These are the faces that haunted my dreams as a child, to the soundtrack of my mother sobbing on the couch. Television documentary on, piles and piles of bodies in a big, ragged dirt hole. Nobody put flowers on their graves, she wailed. It was the late 1950’s. It had just happened. Most of the Hungarian side of my family was gone. All of the Russian side was.
Years later, in school, I was presented with the story of the Japanese internment camps. Well, it had happened during the same period. We knew better now.
Today I watched a black television screen with only a soundtrack. This time: Children sobbing, wailing, crying out for their parents, the translation a scroll of white pinching my soul with each letter.
SILENCE=complicity