By Numbers Eulogy to the Holocaust by Ruth Mandel my dear great aunt erna, Anyone who knows you would believe it easily, even expect it. To keep you there, prevent you from kicking your feet over the edge, wresting yourself out of bed, wrenching those i.v.s out of your arm, the oxygen tube out of your throat and walking right out of the hospital, probably unaware that your lungs cannot breathe, your legs cannot carry you. Your mind, having a mind of its own, would just walk on out, regardless.
Memory is a kind of oxygen.
The survivor in you ready to take care of yourself, by your own means. But if you flail and kick yourself free as you are trying, we would loose you, on foot, to an unwalkable, vague and dreaded landscape. They have bound you, to protect you from your desire to flee. One strap wraps itself just under the tattoo Auschwitz gave you, wise and horrible Auschwitz, keeping itself alive, in a small way, on your arm. Memory is a kind of ruin.