I left Berlin a week ago, and this will be the first of several blog posts from my travels. This essay around 4, words feels very close to my heart, and I wish I could make every essay absolutely free, but writing is now my full-time job. There is a small, yellow bug crawling on the corner of my book. The insect is no bigger than half a grain of rice, triangular, and his antennae investigate the air with a charming curiosity. The more circumspectly you delay writing down an idea, the more maturely developed it will be on surrendering itself.
Speech conquers thought, but writing commands it. Charles and I play three games of Uno and I lose each one. Defeated and high-strung, I open my book to read. On page seventy-five, I find a small, yellow, six-legged carcass crushed into page I want to cry. Benjamin died in , choosing to overdose on morphine tablets rather than risk capture by Nazis in Catalonia.
As we take the train from Germany into Poland, I am suddenly paralyzed by history, by memory, by feeling. Standing still in Berlin feels fine. Feeling the gentle rocking of the train, almost like a cradle, my feet feel like they are made of lead. Are these the same rails that carried the Jewish people of Berlin, the ones with the same crooked smiles and freckled noses as the people I know and love today, to their murder? Did the landscape look the same, at least for the ones lucky enough to see beyond tightly packed bodies and a dense cloud of fear?
Were these aspens and the pines—which to me resemble the beautiful and lithe and postured women of Manhattan and California—the same ones seen by the heartbroken prisoners of the Nazi regime? Did their emaciated trunks stab at the skyline, a puncturing harbinger of the starvation and disease that was to come for these passengers?
But the trees could be. When we cross into Poland, a new conductor boards the train. Charles asks if I want to play more Uno. I decline. I draw the cows we saw from the train in my little red notebook. Over breakfast the next morning, while discussing which museum we should visit, Charles and I try to name famous Polish-Americans.
