soultouch -- hazak v'ematz

SLEEPLESS the_mighty_ones.

sleepless
written word:

Hazak V’ematz

Nature had become one of the only solaces I could find in the foreign and unfamiliar countryside through which I trekked, always at a brisk pace – a practiced pace. The flowers and trees around me had come to symbolize the flowers and trees that I had left behind in Pennsylvania years before. During the winter, especially, when the trees were barren and the flowers did not grow, I grew lonely for my family back in Pennsylvania. The winter was the time when I most often regretted enlisting in the battle efforts. I had been barely twenty years old when I had left my parents and younger sister behind.

I had been barely twenty years old, and, oh, so naive.

Despite the horrific stories my father had told me of his time serving in the first World War, I, just a little boy living the cultured small-town life, had offered my services to the militant effort to combat overseas enemies. Adolf Hitler’s image, in bold black and white in the newspapers, hadn’t scared me away. Shadowy whispers of “Nazi Germany” had not convinced me to go back home to good ol’ Ma and Pa.

How naïve I had been; how stupid I had been. It was my own fault that I had been shipped overseas to Europe to fight against an enemy I only knew from the pages of the local newspapers: the Nazis. Over the two years I had been in combat against Hitler’s forces, I had come to know the sight of human blood and carnage as well as I knew my own image in the mirror. My naivete – my untouched innocence – had been quickly stripped away as I looked down the barrels of the guns of the enemy and watched some of my best friends suffer at the hands of the enemy – or, more correctly, at the mercy of their rifles and their cannons.

So now, I took in the sight of the tree branches hanging high overhead, once stripped naked by the frigid winter winds of late 1944 and early 1945, finally – finally – wrapped in a sheath of glossy green leaves. These leaves were a sight for sore eyes.

I kept in step with the soldiers around me, taking only occasional glances at the greenery overhead to comfort my fears – my illogical fears – that the only tangible reminders I had of my home would disintegrate. The late April breezes that brushed by us all were warm, only a hint of chill to them – a reminder that summer was nearly upon us.

“What is that God-awful smell?” a man to my left hissed suddenly, raising his fingers to his nose in an effort to combat whatever stench he was currently enduring. I blinked twice, knowing that a confused look had twisted its way onto my features. What smell? I wondered.

A moment later, I knew. An unfamiliar and pungent odor worse than anything I’d ever smelled before washed over me. I nearly doubled over from the thickness of it. I felt a string of coughing forming at the back of my throat.

“My word!” gagged Private Higgins from behind me. Hank Higgins, I thought, distractedly, of the assonance of my friend’s name. I could picture him with his pale white hands at his nose, with his mouth contorted in disgust and his pale gray eyes conveying much of the same.

The sergeant at the head of the ranks turned to face us, his soldiers, as the ruckus elevated. “Men!” he shouted, his voice gruff and displeased. “Continue on!” He glared at us for a moment before turning back around and commanding the ranks to proceed forward once again.

Despite the horrific smell that plagued our noses, we did as our superiors commanded and marched forward. Far up ahead of us, the odor intensifying as we marched, I could see the outlines of what resembled a military base or prison.

The sun was entering the earliest stages of its descent from the sky as we neared the rectangular area of buildings ahead. The smell, ever strengthening, had become an ever-present companion as the ranks pushed onward along the sometimes-rocky terrain.

Finally we reached the immediate perimeter of what I had thought to be a military base or prison. I caught a few glimpses of the thick barbed wire that ran along the outline of the place through the openings in the trees.

One of the superiors turned to face the ranks that stood behind him. “This,” he said, just loud enough for the rows of soldiers to hear him, “is one of Hitler’s concentration camps. We’ve gotten word that many of the Nazis that are a part of the administration of this camp have fled, so we expect little resistance, if any. We are going to liberate this camp.”

Questions immediately entered my mind. I wondered: What, exactly, was a concentration camp? What would the other soldiers and I find when we went in to “liberate,” it as the Captain had said? I had heard hazy stories from soldiers in other regiments about their own experiences liberating concentration camps, but the most I could gather from their stories was that these camps of Hitler’s, death or labor camps, could be very gruesome.

Within moments, the superiors were driving the ranks toward the camp. Our men stormed across the tiny footbridges the Nazis, I supposed, had built, struggling to maintain their balance as they passed over the quasi-moat that ran around the camp. Stupidly, so stupidly, as I passed over the moat, I thought, What is this for? I held my gun in my hands like it was a life preserver, shoving it in front of my torso as though it would protect me if those inside the camp tried to attack.

The stench overwhelmed my mind and body. I tried, with all my might, to fight back the tears – the stinging kind that onions invoke – the overwhelming odor brought to my eyes.

As my fellow soldiers – my surrogate family – and I pushed our way inside the camp, moving in unison to avoid the barbed wire, the stench was so thick it was almost visible in the air.

That was when my eyes moved skyward. I saw a long trail of thick, black smoke puffing out of a massive chimney atop a building about one hundred yards away. The stench – the stench – radiated from the smog that poisoned the graying sky over the camp. The smell was all around me. It absolutely enveloped me, taking over my body.

Rows of paltry, scantily-crafted wooden buildings – lengthy shacks, really – surrounded me. They rose up, like the buildings of a ghost town, from the nearly black, hard earth at my feet. Potholes and rocks littered the ground, vacant of any greenery or grass – this place was a world away from the trees outside. Browning weeds were the only vegetation, and even then, they were sparse.

As my eyes traced the potholes and rocks scattered across the ground, I came upon a shadowy pile that reached higher into the sky than many of the buildings. The ameba of soldiers around me had thinned, so I pushed my way toward the misshapen mound. As I stumbled toward the pile, a new stench overcame me – this stench, unlike the other, was familiar: It was the horrifying fetor of the decomposition of the human form.

I was then face to face with the pile. The vacant eyes of those long dead stared back at me, their faces frozen in grimaces and terrified expressions.

I felt a scream boiling in my throat. I backed away from the pile of carnage – sheer, sheer carnage – stumbling over my own feet on the way. For the first time just then, I noticed the people that were emerging from the ghastly shacks.

They appeared to be walking skeletons. Walking skeletons.

The scream caught in my throat. Were these humans that were before me? Could these forms be human beings?

My mind flashed back to the words of a soldier from another regiment that I had met in passing a few weeks ago. “The survivors of the concentration camps,” he had told me hoarsely, “look like they are dead. They call them Musselmaner – the walking dead. How could any man do these things to another man?”

I had not thought much of what the man had said, but now, as these skeletal figures approached the other soldiers and me, I saw, clearly, that they were the walking dead. Their skin was stretched across their bones; their eyes were ringed by dark, dark brown circles. Some wore thin slips of material around their bodies, the material hanging off of their frames; others were nude or enveloped in dirty blankets.

Some of their eyes appeared lifeless, but others … others appeared to have hope in their eyes. Starvation and disease were obvious in these emaciated men, women and children. As I caught sight of the rib cage of one woman outlined by her thin slip, I felt another scream bursting from my vocal chords, but when I opened my mouth, nothing came out. I could find no words to speak. What had these people had to suffer? What kind of atrocities had been done to these people – these people that were just as human as I was?

Their faces struck me the most. It seemed as though there were thousands of faces all around me. I felt rooted to the ground as I looked into the slowly forming crowd of people. I thought, These are husbands and wives and brothers and sisters and cousins and grandparents and friends…I could see myself in the suffering people before me. I could have been one of them.

My military gear suddenly meant nothing to me. It had once set me apart from the civilians around me – I had once thought, this uniform is what sets me apart; it shows that I am brave, but I saw now that the people before me, the ones covered in sores and dirt, were the brave ones. My actions in the war, my wartime badges that made me a hero in my own mind – they meant nothing. My “heroism” was nothing compared to the things these people had endured and survived. These were the brave ones, and they were the ones that were the heroes.

A man clad only in a shrewdly constructed loincloth stood before me. He was, literally, about a quarter of my size in terms of width of body. He stared up into my eyes, and I saw the pain of a tortured man in his eyes – but I also saw … I also saw hope in his eyes. I felt tears welling up in my own eyes – this time, not from the horrible smells all around, but from the pain I saw manifested before me.

I felt my gun fall from my hands. In unison, the man and I moved toward one another. He put an arm around me, and I did the same to him – but gently, so gently, because I was afraid that I might break his fragile frame.

In a thick accent, his English lilting and halted, the man spoke two simple words: “Thank you.”

I could find no words to say to this man. It had taken him such a huge amount of effort to say just those two words…

“Hazak v’ematz,” he said then. “Be strong, have courage.”

With those words, the man disappeared back into the crowd of survivors. I searched for him for a moment, but I knew that I would not find him. I felt my reserves falling away as I realized that the man had just given me the strength to continue on.

“No,” I whispered to the man, the man whose name and future I would never know. “No. Thank you.”

And then, I repeated, to the man, the other survivors, myself, the other soldiers: “Hazak v’ematz…”

And with those words, I felt the tears come.