by Harper Smith
A bit of background: For my novel project I chose the ‘Letter from Sighet’ option. I did a lot of beforehand research, trying to pick a subject for my letter that would be interesting and provide me with more information on which groups were also marginalized during the Holocaust. During my research I came across a fact about the queer men that had been interned in concentration camps. During this time there were many places in the world where homosexuality was illegal and considered a jail-worthy crime. The Nazis, who targeted all who were different from their idealized version of a human being, captured several of these individuals–specifically, gay men–and interned them in camps along with the Jewish residents. When the Allies eventually stopped the war and freed the prisons, they and the newly recognized German states, chose not to consider queer prisoners victims of the genocide–which was a crucial status they needed to be able to apply for asylum in other states or get help for their experiences. In fact, in places such as Austria, they elected to send these men, fresh from what is considered one of the worst and most horrific events in human history, right back to prison. My letter is written from the point of view of one of these men named Imre, a queer Jewish person who is writing from Austrian prison to his lover, whom he was separated from at the beginning of the war and is not sure is still alive. I hope you enjoy my project and the story of the character I have created. Though fictional, Imre and Isadore represent the millions of true survivors who were torn from their loved ones in this horrific event of history, and I encourage you to reach out and learn more on your own. History will only change tomorrow if we are educated on the past today.
Content Warnings: Mentions of violence and death (nothing graphic), an exploration of the trauma that came from this war. Read with caution and take care of yourselves.
March 1st, 1946
I write this letter with little hope it will reach you. I barely trust in the assurance that it will make it out of this prison alive, my words discarded lost or burned at their hands, without a glance at what I have to say, like so many promises broken. But I have to try. There is precious little left in this world that I believe is worth trying for, after all I have seen, but if there is a singular thing—if there is one light left in the darkness—I believe it would be you.
It has been nearly five years now, since I have last seen your face. Do you still remember that fated day? They have tried to take it away from me, but I will never forget. We were a simple little place, the town of Sighet, Transylvania, nestled in the woods. The smell of salt always thick in the air, not from the ocean from which we were far, but from the mines that harvested the mineral and brought it up from the Earth. My father worked in one such mine. He was a good man, kind and warm. My mother did not work, yet she loved her sewing. Her hands, a needle and thread could make such beautiful creations we teased that she should sell them, if only to make us the richest in all the land. She shrugged these off, but I remember her smile in the candlelight. I had no siblings. They were Jewish as most families in our neighborhood were, devout and pious, brought together in our community by the grace of God. I was Jewish in the way that birds sang each morning, or that vegetables were good for you despite their taste. It simply was. I did not think much of it then–I had my own secrets, secrets that could make me hated and feared even in the eyes of God Himself, and I concerned myself no more with the matters of religious identity than a simple daily prayer that worked that kept my life afloat.
Apologies. I did not mean to insinuate that I felt my burdens with regret. There was shame, as there was wont to be, but never regret. I could never regret you as long as I live, my friend.
The day the foreign Jews were expelled was not one I had paid much mind to at the time. I will admit that I was selfish back then. I believed the Earth would simply continue to go round as long as I and those I loved were unharmed. So I did not take much notice when they were hauled away. I had spent the day with you, Isadore, in the fields behind your father’s mill. We were too caught up in the joyous and simple pleasures of youthful physicality to take much mind of anything at all.
The ghettos have not stuck well in my mind, I am afraid, for it has been so long and I have been through so much as to render them a paradise compared to the places that followed. We lined up on the streets for hours those days, waiting for them to cart us away. I’m sure you remember. How you complained about the heat. They did not tell us where we were being taken, though they looked at you and I with more respect than the others. We were young–early twenties, then, isn’t it so funny to think–and fit, and we had an air of intelligence about us that perhaps inspired them to treat us as though we were human. The same could not be said for my family. They looked at my mother like a piece of meat and my father like a frail burden, though he was only sixty and she was only his. Oh, if only they could have known then, when they looked upon us! You and I were filled with more sin than they could have ever conceived, yet looking back I find only satisfaction in that knowledge.
They took my family away before I. It was a solemn day, and I cannot deny I still shudder to think I shed no tear. If I could have known it was the last I would ever see my mother, my precious amma, my father, the stone-faced and gold-hearted miner, I would have ran into their arms like a little boy again, but I did not. Alaya and Joseph Malik, those were their names. History will not remember them as I have, for history will not remember them at all. I am told they were killed along with hundreds of others upon arrival, their very existence forgotten to the flames. It haunts my mind like a ghost, the thought of their ashes left to the wind.
They took you away from me. I barely can picture the moment, for all I knew was that all at once, I was loaded into one car and you another. We had only interlocked hands–no kiss, no embrace, only a faint reminder of your skin on mine before being ripped away. That is all we had.
I have not seen you since. I do not know if you are even alive. But that moment, I remember, and I shall remember for all my life. You were warm in my hands as I held you and through all of this I have held onto that last flame of sunlight before the eclipse.
I will mention, it was not long after I arrived that they discovered my crime. That summer, a trip we took to Austria in which we were caught together behind the bar–do you recall? The cells were cold there, but not nearly as cold as I soon learned these “camps” could be. I had forgotten, I admit, for our arrest was but a night, but they keep these things on record, you know. Any modicum of respect they had for me was gone by this point. I was spit in the face, called all manner of names–I will not transcribe them. I know that you have endured all the same.
I will not paint a picture of the horrors I suffered to you now. In a selfish way I pray you already know, because that means that you have lived to suffer the same. Five years I spent being shuffled along those places like cattle, only left breathing because I was strong and could work, losing what it meant to be a person in the light of God more and more with every day…those years were the worst of my life. I have lost my soul to them, Isadore, and yet I cannot help but to think upon all those who have lost worse. The infants, the children, the mothers sons and daughters fed to that fire, young men torn from their mothers and their fathers and everyone they knew before they were even old enough to lift a glass…I am lucky to have survived to live in Hell another day. Any pain that I feel now is but a token I carry for all those who cannot.
The war is over, now, as it has been for nearly a year as I write this. I have not entertained a single notion of freedom since the Allies, in form of huge, imposing Soviets, liberated our “camp”, nor did I really ever expect to. To the rest of the world, I am the lowest of criminals, set apart from the light and grace of God. Schwuchtel, they called me here, which is a word I had not heard spoken in the same fashion but have heard the heart of many times. I know what it means. I know not if they are wrong, only what they see. My crimes–a single kiss, shared with you one warm night all those years ago, witnessed by prying eyes–has granted me three years of prison time, and the revoking of my status as a victim of this war.
Three years. What is three years, compared to those who lay dead in the snow? Their bodies ravaged by seasons of wildlife, their names never known…
I had a friend, if you could call it that, a young man by the name of Samuel. I believe he may have been nineteen? He did not know who I truly was, nor do I doubt that any connection we shared would have been lost if he had, but nonetheless I was grateful for the small things we did share. His body lies crushed among the trees somewhere, trampled by the feet of his fellows who may have once known him, left behind there to rot when we were gone. No one, not one page of history will remember him–I myself did not even know his surname, but I find comfort in at least the fact that I did know him through his final hours. What am I saying? It becomes difficult to keep my thoughts orderly when my fingers become so cold in these cells. The memories haunt me like a tide, returning forevermore. A point to say: I know I am lucky. The constraints of my predicament wear away at me anyway, and I do believe by this point that no one could expect me to be grateful.
You must believe that I hate you, dear Isadore. After all, if not for my love of you I would be free of these cells, as free as a man can be when forced to live in his very own lie, but alas. If not for my love of you, I do believe I would have met the same fate that befell my brothers and sisters in that Hell–if not death, than a loss of oneself. Though I do not claim to be the same man I was when I left you, and at times I fear that I have lost my soul, my body, and the sanctity of my mind…but it is only the memory of your hand in mine that reassures me that if anything I have not let go entirely of my heart. There are days I feel as though I have lost the ability to love anyone at all, and I cannot lie and say that does not extend, in its own way, to you. Distant as the years have made your image in my mind, murky as my certainty at your survival had become, until one day it faded until I admit I no longer trust that you live at all. But then I remember that sweet summer night, only mere hours before our world would be changed forever by the placement of a simple, yellow star…and I feel the only spark of warmth left among the cold ashes that have consumed me.
Are you alive, chayim sheli? Does your heart still beat, or have you become like so many, lost in the embers? Have you suffered the same fate as I, or do you walk free, in this country or another, your life your own? I have no way of knowing. I suppose it is possible I never will. I send this letter now to your aunt, in France, for I have hope to believe that she was spared from the same internment we faced. If she does not tear this letter to shreds upon its arrival, she may succeed in reaching you. If she does not, then, well, I will live as I have been. I have no reason to believe she would write me back either way, so I may continue to believe blindly in your existence no matter the true outcome.
Write to me, Isadore, should you have survived. Write to me and tell me everything, or nothing at all. All I ask of you is to tell me that you live. And maybe one day, when I am free from these walls, I will find you again.
Yours,
Imre Malik
The Lighthouse 