7, 23, 37
For our prompt yesterday morning at the regular gathering of the Deer Isle Writers Group was to write a piece using three arbitrarily assigned numbers. The numbers I was given were 7 and 23 and 37. Here is my piece …
It has been eighty-nine years, every one of which I count as untold blessing, since that unspeakable season of impenetrable darkness and unrelenting dread, the winter of ’37. It was not the snows. Yes, we had bad storms that lasted for days and severe blizzards that dumped feet of heavy wet snow, so that we had to crawl out the windows to get outside, the doors pinned shut by ponderous drifts. We always had snow. We were used to it. And, as a boy of seven, the more than head high piles of snow were my playground, my imaginary Everests, the setting for many an intrepid ascent by this would be mountaineer.
No, it was not the snows. It was the ice, the rock hard ice that covered everything after days of thaw and then refreezing. Thick ice, cold and bitter, inches of ice coating snow and road, trees and house. all the more when the freezing rains came, days and days and days of freezing rain, the days just warm enough to leave it rain, but the nights quickly congealing it, bowing and breaking the slender birches, bringing even large limbs of the oaks crashing to the ground, rendering movement outside all but impossible, for us, our family trapped inside the house and for the pitiful deer we spied through ice-glazed windows, slipping and sliding and falling, on their futile quest to find any exposed vegetation.
It was the ice, the ice that rendered the outside world inert and unforgiving, and the ice that hardened human souls, rendering them too callous and cold and unforgiving. It was an ill wind blowing through the streets of Weimar, bearing rumors of a camp being built on Ettersburg Hill, only an hour’s walk from our front door, a camp called Buchenwald where, we would later learn, hundreds of thousands of Jews and gypsies and other “undesirables” were imprisoned, where tens of thousands of these human beings, these children of God, died.
We did not know that then, but we knew of the movement birthed out of post-war turmoil and a disastrous economy, a revolutionary movement momentarily derailed after the failed Beer Hall Putsch of ’23, but now gaining momentum, inexorable, inexplicable, utterly frightening momentum — friends, neighbors, church members channeling pain into anger, suffering into disdain, making of blameless women and men and children a suitable scapegoat for their own feelings of loss and helplessness and despair.
It has been eighty-nine years since that dreadful winter, the winter that birthed an unrecognizable spring, and years of unspeakable horrors, but it is over. It is long over. The madness did not prevail. But its seeds, its icy and cold-blooded seeds, remain, and even now take root in the hearts of once well-meaning people, once more stifling compassion and killing mercy, as unease and dissatisfaction are wielded as weapons in a senseless war against innocents. May God have mercy on us and may this winter too pass.
sing