Tuesday, May 2, 4:35 p.m. East Pyne Courtyard. Eerily, I began thinking about my final paper on "Maus: A Survivor's Tale" for ENG 376: Topics in Literature and Ethics, and I paused to listen.
What I was hearing was not the wind in the archway, nor the birds, but a sonorous voice. A young man, standing behind a microphone was reading out the names of people killed during the Holocaust. Throughout the day, thousands of names would pass the lips of various members of the Jewish community. Every day, however, millions of names dwell silently in hearts all over the world. The images live still in the minds of survivors, of Jews, of anyone moved by a sense of vast injustice, by anyone who has ever lost a friend. Spoken into a silent courtyard, the names evoke images of not only starved faces and persecuted eyes, but also the faces of those who were touched by horror, and were spared.
As I paused in East Pyne, I felt the wind, saw the birds, but I heard the names with all my senses. My mind conjured the faces of Anna and Lauren, my roommates and dear friends, both Jewish, both too young to have seen, but both carrying scars in some part of themselves. I wondered what their stories would look like if they told them through the eyes of the ghosts that haunt them, and how those images would affect the world. In that moment, I understood that Spiegelman's "Maus" is not just a picture book, but the "memory images" of a survivor's story related through the eyes of his child. I also realized that any "academic" approach to the tale would always be colored with the faces of my friends, the names of their loved ones and my own sense of crushing sorrow. After Auschwitz there should be only silence, but the memory of the Holocaust remains an experience of the senses, of words, of images, of names. After standing silently for a moment in the courtyard I noted the time, picked up a leaf to press between the pages of "Maus," and walked out of the circle.
Every day is Remembrance Day. Desi Martinez is an English major from Willis, Texas. She can be reached at desereem@princeton.edu.
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