The Shtetl Man

I went to the Holocaust Museum.

My cousin has the TV on. It’s YouTube and a narrator with a British accent is telling us the top 15 groceries that will be getting rarer in the coming period. I remark that despite the fact that the video is rather full of unremarkable stock footage, that the voice is authentic. It won’t be long before more videos are narrated by AIs.

The video goes down through meat, lemons, avocados, soybeans and it gets to the point where they show powdered grubs. Oh, snap. I just wrote about that. We have a brief conversation about what we should be stockpiling. I don’t have many ideas, but I do have a second refrigerator and a full size freezer. He says he’s considering getting a side of beef. He already has the grinder. Hmm. Good idea. Today is the day I go with my niece to the nation’s capitol. We have tickets to the museum.

The last time I was in that part of DC, the Holocaust Museum was the hottest ticket in town. That was quite some time ago. This morning there are six guards outside. One has a dog and inspects the open trunk of a car about to go through the gate. I take a selfie. We are directed to the proper door. I place my metal items on the security conveyer. My belt fires the alarm and the next guard has his wand up on high. I pass through and head to the main desk in front of the elevators. We are briefed and go up.

It’s dark.

As we circle around the top floor in silence, a baby breaks the spell, but then by being there, innocent of the destruction on display, reinforces it and brings focus. He calls to his mama. We’re not flying coach. We cannot get mad. We can only absorb. Artifacts. Text. Video. Documents. Voice recordings. Newspaper clippings. Names. Scale models. Pieces of destroyed buildings. Dates. Declarations. Ships denied docking. Photographs. Charts. Letters. Diaries. Testimony.

It’s the day after Halloween and I can’t eat the candy I didn’t manage give away. How much money did I risk imagining more children would participate in this ritual? I’m trying to find out what 1938 feels like. I’m trying to find more ways to prepare for what might go wrong - when the entirety of the state apparatus gets sliced by the unlikely iceberg. Like nobody knows we’re steaming across the ice cold, deep dark Atlantic Ocean. The ocean has always been there with its crushing depths. One doesn’t simply sail across.

I have this picture. It’s one I wanted to capture in my mind most of all. I imagine the man who sees it coming and he’s staring me down. He has never seen it before. No one has ever seen anything like this before, and yet he knows. He knows he will never live to see the end of it.

The image. I can’t square it. I try to crop and straighten. I can’t make it fit in my digital world today, not without distorting it. I stop trying. He cannot be captured. Zoom in if you dare. It’s a simulation. It’s a museum. It’s not going to put you there. Maybe it can remind you of the depth of dark ocean of the human soul.

I don’t know about you, but I’ve navigated myself into something - some place that tries to appreciate snow geese flying south at sunset over rural Maryland. Janet Jackson is on the Sonos. Pistols are in the basement. The glass shelf has great grandparents in black and white. They died the normal way. I don’t like the sound of ‘infinite possibilities’. I don’t know about you but I can sense the dark side of half an infinity. Its malevolence can be perceived today, or maybe in 90 minutes you could be reminded. It doesn’t seem like a museum is enough. An event is just a moment.

The District of Columbia is lined with monumental avenues. I review the number of museums I have attended. Air and Space. Spy. The Arboretum. The gallery with the large paintings. Plus the major monuments. It seems like the kind of place where there would be some ritual appreciation for and dedication to core principles, but I am as unfamiliar with the attitudes of the people here as I am of their flag. Three red stars, two red stripes on a field of white. Now I notice it on license plates. Not quite sacred enough.

I’m walking back to my car with my niece. Mort joins us in small talk. He’s a volunteer at the museum and is heading towards the capitol for the Smithsonian subway stop. We talk about the exhibit. I say that we occasionally need to be reminded of how cruel we can be. He is recently back from Spain and Portugal. I wonder if the economy of Portugal has recovered. We don’t really know. It is the act of satisfying that curiosity that makes us vulnerable. When you want to know what actually happened in Germany of 1941, you have to open your head to that course in human events. If we are not settled, we could quickly become deranged by the facts. I took down so many facts, and I know I can’t post them on social media. I know the color codes of the inferior races. I have a chart of the reduction of Die Judische aus der Ostmark. I have the photo of Eisenhower viewing the dead. I have five paragraphs about Babi Yar I still have yet to read. I am collecting for my memory.

I wonder if we even consider ourselves to be reliable in our memory. The museum reminds me that there are so many ways to discover other than to outsource our minds to AI and web interfaces. And yet there are towns and family names that have been erased. So I have the photo of the man from the shtetl burned into me. Not just him, but his premonition. I will carry this with me for the rest of my life, because neither you or I will live to see the end of it.