Auschwitz

I’d spend Social Studies lost in fantasy, swept up in 90s Titanic Hysteria, mulling over the second hour of the movie again and again, the sinking ship the least interesting part of the story. My father had covered my eyes in the theater when Kate Winslet’s breasts appeared on screen, but he’d forgotten this same parental impulse when the bodies crashed onto the smokestacks from the stern before plunging into the Atlantic. It should have instilled in me a message that the female body was more dangerous than hubris itself, but all I took from that big hand suddenly blocking my view was that the tension between two strangers was blinding, their vulnerability impalpable, the electric discovery of common ground just darkness in a dark theater.

The axe scene was my favorite—how he gave her his trust out of necessity, out of survival. I couldn’t decide if it was love that gave her the courage to swing, or if love had left her no choice. The weight of her soaked chiffon dress disturbed me more than the moment the axe hung in the air, the memory from moments earlier of the fabric flying through the boiler room, bunched up in the car, grazing the deck under the stars as she laughed at her reckless liberation. The only battles I ever cared about were internal.

Reading about the Middle Passage that year, one of only a couple of students in my class who weren’t Black, I sat at my desk horrified by that infamous blueprint of a slave ship. The one in black and white, simply drawn, a bird’s eye view with little stick figures of people crammed together like sardines below the deck. I looked up at my friends sitting beside me and felt my body numb itself before I could even begin to untangle the knot in my stomach, my ears going deaf to the sound of my teacher at the front of the class, speaking matter-of-factly about a history too relevant to grasp.

Not that we hadn’t talked about it before. We’d memorized I Have a Dream while learning about slightly more palatable Civil Rights atrocities than slave ship suicides. I imagine we took such an unflinching look because it wasn’t a secret by any stretch, given the demographics of my class and our city. Even my white mother explained the premise of our country when I was still in preschool so I’d understand my own mixed background and why I had almost no cultural connection to my Jicarilla Apache ancestry. I nodded, asked questions, nodded some more. But nothing much more than fear permeated.

There’s one memory that sticks out to me from an otherwise monotonous Social Studies class in 4th grade that stuck with me for decades. We were reading The Diary of Anne Frank (well, we were supposed to read it, I skimmed it), and I spent most of the hour after lunch distracted, staring at the kid I’d had a crush on since second grade, only a few rows away at his messy desk with pencil scribbles all over the top. I pretended to follow along in the textbook chapter, vaguely aware of our place on the page so I wouldn’t get in trouble when asked to read aloud. Then I heard the words gas chambers. I looked down and found the image encased in text: a hollow room with stone walls, where humans put other humans in order to kill them. Like cattle. Like sardines. I became a vegetarian around this time.

I remember the most bizarre thought popping into my head as I stared at the two-dimensional photograph: I want to stand in one of those.

My best guess is that this was a strange defense mechanism, activated like the dissociation that washed over me while looking at the slave ship sketch, or on a field trip in first grade when our tour guide told us that the Spanish “missionaries” had run out of room to bury Indian bodies, so they’d buried them in the walls around us, each year the room a little more claustrophobic than the last. I’d looked up at the fortress of terra cotta brick and saw the skeletons of my ancestors with my six-year-old x-ray vision.