Fifty-Four Miles From Dachau by Gail Hosking
I play in the forest near our apartment building assigned by the American military ten years after the war is over. I am building a home with rocks and sticks and leaves piled into my make-believe kitchen. Sometimes I bring my doll and my two younger sisters to live there with me on summer afternoons. We breathe in the air of freedom even as I look over the nearby rock wall to see barbed wire around the base across the street. The arched gate we enter for popsicles at the Snack Bar or for books at the library above the parade grounds or for a western movie on Saturday afternoons is the same gate those
gray SS uniforms once walked through with heavy stamping steps, their black boots making a melodic pattern of violence.
I do not know this yet.
My father brings me to Dachau one Sunday afternoon when I am ten, and we stand in front of the gruesome pictures with their striped pajamas and rawboned, skeletal bodies piled onto bunk beds. I am silent as I stare in disbelief. It is a piece of a puzzle I cannot put together, maybe never will. The German woman who comes to clean our apartment, the German café owner we call Onkel Zeppi, or the lady at the ice skating rink who gives me Gummi Bears in exchange for my one German mark—who are these people now?
A fragment of flesh, a taste of terror, roses near ashes, a child playing house in a forest, slipping her idle hours away within whispers too strong to hear.
Artist’s Statement
I write to insist on the gray areas of life, not the black and white of heroes or losers, nor good vs. bad. My writing of poems and essays and memoir seems to keep returning to my days of youth, to a world that no longer exists. I keep thinking I'm done, but a new thought appears and so I get out the pen again.
Gail Hosking is the author of the memoir Snake's Daughter: The Roads in and out of War (University of Iowa Press) and the poetry collection Retrieval (Main Street Rag Press). She holds an MFA from Bennington College and taught at Rochester Institute of Technology for 15 years. She is a member of the Author's Guild. Her essays and poems have appeared in such places as Lilith Magazine, Upstreet, The Florida Review, The Chattahoochee Review, Nimrod International, and Consequence Magazine.
