exists. What would it be? D o you count each time separate;
and the blank days, they do count or they don’t?
E IG H T
In March 1973
(Age 26)
I was born in 1946 in Camden, N ew Jersey, down the street
from Walt Whitman’s house, Mickle Street, but m y true point
o f origin, where I came into existence as a sentient being, is
Birkenau, sometimes called Auschwitz II or The W omen’s
Cam p, where we died, m y family and I, I don’t know what
year. I have a sense memory o f the place, I’ve always had it
although o f course when I was young I didn’t know what it
was, where it was, w hy it was in m y mind, the place, the
geography, the real place, the w ay it was, it’s partial in my
mind but solid, the things I see in my mind were there, they’re
pushed back in my mind, hard to get at, behind a wall o f time
and death. Everything that matters about me begins there. I
remember it, not like a dream and it’s not something I made up
out o f books— when I looked at the books I saw what I already
had seen in m y mind, I saw what I already knew was there. It’s
the old neighborhood, familiar, a far-back memory, back
before speech or rationality or self-justification, it’s w ay back
in m y mind but it’s whole, it’s deep down where no one can
touch it or change it, it can’t be altered by information or
events or by wishful thinking on m y part. It’s m y hidden heart
that keeps beating, m y real heart, the invisible one that no
physician can find and death can’t either. N ot everyone was
burned. At first, they didn’t have crematoria. They pushed all
the bodies into huge mass graves and put earth on top o f them
but the bodies exploded from the gases that come when bodies
decompose; the earth actually heaved and pulled apart, it
swelled and rose up and burst open, and the soil turned red. I
read that in a book and I knew right aw ay that it was true, I
recognized it as if I had seen it, I thought, yes, that seems more
familiar to me than the crematoria, it was as i f m y soul had
stayed above and watched and I saw the earth buckle and the
red come up through the soil. I always knew what Birkenau
was like from the parts o f it I have in m y mind. I knew it was
gray and isolated and I knew there were low , gray huts, and I
knew the ground was gray and flat, and it was winter, and I
knew there were pine trees and birch trees, I see them in the
distance, upright, indifferent, a monstrous provocation,
G o d ’s beauty, He spits in your face, and there were huge piles
o f things, so big you thought they were hills o f earth but they
were shoes, you can see from currently published photos that
