Can one ever truly
A poet's intention
Or are we forever fated
To exist in the dark
To argue over meanings
That may or may not exist
Or exist only for us
Made up in our minds
All we have are guesses
Based on a set of facts
And vague suppositions
Assumptions and perceptions
Left to fill in the blanks of
Life's redactions
What is seen is less important
Than what we believe.
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I show up
without appointment,
"Take walk-ins?"
If you can wait 15 minutes
Anna will take you
a young man says
nodding over
to a blonde woman
working the pink skull
of an elderly man.
I settle into hard vinyl
torn seat skin
oozing cushion pus,
and watch Anna
as she carefully separates
stringy white wisps
with a comb
on the old man’s scalp
snips at strands
as if frightened to make
an irretrievable mistake.
She takes a step back
to inspect,
consider next moves,
snippets of conversation
pierce our distance
I try to place
her familiar
immigrant accent.
She stares into the mirror,
her doppelgänger
pauses for ID,
then looks down
at the man draped
like a morgue corpse
face exposed
he isn`t talking;
she spins
as if to confront
an approaching stranger
(could she feel my rude
inquisitive stare?)
switches scissors
for a buzzing razor
and with a click
begins a circle dance
hora of sadness
round a chair
bolted to the floor.
“I am from small town
near Kiev," she says,
"no one left.”
noone left
my ear is caught,
but you did Anna
you left
peripatetic
palindromic
Anna
and before you
my grandmother left
from the czar's pogroms
to Putin's war
and here we are today
I am next in line
waiting my turn
far from Kiev
and not so far.
It's a new Netflix documentary that I watched last night. The story of a Holocaust survivor (Misha) who survived the war as a 7 year old orphan in the forests of Belgium with a pack of wolves. Her story was made into a book that was published in the US and internationally in multiple languages. Oprah showed interest and Disney wanted the movie rights. But if the story of a 7 year old orphan living in the forest with wolves sounds incredible, it's because it is, as in not credible. My initial thought (like 10 minutes into the documentary) was, this story should not be difficult to verify, why isn't anyone doing that?
Plenty of people chose to believe Misha's story without questions, from friends and neighbours to animal rights activists, and they all had their reasons. Most were well meaning. The small US publisher who was responsible for convincing Misha to publish her story saw major dollar signs, but even she sent the manuscript to a Holocaust historian for verification, indicating that she had doubts, or at least wanted assurances. The Holocaust historian told her that the story had glaring holes and was most likely untrue. The publisher decided to release it as a memoir anyway, presumably greed getting the better of her.
People all across Europe especially embraced the book with open arms, school kids made projects about it, and the author was welcomed at readings, conferences and on TV talk shows. The book was a bestseller, a French movie company bought the rights and made it into a feature film. I can understand the European enthusiasm for this feel-good story of courage and redemption. The Holocaust is largely a European tragedy and still an open sore, especially with regards to the perpetrators and their collaborators. Sugaring that bitter history with a little redemption helps it go down with the younger generations.
The US publisher finally did decide to do a deep dive to verify the story, but only after losing a lawsuit that ruined her personally and financially, again, money being the main motivator (but this time it was about finding ways to avoid paying it rather than how to maximize making it). During the trial the defendant (the publisher) never thought to question the story's authenticity, she was complicit after all in publicizing it. The jury bought Misha's story hook line and sinker since it was never challenged at trial, which seems to be egregious legal malpractice to me, and awarded her a staggering multi-million dollar compensation.
The moral and emotional hazards inherently associated with questioning the credibility of Holocaust survivors and the veracity of their stories is raised in the Netflix documentary. We've all heard harrowing stories of unlikely survival during a time of unimagineable horror. In a way, the unimagineably horrific circumstances made seemingly impossible stories of survival more believable not less. And who are we to question what the survivors say they endured? Even more, as the generation of eye witnesses of the Holocaust passes on, listening to the story told by every remaining survivor becomes beyond important, it's an absolute moral obligation. This is especially true at a time when Holocaust denial and disinformation has exploded online.
It's this issue of what we believe and why we believe it, that ultimately makes the documentary interesting. Living in a time of 'fake news', 'alternative facts', 'post-truth' and conspiracy theories run amok, people choose to believe all kinds of absurd things that on their face defy credulity. Watching this movie resonated in my mind with the Alex Jones sentencing trial on the news these days. As you probably know Jones was found guilty of defamation for his outlandish claims that the Sandy Hook massacre of school children was fabricated. He was sued by the parents of the murdered children for $150 million. Jones defended himself by testifying that he never said anything on air that he didn't completely believe. (I can already hear Donald trump's lawyers arguing the same thing about the 2020 election ie. that he believed and still believes the election was stolen.) The judge answered Jones plainly: Mr. Jones just because you believe something does not make it true. That Jones and trump and their followers might think that believing something is a plausible courtroom defense (like Rudy Giuliani saying we have great theories just no evidence) is somehow indicative of a nadir of general cynicism and mistrust that we have sadly reached in society as a whole.
Of course, Misha's story is not Alex Jones's (or trump's), but in some respects her falsehood is more terrible. Peddling lies for power and profit is as old as America itself - 'You can fool all the people some of the time... etc.' (Abraham Lincoln), and 'There's a sucker born every minute' (PT Barnum). But telling falsehoods about the Holocaust plays into the hands of the Holocaust deniers and doubters ie. if one 'survivor' is lying about it, maybe they're all lying. At a time when the meaning of truth and fidelity to fact is under constant and wide ranging attack, the insidious erosion of social morality is the ultimate cost. Telling the truth about our greatest tragedy, the Holocaust, is one important antidote to this disease.
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I don't reflect on anything
that's not about me
the image in the mirror
is all that I can see
the lonely snow-capped mountain
the anxious storm-tossed lake,
the calmly spoken thought
the slip-of-tongue mistake
the determined bumblebee
the patient foxglove
the stories we've been told
about the God above
the homeless on the street
the politician's rhetoric
the art in the museum
that appeals to my aesthetic
the news always breaking
about the wars being fought
or terrorist attacks
that kill a lot
Instagram and Twitter
my Facebook page feed
and something else called TikTok
provide everything I need
I am what I take in
with a degree of empathy
if you call me a narcissist
I won't disagree
it’s always about me
always about me.
