There is a box of Holocaust hidden under my grandmother’s sink. I hear it every day, at lunch time, when she stands over the stove holding a large wooden ladle, raising her hand high in the air, and cursing.
I don’t understand any of the curses, I think they’re in Czech; throaty sounds that turn the kitchen air murky. The rest she says in plain Hebrew over the steaming pot of soup, screaming, “May God come down and take me this very instant!”
I don’t look at the ceiling anymore, but I used to, when I still believed that God was real and the ceiling, stained with the vapors of soup, would suddenly be ripped open to reveal a bearded face with hollow eyes filled with dark stars, as dirty as my grandmother’s curses.
Now I know that God isn’t real — but the box of Holocaust under the sink is.
God never comes to claim her when soup-drops rain from the raised ladle onto the floor. She stands there, frozen. Mouth open. Emitting the silent echoes of her desperate plea for release. Always disappointed that a bolt of lightning, or some other celestial force, doesn’t manifest itself to claim her. A monument of frustration.
The box of Holocaust, though, sings in return. All her dead relatives burned in the crematoria, and there were fields plowed with muselmann bodies, and bulldozed mountains of limbs. The documentaries they show us in school are only pale imitations of what’s inside there, in my grandmother’s box of Holocaust.
She...
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