The Swastika Stain

The frequency of hearing Hitler’s name in my home growing up imbued my psyche with a “before the war”—“the war”—“after the war” sense of knowing and not knowing. Sometimes it was unclear whether I, like my parents, was a Holocaust survivor when as a child I would foggily wake up from a dream about being a terrified prisoner in an endless line of terrified prisoners. This inheritance lives in me, sometimes jolting me into a moment of paranoia, sometimes paradoxically soothing me when it provides connection to others, sometimes derailing my sense of time, sometimes allowing surrender to the imprint of my legacy and the impetus to not be silent.

Some decades ago, while sitting high up on the fire escape of my three-story building and enjoying the leafy branches surrounding me a good distance from the Brooklyn backyard below, my attention was caught by a laundry factory’s red-bricked chimney, perhaps ten three-story houses away. It stands tall, wears no frills, and toots no horns, austere in its single focus on getting the job done. With some inherited sense of knowing, I watched the steady white smoke emerge from the blackened chimney top and took endless photos of the monolithic structure as if a familiar symbol lodged in my psyche cried out to be claimed.

More recently while perched in my twelfth-floor apartment and hoping to rest my mind from mid-term 2022 election worries, I gazed at the vast Brooklyn view before me. Aglow with the setting sun, the view got dimmer when my eyes landed on rooftops with smoking red brick chimneys, the symbol of Holocaust crematoria unexpectedly evoked in me once again. After 9/11, code red (connoting “take action”) represented the highest level of alert against potential

terrorist attack, while code green (connoting “there is nothing to worry about”) represented the absence of conflict.

Two decades later, I recently felt pangs of code orange race through me