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OK, we will try this again. I had typed in a long, long post, and then ezboard ate it. I can only hope ezboard gets a tummy ache in return.
Highdrake - I am glad that you are enjoying The Sparrow, and I hope that someday you will go on to read the sequel, called Children of God. I thought it was the rare sequel that is every bit as good as the original.
Recently I've begun reading a little book by Elie Wiesel called Night. It tells the story of the author's boyhood. He was a studious young Jewish boy in Transylvania when the Germans took over in the course of WW2...
What results after the Germans take over Hungary has not been easy reading, as you watch the deaths of innocent people, of the innocence in one person, and in that person's great belief in God.
After Wiesel somehow survived Birkenau, Auchwitz, Buna, and Buchenwald, he did not speak of his experiences for ten years. When he was finally ready to tell his story, he could not find a publisher, as this story of the Holocaust was considered too depressing for people to read. His story was finally published in France in 1958 and was translated into English and published in America in 1960.
He wrote his story both to honor the millions of dead, but more importantly to teach the living about what happened, in hopes that such evil will never be repeated.
Quote:
Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp, which has turned my life into one long night, seven times cursed and seven times sealed. Never shall I forget that smoke. Never shall I forget the little faces of children, whose bodies I saw turned into wreaths of smoke beneath a silent blue sky.
Never shall I forget those flames which consumed my faith forever.
Never shall I forget that nocturnal silence which deprived me, for all eternity, of the desire to live. Never shall I forget those moments which murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to dust. Never shall I forget these things, even if I am condemned to live as long as God Himself. Never.
Quote:
"You're crushing me...mercy!"
A voice that was not unknown to me.
"You're crushing me...mercy! mercy!"
The same faint voice, the same rattle, heard somewhere before. That voice had spoken to me one day. Where? When? Years ago? No, it could have only been at the camp.
"Mercy!"
I felt that I was crushing him. I was stopping his breath. I wanted to get up. I struggled to disengage myself, so that he could breathe. But I was crushed myself beneath the weight of other bodies. I could hardly breathe. I dug my nails into unknown faces. I was biting all round me, in order to get air. No one cried out.
Suddenly I remembered. Juliek! The boy from Warsaw who played the violin in the band at Buna...
"Juliek, is it you?"
"Eliezar...the twenty-five strokes of the whip. Yes...I remember."
He was silent. A long moment elapsed.
"Juliek! Can you hear me, Juliek?"
"Yes....," he said in a feeble voice. "What do you want?"
He was not dead.
"How do you feel, Juliek?" I asked, less to know the answer than to hear he could speak, that he was alive.
"All right Eliezer...I'm getting on all right...hardly any air...worn out. My feet are swollen. It's good to rest, but my violin..."
I thought he had gone out of his mind. What use was the violin here?
"What, your violin?"
He gasped.
"I'm afraid...I'm afraid...that they'll break my violin...I;ve brought it with me."
I could not answer him. Someone was lying full length on top of me, covering my face. I was unable to breathe, through either mouth or nose. Sweat beaded my brow, ran down my spine. This was the end - the end of the road. A silent death, suffocation. No way of crying out, of calling for help.
I tried to get rid of my invisible assassin. My whole will to live was centered in my nails. I scratched. I battled for a mouthful of air. I tore at decaying flesh which did not respond. I could not free myself from this mass weighing down my chest. Was it a dead man I was struggling against? Who knows?
I shall never know. All I can say is that I won. I succeeded in digging a hole through this wall of dying people, a little hole through which I could drink in a small quanity of air.
"Father, how are you?" I asked, as soon as I could utter a word.
I knew he could not be far from me.
"Well!" answered a distant voice, which seemed to come from another world. I tried to sleep.
He tried to sleep. Was he right or wrong? Could one sleep here? Was it not dangerous to allow your vigilance to fail, even for a moment, when at any minute death could pounce on you?
i was thinking of this when I heard the sound of a violin. The sound of a violin, in this dark shed, where the dead were heaped on the living. What madman could be playing the violin here, at the brink of his own grave? Or was it really an hallucination?
It must have been Juliek.
He played a fragment of Beethoven's concerto. I had never heard sounds so pure. In such a silence.
How had he managed to free himself? To draw his body from under mine without my being aware of it?
It was pitch dark. I could only hear the sound of the violin, and it was though Juliek's soul were the bow. He was playing his life. The whole of his life was gliding on the strings - his lost hopes, his charred past, his extinguished future. He played as he would never play again.
I shall never forget Juliek. How could I ever forget that concert, given to an audience of dying and dead men? To this day, whenever I hear Beethoven played my eyes close and out of the darkness rises the sad, pale face of my Polish friend, as he said farewell on his violin to an audience of dying men.
I do not know for how long he played. I was overcome by sleep. When I awoke, in the daylight, I could see Juliek, opposite me, slumped over, dead. Near him lay his violin, smashed, trampled, a strange overwhelming little corpse. ******************************************************
Our lives are the songs that sing the universe into existence.~David Zindell
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