That's a Nazi
Two Czech women with short, white hair and red, laminated nametags hanging from their necks whisper amongst themselves at the top of Terezin's Ghetto Museum's staircase. A sudden mixture of yelping and stomping from below echoes up the stairway, both women snapping their heads like hounds to a dog whistle. Together, with arms crossed over their sagging breasts, the women shuffle to the banister and spot the culprit of such a ruckus.
Below, a young American boy wearing olive green pants too short for his white, spaghetti legs, bright red socks and a G.I Joe backpack hoots, wails and stomps like a baby beast, his calls bouncing like a ping pong ball off the marble steps and paneling. He bounds ahead of his mother, the rubber bottoms of his dirty sneakers slapping each step, one by one. I am standing at the beginning of the exhibit at the top of the stairs where he sprints past me. For a moment he makes a blur of the numbers posted in front of me explaining that 35,000 Jews died in the small fortress about a 15–minute walk away. These words also tell me that the very building I am standing in was used as a headquarters for 10–15 year old boys who were forced to relocate in the Jewish Ghetto. The boys in the black and white photographs look about the same age as the American boy.
"Please stay by me, we only have a few minutes!"the boy's mother called after him.
His mother strolls in front of "35,000 deceased" like a train just starting down the tracks, not sure whether to stop and read the rest of the numbers listed below or to keep chugging after her monster of a child in blood red socks.
The boy, well ahead of his mother at this point, stops only to exclaim while pointing at a doll sitting in a display case, "That's a Nazi!"
"Yes, darling,"his mother cooed, wrapping an arm across his chest to hold him in place.
"And do you see these stars?" she said, pointing at the shelf second shelf in the glass case covered in pieces of yellow felt with "Jude" written in the middle. "If you were a Jew you would have worn one of these everyday."
"Didn't some of the Jews die?" the blood–socked boy asked, bouncing at the knees behind the gate of his mother's forearm. "Yah, some," she answered. Some?
The boy ducks under his mother's arm and charges down the next hall of the exhibit, the same hall Jewish boys his age used to lie across drawing colorful pictures of their journeys back home on scrap paper or scribbling out poems about living in hell. The women with the nametags peer around the corner shaking their heads as the boy rattles the insides of his G.I Joe backpack with each stride.
Ekleksographia:
Wave Two
March, 2010
Fiction
Nora Seilheimer
Nora Seilheimer spent a summer in Prague for a writers' workshop following graduation from Kalamazoo College (Michigan) in 2008. She fell almost instantly in love with the city's haunted and lively spirit. She has since continued to daydream about midnight strolls across Charles Bridge and Staropramen.