Snow Globe with Hitler Youth Director
In a black forest, the hunter becomes the hunted.
Near the Black Forest, a path is covered with bronze memorial stones but not stone #296. In 2020, Robert Schenkel’s bio is cancelled with a black marker in a single continuous line like a maze.[1] He runs for his life in this maze. He was #1919 at Flossenbürg. At the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, # 20,692. He broke Law 174 and “Law” 175.
Boys with black neckerchiefs, slipknots and performance books watch. Residents in the Warsaw Ghetto watch. On the black path, he runs for his life past the crowds in the woods, a bonfire of book burning. This time he’s not giving the speech about “die Bücher des Schmutzes und Schundes,” books of dirt and trash. He’s not leading a delegation to Berlin, not accepting a gold medal at the Leaders of the Reich Vocational Competition. His factory, which designed Nazi broaches, has been shuttered. In 1937, he is “Ein Wüstling schlimmster Sorte,” a lecher of the worst sort.
Oskar Dirlewanger needs more soldiers for The Black Hunters, the 36th Waffen Grenadier Division. Oskar Dirlewanger, “the most evil man in the SS.” Oskar Dirlewanger routinely kills his own soldiers, a troop of poachers, fallen SS men, and convicted criminals.
Oskar Dirlewanger pins a smudge to his forehead. A burnt page, to his forehead. In a black forest, Robert Schenkel dies in September 1944 in the Warsaw Uprising.
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[1] In 2008-2020, the statement for Stone #296 / Robert Schenkel in the Pforzheim Stolpersteine Initiative booklet read (translated from the German): “On April 8, 1940, he was arrested as a career criminal under Rule 175 and taken to Flossenbürg. There, he was assigned prisoner number 1919. In November 1942, he arrived at Sachsenhausen concentration camp and was registered with prisoner number 20,692. There is evidence that he was imprisoned in Sachsenhausen before Flossenbürg. After his possible second stay in Sachsenhausen, traces of Stencil disappear. However, it is almost certain that he did not survive his imprisonment.” It was later discovered that Schenkel had been director of the Pforzheim Hitler Youth and that he died in the Warsaw Uprising in 1944 as a soldier in Dirlewanger’s notorious division. Schenkel’s Stolperstein was removed and his bio crossed out in the Stolpersteine Initiative publication.
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Snow Globe with Death Castle
Ghost buses pull into the lane. The passengers are “useless eaters.”
The castle is yellow and eighteenth-century. The grey buses were known as Gekrat (Gemeinnützige Kranken-Transport G.m.b.H. or Charitable Foundation for the Transport of Patients, Inc.). The first time, the driver goes for a walk along the tree-lined ridge. Later he stays in the parked bus. Takes a cigarette break. Chats it up with the death nurses. Karl Gustav Frey, resident of Pforzheim, May 23, 1940. Else Landau of Pforzheim, July 23, 1940, Eugen Aab, Elsa Abel, Frieda Beckh, Karl Beer, Richard Blessing… [the names falling through the trees onto the courtyard the castle]
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Once a week, a staff member was sent to the village to purchase groceries and delicacies. A barbed wire fence [location selected because from the castle anyone approaching could be seen for miles] [under defense is the indefensible] and guards shot sedated patients who, realizing their fate, made a dash for it. A young schizophrenic patient wrote “I will be murdered” in his dessert the day before he was transported from his institution to Grafeneck.
The castle, straight ahead, was the staff dormitory. The staff was also transferred, to jobs at Auschwitz-Birkenau, Belzec, Hadamar, Sobibor, and Treblinka. The gas chamber dismantled, reused. [the names falling through the trees onto the courtyard the castle]
After a long day, the staff needed to unwind. Alcohol was abundant. Paul R., responsible for moving the bodies to the incinerator, missed the celebration for the ten-thousandth victim and only received a bottle of beer leftover “from the festivities” when “an encephalitic corpse lay on the table as Gottlieb Hering, masquerading as a priest, conducted a blasphemous ceremony for the amusement of the carousing company.” (Burleigh, Death and Deliverance)
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The villagers began to suspect something, “I will not sell you my cherries.”
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Snow Globe with Children of the Rubble
In the distance, children are playing in rubble in Germany at two times the normal speed. It’s 1948. On the crushed calligraphy of the evangelical spire, soon toppled; in rebar weeds; on husks of buildings with holders for the flags of their own moral destruction; with missing fathers, high divorce rate (80%). Children born into a defeated country, coming to consciousness in rubble and broken relationships.
-broken fathers, -broken mothers, -snapped brothers and uncles, -dented neighbors coming out of buildings with gardens of rebar, to build or destroy, to begin or end. Crosses in the rubble. Rebar bloom stumbling stones, that new crop of garden flowers. Hans told me he was so hungry that his mother picked grass seed to ground for flour.
Children, like sandpipers and gulls on an empty beach.
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In this snow globe, my mother, Christa, is led by the hand by another toddler, Klarle, as they climb the crater of the Palast Café, the mound of the train station, the pile of a watch factory in Pforzheim. In the distance, children are playing in rubble at 3x, at 4x the normal speed.
As the snow settles on Rubble Mountain, she’s made to leave school at thirteen. Emigrates to America at seventeen. To my grandmother’s heartbreak, her sisters soon follow across the white absence. The snow settles on Rubble Mountain.