By the YU Writers’ Guild
Each month, the YU Writers’ Guild accepts submissions for a short story following a specific theme. This month’s theme was “sing me your story” featuring stories based on your favorite song. Members of the club voted on a short story to be featured in the YU Observer. For the month of November, “Vienna” written by Brooke Kohl was selected.
Vienna waits for you
I’m told Vienna waits for me. Well, I’ve waited for Vienna for far too long. I’ve waited through years of violence and persecution, I waited as my nation was brutally attacked by their neighbors, I waited while my people were shipped away like cattle.
Vienna, I’ve waited.
I’ve waited for you, Europe.
I waited as I walked the vast plains of Poland, set foot on the ground where inhumane neighbors stood and heard the screams of fellow humans being burned alive. I waited as I stood in chambers of death and then emerged into a beautiful countryside, where people walk their dogs next to fragmented bones of their haunted history. I waited in beautiful forests with bones beneath my feet, where each leaf I crunched felt like cracking a bone of the family I trod on. I waited by pits where the blood of children cried out to me in despair, where they wailed that the pain was too great to bear, but they bore it anyway.
I waited as I walked as a stranger down streets that once would have been my home. I waited in the cemeteries that show the rich history of my ancestors. I watched leaves fall on their graves and thought of the changing seasons and how the seasons changed as my people went from valued friends to worse than vermin. I waited as I saw the houses of my people taken over by the same neighbors who attacked them. Those families are built on bloodstained foundations, and I wonder if the ghosts of their past ever haunt them, if they can feel that their happiness is built on someone else’s pain.
I waited on railroad tracks, slowly stumbling down the route that once brought my people to be slaughtered. I waited as I was swallowed by walls of stones and heard echoes of one action reverberate through all of space and time. I waited in death trucks and horrifying barracks, among stones showing death, beside empty rectangles full of bones, on asphalt infused with songs of survival. I waited beneath words of work, next to families with giggling kids taking pictures of my pain. I waited next to locks of hair forcefully shorn from the heads of their owners, I waited next to leather shoes aged beyond repair, I waited with suitcases still packed and ready to run, just waiting for someone to slip a hand through their handle and travel away from the horrors they’ve endured.
I waited in the shadow of discarded clothes, between a sister’s blouse and the bullet used to kill her, her memory resurrected as resistance and repaired while remembered. I waited with ritual objects disfigured and disguised, then brought along through travels and travails as symbols of hope. I waited with faded armbands and yellow stars, with prisons built by those to be imprisoned in them, with objects once used for joy turned into poor attempts at distractions from the horrors of life.
I waited in a house of prayer turned into a restaurant. I watched the juicy fat of pig drip down the chin of those who acted like pigs, the meat of millions of dead still visible between their teeth. I drank to salvation while partygoers drank to ecstasy during the worst of times for my people. I read faded words of hope on a wall underneath vulgar graffiti, and I remembered the writing on a wall thousands of years earlier, writing that predicted the coming of better days with the arrival of a foreigner who acted as our savior.
Unlike that, Vienna, your people all turned against us.
My ancestors were doctors, lawyers, artists, and economists. My great-grandparents thought you would offer them a better life than what they had, and indeed, they thrived in your arms for years. But Vienna, your people turned on my people, your sense of morality disappeared or the illusion of it vanished, you shattered our hearts along with our glass and tied our wings and stripped us of our freedom as you scattered our feathers on the winds of change.
I’ve waited with tears tracing tracks down my cheeks, with bloodsoaked history reminding me that I’m in this world for reasons larger than I can fathom. I’ve waited with bated breath before realizing that I would never stop waiting, never be able to breathe.
I’ve waited, and I’m still waiting. I wait as countries and people of the world turn against us again or, more likely, reveal the hatred they’ve been harboring all along. I wait for the truth to be shown, for a light to shine forth and reveal the truths that my people have known for almost 3837 years.
You may wait for me, Vienna, but I’m done waiting for you. I’ve waited through too many years of strife and grief, from you and from the entire world. You’ve extended your hand in citizenship, but I’m not so naive to believe that it’s also a hand of friendship.
Your ship has sailed, your die’s been cast, my family already turned their backs on you.
You may look beautiful, but I see the sins you try to hide.
Keep waiting, Vienna.
Photo Caption: Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial
Photo Credit: Unsplash