You Are What You Are

Please, write your name! The service will commence shortly.

Walter Benjamin

Please, write your name! The service will commence shortly.

Bruno Schulz

Please, write your name! The service will commence shortly.

Lea Deutsch

Please, write your name! The service will commence shortly.

Petr Ginz

Please, write your name! The service will commence shortly.

Lidia Zamenhof

Please, write your name! The service will commence shortly.

Hana Brady

Please, write your name! The service will commence shortly.

Victor Perez

Please, write your name! The service will commence shortly.

Anne Frank

Please, write your name! The service will commence shortly.

Victor Goldschmidt

Please, write your name! The service will commence shortly.

Paul Celan

Please, write your name! The service will commence shortly.

Jerzy Kosinski

Please, write your name! The service will commence shortly.

Primo Levi

They kept on coming and writing their names, filling the place until it looked like a memorial incarnate.

Are we gathered here this nightfall to pay boundless tribute and most sincere respects to your mythical reappearance, or utter anguish and most persistent bereavement to your up-in-smoke disappearance? You will have to select your group before the end of the service.

Those who were fortunate to know you were bound to love you, and those who never heard or cared about you, would have loved you as well had Judeopathy and its ilk not been imbibed by them like an immortality elixir.

Let us take a precious instant to gather our thoughts and reflect upon each and every one of you! Dig into your pasts and find an event, an occasion when you were content if not happy to be part of this world!

The gathering was silent like a graveyard at dawn, that is until a melody could be heard all around, bringing smiles and then tears to everyone present. A few of them even joined in:

You can’t always be what you are.

You can’t always be what you are.

You can’t always be what you are.

If you try sometimes, you might find

That you are what you are, oh yeah.

The à-la-Bellagio-Las-Vegas buffet table was inviting to say the least, but most of them looked at it as if it was a pitiless mirage or a hypnotic painting. Jerzy Kosinski touched the table and then hid beneath it, Paul Celan wrote the words Bei Wein und Verlorenheit ("over wine and lostness") on the tablecloth, Petr Ginz gazed at the Moon through the enormous windows, and Victor Perez punched one of the cakes.

Very few of them attempted to taste the assortment of dishes, and it did not matter if they were meat-grounded, vegetable-founded, or fruit-based. The panoply of fare was even nauseating to some of them. Did they think that the fish looked fishy, that the meat had to be imported, that the vegetables seemed out of place, that the fruits were out of season?

As this get-together was quickly winding up — no one spoke to no one else — it looked devastatingly clear that everyone had chosen the up-in-smoke disappearance group, that is everyone except for Jerzy Kosinski who must have seen himself rightly belonging to the mythical reappearance group.

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When life seems to be too wrong, death may look blissful

Oh, life is surely ill when bombs fall from the sky

The issue cannot be life for all those wishful

There are more than two reasons for anyone’s why

Why me? Why you? What did all the Jews really do?

To live and let live sounds better than the “to be”

Years become decades with so many days to chew

On whether we were ever just a little free

To love anything and anyone with no blame

To live with no chronic pain in a world troubled

The price is steep when there is no shame in a name

Like superpower and someone being smuggled