Forgetting by Frederika Amalia Finkelstein

Author:Frederika Amalia Finkelstein
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Deep Vellum Publishing
Published: 2023-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

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My grandfather didn’t die in Poland. He should have died asphyxiated in a gas chamber or with a bullet in the back of his neck, but he managed to flee his country in time. In other words, my grandfather orchestrated a short-circuit: a bifurcation at a precise moment (T) in the process. My grandfather momentarily interrupted the mechanism: the Nazi machine was unable to contain him. Metaphors are always illuminating: imagine a high-precision watch that misses a beat. It wasn’t foreseen, it was entirely unexpected, and yet, the probability that such an error might take place, that such a mistake might occur (if we take into account Nazi doctrine), as rare as it might be, does exist. My grandfather’s survival was an accident. He slipped through the organization’s net, past the will-to-exterminate mobilized by the one called Hitler, then by the one called Himmler, then by the one called Heydrich, then by the one called Eichmann.

My grandfather was like a missed beat in the mechanism of my watch—my watch does it too, it happens, like a mouse darting under a door and disappearing into the night; like a cockroach left uncrushed by an exterminator who didn’t notice it. I am the result of an operation which partially failed at a precise moment in time (T), in a given place (E); I am the distant fruit of a malfunction, the distant result of an exception to the law of death. My grandfather survived by disappearing—and by disappearing, I mean, by exiling himself. He was the missing mass. The extermination’s +1. The remainder: what could not be sacrificed, what escaped destruction.

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