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Over the past several...days, I have found myself becoming more and more obsessed with WWII, mainly with what when on in Germany and Poland, and the Nazis. I cant stop reading about it, or researching it, or thinking about it...its like a huge train wreck that, when you talk about how the train managed to fall over, people look at you funny and try to start an argument. Its strange, but I worry that my new subject of interest is... Dangerous. And that the more I know about the Holocaust the more evil I am, or the stranger I am, or even the more disgusting I become.

Which is very strange...because when I see other people that know a lot about the Holocaust I don’t feel that way when I look at them. My sister knows a lot about it, her girlfriend knows a lot about it, even my friend Kate knows a lot about it, and is currently in the same sort of fascination as I am. But for some reason...I’m different. I think its because I understand why they did it (Although I disagree with them on...well...everything.) But I get the thought process that the Nazi’s had. (This scares me. I fear that I am unconsciously brainwashing myself.)

I have a very hard time hating...people. What they do I hate, what they believe in I may hate, but it is very hard for me to hate actual people. Someone tried to rape me at one point of my life, and to this day when I look back on it, and when I see his face, I find myself not hating him. When I tell this to people the reaction is that they feel I am suppressing something....but I don’t feel suppressed at all. I have talked through it again and again and again, and I have come to terms with it, and am happy that I wasn’t actually raped, and in the end I don’t hate him. I may not want to talk about it much anymore, but it is only because I am sick of the subject. When I talk about it people still think I’m hurt, or that I’m upset about it...and I’m just not.

Again, this ties into what my large concern is at the moment....because I don’t hate any country or person that was involved in the war. I get chills and think ‘Oh how horrible’, and understand the horror and dehumanization of it all, but I don’t find myself angry. Scared, sad, passionate maybe, but not angry. I think I have only been angry when I read about Josef Mangele smashing the face of some pretty girl and calling her a whore, and in Mause when... Ach. I forget what happened, but it made me somewhat annoyed. (I think it might have been the father starving his son so he couldn’t get drafted...but I truly forget.)

In class we were each given a war that we were supposed to research and give a presentation on. Obviously, I volunteered for WWII. When I gave the presentation, at the end of it I felt overwhelmed, devastated, choked up, and strangely humble. (I of course cannot explain why though.)

On Monday, I started a Fast that I had planned to last a week. (Meaning, I didn’t eat any sort of solid food. Water, juices, tea, but no solids.) I did it to understand hunger, and what it was like to have something in front of my that I could not have, that I deserve. (I am a very...well..blessed girl. I tend to be somewhat of a cockeyed optimist, and am entertained by very strange...simple things.) On the first day, I was hungry and somewhat irritated. On the second day, I felt lightheaded, sick a little, I couldn’t concentrate on school work, and my emotions were very strange and kept changing. On the third day.... I got it. I was very fatigued, I felt like someone had sucked out all of the thoughts in my brain, I was completely free from any sort of intention. I couldn’t sit down and just do one simple thing. I kept getting distracted. When I got home, I think I had some sort of breakdown. I understood that when I was trying to achieve, I would never understand because of the kind of culture I lived in, the opportunities that I had for myself, and the overall time I lived in.

I don’t want to just know about the war...I want to understand it. I want to know what it was like to be on both ends of the rope. For three days I didn’t eat so that I would know what it was like to be hungry, like those poor souls in the camps. On the third day, I managed to sort of brush the feeling with my fingertips, and nothing in the world has scared me as bad as that thought did. Ot this day, people are starving to death on the streets. Every day on my way to school I see a man standing on the side of the rode with a baseball hat and cardboard sign, with ‘God bless’ written in shakey handwriting. When I see this man, I look away from him.

Is that what it was like then? And when I think about these things, I wonder if we are really so far from what we demonize. The SS officers when home and kissed their wives good night and tucked their children in, and even the Auschwitz two people managed to keep in contact and leave the hellish place alive.

...

Meyer Levin wrote, “The victims of the Nazi atrocities hid fragmentary records of their experience, they scratched it on walls, they died hoping the world would some day know not in statistics but in empathy. We are charged to listen.”

And yet I feel as though I am talking into a conversation that has ended years ago, and that I am asking ghosts questions, when all they want to do is finally be able to rest.