MONO ISSUE 2 - Flipbook - Page 82
I’m suddenly very frustrated. Why are they telling each other things they both already
know? Why do I have to listen to it? I smile and nod.
“Nothing more efficient than the Nazi death camps though,” my boss continues, and I
feel my smile fix in place. Suddenly I must make a conscious effort of muscles in the
jaw.
I look around for customers. I don’t like this part of the history lesson. The part where
we chat about the Holocaust. There’s one man, leafing through the book section. I hope
he’s engrossed by whatever book he’s reading.
“Talk about mass production,” my co-worker says, under his breath. Even he knows
this is toeing the line for a conversation on the shop floor. He’s not quite as invested in
these history lessons: he’s invested in impressing our boss, however. Possibly, just as
invested in impressing me.
“Mass destruction,” my boss says and snorts.
When I lived in Germany, I was an hour away from an old concentration camp. I chose
to never visit. I saw footage only once in a classroom. A mass grave. I closed my eyes
then. There are some things so big I can’t touch them with my mind. I can only skirt at
the edges. I don’t look at the footage. I chose to look at pictures on a wall instead. I
liked the surrealists best. André Breton, Loius Aragon, Max Ernst. My only human
connection to the war is a grandfather who remembers rationing. That and a second
name that comes from a Jewish step-great-grandfather who anglicized it when
emigrating from Germany. Tenuous threads. Thin threads, and would it make a
difference if I was Jewish myself or had veteran grandparents on both sides? That was
not me. I was firmly not involved. I look at pictures on the wall, words in a book, movies
on a flat screen television set. That’s my war, right there. A swastika graffitied in a public
bathroom and a Keep Calm and Carry On mug. Alright frog memes and young men in
white shirts holding torches. Times have changed. Sort of.
“Not just in the camps,” my co-worker says. “There’s a reason for the name ‘Nazi
Death Machine’.
“Actually,” my boss says loudly, looking excited at the invitation he’s been handed.
“That name was a huge exaggeration. The German war effort wasn’t nearly as
mechanized as everyone thinks. There were one hundred and fifty-five divisions used in
the Blitzkrieg. Guess how many of those were mechanized?”
He pauses. My boss is a big fan of rhetorical questions. He usually waits for someone
to attempt an answer before telling them the second half of the fact.
“I don’t know,” my co-workers says, blunt now and not wanting to play. “Half?”
He must be tired too. He has small children to go home to after this.
“Sixteen,” my boss says triumphantly. “The rest were all on horseback or foot.”
“Wow,” I say, even though I’m not sure what this is in comparison to or if it’s even
true.
I suspect it is. My boss watches a lot of documentaries and has read multiple books on
the subject. He has visited the Imperial War Museum three times so far this year. I’ve
been there too. I saw a gun in a case, but I don’t remember the name or which country
made it. It had been used in combat and even knowing that, I wanted to touch it. I
wanted to know if it was real or if when I put my hand out it would just be plastic, like a
77
