“The Name”— 1981
Undated, 1981.
I couldn’t help but hear the screams of the girl. “Ellio! Ellio!” She calls! “I AM HERE! I am going here again! She grabs my heart and she says, “Don’t let me die! Don’t let me die in this room! Don’t let me die! Please!” I ask her name. “JEANNIE!” I try to take her hand, but she is slowly slipping away from me. I don’t even notice that she is suffocating and trying to hold me. She is screaming. HELP! ELLIO! I can’t help her up. I fight to help her, but she is slipping through my hands. I don’t know another name but Jeannie. I heard her scream a last name- HI-MER! What does that mean? The room that she was in, had so many others in, reaching for me, trying to pull me with them. Where was I? I didn’t know, but I could not see where I was. The yelling and screaming finally ceased. There, were a bunch of children, dead. But the room was almost completly silent, but it was still loud. In my ears, I could hear, the girl, or the others screaming for help. They were begging for their lives, they knew they were f*cked.. They were gonners, and now, it’s just me in that room. I can’t get that room out of my head. The scent, I can’t really put my fingers to it. The girl was dead. Dead at my feet. What? What could be happening here? The room is not very well lit, but I can see everything.. the whispers outside, they are all laughing. How could they be laughing at the people who were just killed? Who were these monsters? I believe.. that the monsters are those men, laughing and cursing at the people they have just bled out. They’re not lost, they will never be. The girl will have her revenge, as so many of these other people will. Jeannie is dead at my feet. Her black hair, all over her face. Her suffocated throat, her burnt lungs. Her hands are not moving. She’s not moving. No one is moving in this room. Only my heartbeat is heard. This room, I will never forget this room.”
In this section, my grandpa, talks about a girl, I think I might know who he was referring to. It didn’t take me long to know what he was describring: A Gas Chamber, and I think I might know which one he was talking about: Auschwitz.
This is Jeannie Heimer, and I think he didn’t know if he knew how to spell her name? I think this is who he was referring to? I had no idea who he might have been actually referring to? I had only seen this after he passed. He wrote this way before I was born. But I probably knew what he was talking about. With my grandfather’s writing, a lot of it was written very quickly, so I’m putting the pieces together.
The thing about him was that he wasn’t a Holocaust Survivor, but he could tell you about the “rooms” at any major concentration camp, without having been there, it was odd and cool at the same time.
We met a Holocaust survivor once, and the survivor shook my grandpa’s hand and without being told, my grandpa asked the man if his parents died in a gas chamber at Auschwitz in 1942? The survivor looked at him, shocked and said, “YES! How did you know?” My grandpa let go of the man’s hand and he didn’t respond. I was with him. I looked at the two men with astonishment.
My grandpa was interesting and with the excerpts that I really want to post of his writing, you’ll see how interesting and pretty rad his writing is. It’s really lovely to see a lot of his work, and how his style of writing, is almost identical to mine. Though I was adopted, he really thought of me as one of his own- which techinally I was his own granddaughter. I miss him and I know his writing, at least a lot of it, won’t make a bit of sense, but I promise, I can translate and tell you what he meant.
