecrated during the decades of abuse Rwanda had seen.
Some of the living threw up; others fainted; most simply stood aside, lining the streets as if this were one giant parade of the dead.
Next to Jubril Toma stood a translator who offered words of conciliation, words of peace, but his words ricocheted off of the dead who marched to the churches. The dead opened up the doors until the living poured out and the bells of Rwanda signaled their presence. Then the dead kept marching—to where, no one knew.
#
Miami, Florida, Havana, Cuba and Tijuana, Mexico, simultaneously
Perhaps the climatic event in North America was when the Shoah dead did not march, but sailed, to the New World aboard a transparent St. Louis. Suddenly, the ghost ship chalk full of Jewish emigrants from Hamburg, Germany, arrived again, nearly a century later, on Cuban waters, sailing so close by Miami that residents could just make out the ship’s gossamer lights. Aboard were over two-hundred passengers, not a full ship’s complement, but still with heads shaved, still with decomposing white-pinned uniforms, still crying out for help from Cuba or America that was never to come.
Cuban fishing ships rerouted, but needlessly so. As soon as the massive hull breached the briny waters, the ship disappeared from the coasts of Cuba and Florida and was immediately sighted right along the Mexican border just outside of Tijuana. The bustling sandy streets of liquor, luchadores, bars, and brothels made for an unexpected stop along the way of the march of the dead.
Still, the Shoah dead disembarked the St. Louis and headed right towards the border. Cartel drug lords sent their soldiers after them, but the Shoah dead did not respond to the arbitrary rattle of gunfire. Instead, they marched on, right up towards Trump’s newly funded wall. As mounting security, in the form of guards, guns, and police dogs, watched the entry point, the Shoah dead gathered tiny pockets of emigrants to them—the poor, the hungry, and the unclean. Together, they marched with these immigrants right up to the passport check points. The border patrols phoned Washington for answers, but Washington was already in crisis mode, talking, endlessly talking, with other world leaders about the emigration of the dead.
“Washington reports that the U.S. cannot possibly accommodate the arrival of so many
new immigrants,” one CNN anchor reported.
The border patrol was asked to stand guard.
One line of officers formed, backed up by the National Guard, while another line of the newly arisen Shoah victims and their Mexican emigrants formed. For several moments, neither line budged.
And then, just as suddenly as the dead came from their graves, a new line, of murdered Native Californians, some raped by long-dead Spaniards, and of African American slaves, some who fought extradition to Southern slave states, formed. These newly undead ushered the Mexican immigrants on to American soil as the Shoah stood in their lines.
The border patrollers fired warning shots, but no shots penetrated the skins of the living or of the dead. Instead, the Native Californians and former slaves joined the ranks of the Shoah dead, holding steady in a march right along the border that the living could neither understand nor control.
#
Amsterdam, Netherlands
There was a pooling of the dead in Amsterdam, and a rumor that Jubril Toma had tried to secure a flight but was just as detained in Kigali as Elijah was in Amsterdam.
Elijah took to Twitter, tweeting: “Want to trade spots?” to Jubril, who immediately tweeted from his plane that he understood the truth of it all after seeing the eyes of the dead. The men exchanged numbers and moments later spoke. Elijah wasted no time in telling his family’s triumphant and tragic tale.
“You’ll never make it here,” Jubril said, in polished English, “and I suppose I’ll never
make it there. Text me a picture of the doll once you’re done. I’ll see if I can produce the picture if any of the Shoah dead return to Kigali.”
“They’re gone?” Elijah asked. His tone hardly concealed a deeply rooted despair.
“They’re massing, forming lines in different parts of the world,” Jibril said. “They’re getting more and more dead together to send a message to the living.”
Elijah shook his head. “What triggered all of this?”
“No one knows,” Jubril said. “Some say that we broke our vow never to forget. Others say that it’s the second coming. All I know is that something big is about to happen.”
“You don’t think—”
“Wherever the ashes fly, so go the dead. The closer we get to the camps, the more ashes we get, the more dead. Something’s going to happen where you are. You must record it for me.”
Elijah shook his head. “It’s too much. Their story is too large for me, for any reporter. No news channel, no movie can possibly tell it all.”
Jubril shook his own head. “I know how you feel. My own grandfather died in Jasenovac. He was a Muslim Bosnian who was accused of speaking out against Hitler and of sheltering Jews. For him, I must write. From what you tell me of your grandmother, you must write too.”
“I don’t know if I can. It’s so—immense.”
“Remember what happened to them when no one spoke up?”
Elijah nodded.
“And do you remember what we promised?”
Elijah sighed. “Never forget. Never again.”
“That’s how we lied,” Jubril said. “Now, you must play the prophet. You must show them that we understand. Whether it’s a world leader or one man and a doll doesn’t matter. To the dead, we are all human.”
“But we can’t even speak to them.”
“The dead look into the heart of all things. So far, the dead have spoken to the dead and the living to the living because neither understands the other side. You or I or someone—all of us, if possible—must show them that we understand that we can never understand. That we can only grow up and honor our word: never again. It’s either that or the violence and death of this world consumes us and we all die. That is why I think the dead come now. To tell us how close we may be to suffering their fates.”
Elijah hung up. A message came on that the plane was disembarking, that there would be no flight out of Amsterdam today. As he grabbed his doll and his luggage, Elijah thought of Jubril’s words. Though tired and hungry, he did not head to a hotel or look to book a later flight. Instead, like the dead, he took to marching, walking until he could see the cool gray of their eyes.
#
Choeung Ek, Cambodia
The dead marching from the monument of Choeung Ek to reclaim their skulls and reassemble their bodies caused not shortage of panic, however expected it was. There had been similar marches in Ankara among the Armenian dead, among the Sudanese dead of Darfur, and among the dead of countless countries both present and past. The governments of the various nations gave out messages to the living via their news feeds and Twitter, often along the lines of:
1. Do not approach the dead. Do not antagonize them. Do not call out to them. You can
not speak their language.
2. Keep to your house. The dead so far have only taken over the villages and houses of the dead.
3. Ration your supplies. We cannot say how long the dead will be among us.
The advice was useless and as such was ignored. Scores of family members from those lost in the Killing Fields lined the streets, hoping to get a glimpse of a fallen son or daughter, of a fallen father, mother, or grandmother. Through the fallen Palmyra palms and cinnamon trees of the vanishing foothill forests the dead marched, some with their bleached skulls at their sides, taking no note of the living or of their cries.
The Cambodian dead, marching through street, thoroughfare, and jungle, kept to themselves, walking in and through towns on their way to the sea.
#
Amsterdam, Netherlands, and the World Over
Before Elijah reached the dead, they reached him.
The Shoah dead, the Rwandan dead, even the Cambodian dead held hands in a solidarity stretching past all the borders and walls, bridging the concentrations camps and killing fields with the bloody harvests of today. They stood blocking freeways and office buildings, and even
ocean waters with ghostly boat loads of victims turned back from fruitless journeys. Media helicopters hovered over them, as they stood by the ghostly black chimneys of World War 2, the burned and dilapidated Rwandan houses still stained with blood, and the mounds upon mounds of skulls from the fields of Pol Pot.
For a long while, the living said nothing, as deaf as their fathers and father’s fathers were to the inhumanity of the living.
Finally, from amidst the throng of reporters, Elijah Owens stepped forward and said, “Please forgive us for forgetting.” He held up the doll, its face half smashed by Nazi boots, and added: “Please, Alon, wherever you are, know that because of you, some lived who would have died. I lived, who never would have been born if not for you. Please accept our humble thanks.”
The dead looked with long, steady eyes upon Elijah and upon the living cowering in the distance behind him. From the gathering emerged, with sister, boyfriend, and mother, the tiniest of girls, her once chestnut hair, shoulder-length and pretty, shaved, her once porcelain skin now dotted with the purple-red rash of scabies. Her eyes had great big black circles that looked almost otherworldly. Her frame, decimated from gathering stones in the camps, was little more than a skeleton. Yet, when reporters speculated who this girl might be, she never answered to any name. She merely held up, tattooed on her thin wrist, the number, slightly blurred in its ghostly hue, that read something like “A-25159.”
Immediately, the crowd spoke her words for her: “In spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart. I simply can’t build up my hopes on a foundation consisting of confusion, misery, and death. I see the world gradually being turned into a wilderness, I hear the ever-approaching thunder, which will destroy us too, I can feel the sufferings of millions and yet, if I look up into the heavens, I think that it will all come right, that this cruelty too will end, and that peace and tranquility will return again.”
The ghost of the girl smiled at the words, as best as the dead are able, and said to Elijah: “Alon says he knows. He says to keep the doll. Give it to another needy little girl and your family’s debt will be repaid.”
After the girl, one of so many remarkable souls, joined the millions of her brothers and sisters of the Shoah, the dead became more transparent, less visible. Some flew away with the dust; others remained but simply walked away, past a horizon, a mountain, a sky, to hills that only they could see.
At that same moment, a number of the living turned over their wrists to see ghostly tattoos upon them, and a new mystery was born.
#
The Old City of Homs, Syria
In perhaps the most significant words he ever typed for Clerical Error, Elijah wrote of his encounter with the dead, of the words of the girl, and of the tattoos.
“The dead are with us always,” he wrote. “They allowed us to see them for a brief while to make their point. But they are in every atom of the earth from now until the end of time. I think I know why it is I wear this tattoo. Why it is that so many do. We owe a debt to them, to their sacrifice. They have vanished—for now—because they leave life to us. They would no more take the life of a small girl than they would wish that their lives were taken from them. That is why I am off to Homs to make good on a promise, one neither my grandmother nor I
intend to break. That is why the march of the dead has become a march of the living.”
Elijah was among the first of the tattooed living to head past the ash and sandbags, to the rebuilt houses and urban tenements the Shoah dead had created for him. There, the only dead still among them, the chemically decimated Syrian girls, boys, fathers, and mothers, looked upon his face as he put the finishing touches on the rebuilt homes. For once, there were no drones, no airplanes, no bombs, no soldiers, no guerrillas—just a town on the open land in the open sun.
While the local living were afraid to contact the new arisen children, Elijah stepped forward. He found one girl, the sickest and poorest of the bunch, and handed her an old-fashioned doll that he had repaired and made new. The girl, her black hair bobbing up and down in unfeigned joy, received the doll the way a child might, with imagination and wonder.
She smiled; Elijah smiled, and both wondered why it wasn’t always this way, why there were ever cattle cars or chemical attacks or any place in the world that was not revered as someone’s home.
“I’m wondering,” Elijah asked, “can I tell your story?”
The girl looked at her mother; the mother looked at Elijah. Neither spoke English.
To this, Elijah nodded. “Let’s start over.”
And so, Elijah began communicating the way the first humans ever did, with a series of signs and gestures that both respected, that both understood.
And behind him, those with tattoos on their skin came marching, to Syria, to Sudan, to Kigali, all over. In their stride was something of a promise, not unlike the one Elijah made to this little girl—to always remember, to never forget.