About twenty five years ago I went to see a showing of the Holocaust film, Shoah. For those who aren’t familiar, this is a ten hour documentary, normally shown in two parts consecutively, with a small meal break. The film is notably devastating in effect for its lack of gore, absent of explicit rendering of atrocity. All that unfolds hits the viewer as reverberation. The mind, and heart can and must fill in the blanks. What’s shown is verbatim testimony of the everyday execution of the tasks set before the hard working members of the newly ascendant Nazi party. Schedules, Daily Rounds, Routines of Construction and Mainenence.
I became a student of this subject early in my adult life, and have filled too many hours with contemplation of this grave facet of history. On one side of my lineage, all but my great-grandfather were exterminated in Poland. Those relatives never reached the camps, they were shot in front of their house, as far we know. Hard to believe that may be considered a lucky break of sorts, but so it goes. What I’m going to relate now, in the light of this is so trivial, so minuscule, so remote as to almost be ridiculous. But for some reason it sticks in my mind as we see the daily unfolding of our incoming regime change.
