Naked in an Arctic Room

...and a word from Anne Frank

Maybe every time you are naked under a paper gown summons the ghosts of all the other times you were naked in a paper gown. I was strapped on a board. Tied down but looking up.

I was afraid of the metal taste, the tilting room, the deafening roar of the nurse, the lady coming to take my blood, the tech with the IV bag.  It was a Code 4 emergency, which means my life was threatened. Then it wasn’t my life.

A doctor said something I couldn’t understand. But I could tell from her face that it was bad.  The room was shivering.  I mean I was.  Tears burned down my frozen cheeks onto my frozen chest in my frozen gown.

You don’t know what you have missed when things shred at once in a synaptic shredding machine. Eighteen years post-truck, wars are raging everywhere. Some are wars of words. Some are wars of worlds. Violence makes more things wrong and makes nothing right.

When I was eight or nine, I found a shoebox, stuffed with creased and crumpled photographs. No one explained who these people were or where they went or why we didn’t know them. Daddies, mommies, grandparents, and kids who looked a lot like me.  My family was killed in ovens or made into lampshades or bars of soap.

Anne Frank hid in an attic with seven other Jews and believed in the goodness of people until she was killed by people who weren’t good.  Anne Frank kept shifting back and forth between feeling that she was about to die and making plans for the future she didn’t have.

Some people think Jews are fine if we’re dead. Some people want all of us wiped off the earth. Although Hitler didn’t get all of us, most of us were murdered by his industrial killing machine. Today Jews make up .2 percent of the world — 1/5 of 1%.

About two weeks ago, would-be neo-Nazis known as Hamas terrorists, set out to rape, maim, torture, kill Israelis — and celebrate this “achievement” on social media. They also took approximately 200 hostages whose fate remains unknown. So far, four have been released.

Fyi, rapists are not freedom fighters. Neither are those who behead babies and torture men and woman, old and young, and put it on film.  While all Hamas are Palestinians, not all Palestinians are Hamas.  The only “side” I’m on is the side of people who want to live, and want to live in peace.

Fyi: Anne Frank and her family entered their hiding place in 1942. They were not discovered until August of 1944. They remained hidden for over two years. The diary, which began on her thirteenth birthday, ended shortly after her fifteenth.”