Sitting On The Bus Essay, Research Paper

Sitting On the Bus It was an absloutely unbearably hot day in televiv. But hey, the travel agent said I was to expect weather like this. Right about now I longed for the cooling sensation of the air conditioner, so I assumed that the buses in Israel would be just as cool as the ones back home in Germany. Well, I was mistaken. Upon boarding one of the many buses that frequent the streets of televiv, I was greeted by a quite displeasing environment. The bus was just as hot as outside, but to make matters worse I now had to put up with an awful smell of bus fumes, and the body odors of various occupants. I relized that fighting the situation was a futile struggle, so I settled into my extremmly ridgid platic seat. As moments went by I become quite occupied by the people of the city, and the things that they were doing. However, this precoccupation was instantly broken when I noticed the face of the man sitting across from me. At first I pretended to ignore the man, despite the fact that he seemed to recognize me and proceeded to glare at me. I could best describe this man’s actions as a, “mute exchange,” however his behavior took an unexpected turn, he started to look at me as if I was familiar to him. I wondered if he recognized me by my, “bald head,” “hard chin,” or perhaps my, “drooping ears”? Anyhow, moments later he seemed to shudder and then he looked away, as if in deep contemplation. I soon followed his actions and once again my mind began to drift elsewhere. I think it was when we were stuck in our third traffic bottleneck, when I was abbruptly hurled back into reality by the sound of a man’s voice. He said, “I think I know you.”, I instantly recognized the voice and just pretended to ignore it, you could even say I was, “playing deaf, blind, dead.” Nontheless, I continued to try and converse with me, eventually I relized I couldn’t ignore him forever. I responded back to him, “Were you speaking to me?”, then he said some thing I couldn’t make out, so I replied, “You were saying?”, then he finally replied once again, “I think I have met you somewhere before.”

Indeed he has met me before, but it seems as if it was in a parallel universe, a place which I longed to erase from my conscious and sub-conscious. So I just played dumb to his inquiry and said, “You are mistaken, I don’t know you.” Well, I must say he was quite persistant in talking to me. We agrued back and fourth, he cliam to me saying that he knew who I was and where I was from, and I, once again, playing dumb and just repeating to him the fact that he was mistaken and that I had no idea who he was. I think of this man as the agressive type, in a matter of phaseing, he went straight for the juggular. He started to speak of various camps–old names, names that I puposly have packed deep in my mind, in the hopes that they would never resurface “Maidanek,” “Bergen-Belsen,” ” Treblinka?” I preyed to god that he would not say the dreaded name of the camp in which he and I both were inhabiting. BUT NO, he did, it was as if he mentioned ealier camps just to make a cresendo for was what to come. “Auschwitz” he said!!! It was then that I managed to put my body on autopilot, and began to retreet into my inner thoughts. It was all comming back now, Auschwitz, or more presisly, Monovitz-Buna, a sub camp of Auschwitz. I was remembering quite vividly what the man looked like back in those days. Yet, I must scold myself, for, “those days,” does not do justice to the time at all, a more suiting name would be, “that hell.” And indeed, hell it was. I remember his figure, literaly skin and bones, and I remembered I was the cause of this. It was because of the way we used to starve him, and numerous others likehim: until they were near death. In specific I remember and example in which I saw the man and his father. I forced the boy to eat his father’s soup. It was probably this lone moment that lead to his death of starvation. WHY OH WHY DID I DO SUCH THINGS. WHY?