final_thp_2ndedition

He shook his head.
“No,” he said, “I have to tell you now. The details
won’t be as clear if I wait. Now I can still see it. You said you
wouldn’t mind writing it down again, right Udi?”
“Of course not,” I said, but I’m sure he noticed the
reluctance in my tone. I took out a notepad that I usually
use for medical notes, with his last four dreams scribbled in
bullet points on the top half of the page.
“Was it about the Holocaust again?” I sighed as I
tapped my foot. I had been told about the Holocaust since
I was a toddler, and like most young Israelis I had little
patience for the subject. This was Ariel’s fifth Holocaust
dream.
“Yes,” he said. I sat back down in the chair. We sat
quietly for a moment. Ariel watched the steam rise from my
coffee.
“The Nazis were lining up the Jews into two lines
for men and two lines for women at the gates of Auschwitz,”
he said. “The healthy Jews were sent to a line for
forced labor, and the very young, very old, sickly, or weak
Jews were being sent directly to the gas chambers. My
father and I were sent to the labor line for men. My mother
was in the labor line for the women. My father and I were
at the front of the line, where the Nazi’s were tattooing
numbers into our forearms.”
“That’s terrible, achi,” I said as my foot tapped
faster and scribbled down the last bullet point. The muscles
in Ariel’s forehead twitched just a little. I could not bear to
see an Israeli soldier cry over a dream.
“Ariel, you should wait until
you’re better,” I said, seeing that he
was struggling.
Ariel clenched his jaw tightly
and reined in his tears with years of
honed skill that all Israeli boys learn.
“Like a good Sabra,” I thought to myself.
“Thorns on the outside, sweet on
the inside. A true Israeli.”
“I need to finish,” he said
calmly.
“Suddenly,” he continued,
“a Nazi pulled my mother from the
forced labor line and shoved her into
the line of Jews awaiting their deaths.
When my father saw, he yanked his
arm out while they were tattooing him,
and rushed to defend her. The Nazis
laughed as they seized him and shot
him in the groin. Then they killed her
in front of my bleeding father. They
stomped on my father’s face, cracking
his jaw with their boots until he
stopped moving. His dead face stared
at me open-eyed with blood spilling out
of his mouth.” Ariel was now staring at
the wall again.
“You know what the worst part
of the dream was?” he asked.
“What? The whole thing
seems brutal to me,” I said.
“I didn’t even move,” he said
with disgust, “I let the Nazi bastard
tattoo my arm while my parents were
humiliated and murdered before my
eyes.” His temples quivered with
anger, and his eyes started to swell,
but he didn’t let a single tear escape. I
felt proud of him for his restraint and I
placed a hand on his shoulder.
“I’m sorry you had that dream.
That sounds terrifying. I’m not sure
if I’ve asked you before, but did you
have family in the Holocaust?” I asked
briskly, and I could tell he sensed my
impatience now by the way he glared
at me. He drew in a deep breath, then
coughed.
“I have told you before, three
out of four grandparents,” he said,
“they were all the lone survivors of
their families.”
“I apologize for my imperfect
memory,” I said. “I’ve been busy
lately. But my grandfather’s family was
murdered in the Holocaust too, at Babi
Yar. Luckily my grandfather had moved
to Palestine already. But anyway, Ariel,
enough of this depressing talk, do you
have any new girlfriends?” I desperately
tried to change the topic. Ariel glared
at me indignantly.
“Udi, we’ve been hearing
about the Holocaust our whole lives,”
he said, “People are tired of it here.
Don’t worry I won’t tell you any more
dreams. But there’s one thing about
the Holocaust that I can’t stop thinking
about when I get a fever.”
“What is that?” I asked as I
blushed. I didn’t think I was that obvious.
He leaned in and stared directly
into my eyes. They were bloodshot and
his pupils were dilated.
“Not all murders are equal,” he
said.
“I’m not sure what you mean,”
I said.
“What I mean,” he replied,
“is that we’ve all heard the statistics.
Six million Jews murdered by gas
chamber, by bullet, or by disease in the
camps. But the statistics don’t let you
feel that moment of horror when you
are choking slowly to death, clawing at
the ceiling with your fingernails in a gas
chamber full of wrangling limbs, knowing
that no one will ever remember
you. You can never feel that completely
from a museum, or a book or a movie,
Udi. That death is listed in the same
way as any other death, a tally mark,
but it is not the same as killing someone
in war.”
1 Achi: Slang; Literally, “My brother” in Modern Hebrew, but used as term of endearment or friendship.
2 Kushi: Slang for a dark-skinned person of African descent in Hebrew, with derogatory connotations similar to the American-English
word “Negro”
3 Midrash: A rabbinical interpretation of an ambiguous passage in the Torah. Often imaginative
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