How could we ever forget?

How could anyone ever claim that this didn't happen? It did, and it has, and it will. It is happening again.

I have the holes in my family tree to prove it.

I have an aunt who was chased down the street by other children near her border home until they caught her and felt her head...to see if she had horns.

I have met many survivors, who had the numbers tattooed into their arms. And yet there are those who tattoo hatred onto themselves deliberately. That is how cocked up we have become.

If only they knew that there where those who did not have the option to live or to die, to tattoo or not to tattoo, maybe they would understand.

They were stuffed into rail cars like cattle. They were ripped apart from their families. I remember watching this recreated in a scene from Arthur Miller's Playing for Time. Myself and several other Jewish kids fled the auditorium, crying hysterically. That had never happened before or since. It was awful - like an ancestral memory come to life.

And as for anyone who claims that I am a half-Jew, or not a Jew at all, I tell them that I would have died that day too. And not just half of me. I would be 100%, completely, d.e.d., dead.

People look at my nose, at my fair skin and hair, and say, you don't look Jewish.

Bullshit. There is no Jewish race. There is no one Jewish "look".

People make jokes, and sometimes I laugh. But mostly I just feel like shit for playing along with it. So I say, retroactively, fuck you. I'm a Jew. I may not look like it or sound like it, or feel like it half the time - and I may be broke, and I may even be uncharacteristically unmotivated and under-educated...

But I'm sure as hell not anything else.

And I can spell. F-U-C-K. Take your hatred and shove it up your fearful, ignorant ass if you don't believe.

Some people only believe in pain.

Well, there was plenty of that.

There still is.