Death… It's A Living

I write this from my bed inside my hotel room in Trieste, Italy. I start there simply so I can have a way to begin to write. Sometimes, often in my case, writing itself is uncanny. Is someone in the act of “writing” if they are, more technically speaking, staring at a blank screen, counting the number of times the black cursor blinks during one, two, or three deep breaths. Most how-to-write guides are forgiving with their definitions of writing. “Writing” isn’t only (literal) writing. “Writing” includes such non-writing tasks as thinking about writing, researching material with the intent of writing, reading other written works. If you ask me, though, those actions don’t really feel like writing. They might move the author toward or away from a completed manuscript, but they aren’t getting words down on paper (or a screen). That sort of writing is more like the purgatory of writing. It seems like something might happen, but it might not.

To get to the point where one can feel more productive about writing, these writing guides (which, as an aside, I would not recommend you read because they only delay you from starting to actually write) often advise potential authors to not focus on the first sentence. Don’t worry about the hook, they say. Start writing, anything. Some of it will be good, a lot of it will not. Later, the author can edit this work (this counts as “writing” too, by the way). By keeping the good, removing the bad, and learning what makes the good the good, the author may find it easier to write that hooky first sentence.

Sometimes, though, a lack of literal writing comes from the active avoidance of productivity. Although most writers would like to be productive, some topics defy the desire to be written about. Although death is really the theme of this site, death in the abstract (all people die) is, for me, relatively easy to write and think about. Concrete examples of death are much harder.

I visited Risiera di San Sabba this morning, and I’m still processing what I’ve learned, seen, and felt.

First, some background is in order.

Risiera di San Sabba is an Italian national monument at the site of a Nazi concentration camp. Like many of the camps established outside of Germany, San Sabba was primarily a “transit camp”. That is to say, a place where enemies and perceived enemies of the state (socialists, communists, resistance members/collaborators, and—of course—Jews) were imprisoned, likely beaten or tortured for information, and then held for transport to larger camps, often Auschwitz, where the killings would be more efficient and on a grander scale.

San Sabba is unique in Italy because unlike other Italian transit camps, all of which were located in the north along the border with the Axis powers, it engaged in mass murder. The original purpose of the location was as a rice-husking facility, which meant that it was equipped with a very large furnace, one that could easily double as a crematorium.

Most of the killings took place at night, hidden by the sound of military equipment and barking dogs. Only two of the known murders too place in broad daylight, occurring as part of a that’ll-teach-you-to-go-against-us demonstration of Nazi savagery. These two victim were Italian military officers, who—after the surrender of Italy to the Allies—refused to continue working with Germany. The firing squad that did the killing was comprised of members of the same regiment and were given a choice: continue to live in Italy helping with the Nazi occupation or choose to “work” in Germany or Poland.

Today, the furnace, crematorium, and smokestack no longer exist. These were evidence of war crimes and were destroyed by Nazi explosions before fleeing in 1945. However, the cells (rooms with no light about the size of a king-size bed that held up to six people) have been preserved, as has the death room—a staging area for those with only hours left to live, who were mixed in with corpses waiting to be burned.

Based on witness accounts, the prisoners were probably killed using multiple methods. Some were hanged, some were beaten; many more probably asphyxiated on carbon monoxide fumes from a truck parked outside the death cell.

What more can really be said about something as horrific as the final stages of fascist totalitarianism? There can never really be justice for something as profoundly evil as the human proclivity to find meaning in the elimination of others. One exhibit has haunted me in particular: a letter from a Slovene soldier, very simply informing his family that he would be shot later in the day, so goodbye forever.

Reading notes like that helps to take away the abstraction of death and reveal the sense of terror that humans work so hard to suppress. There is a significant emotional distance between I will die someday and They will kill me in moments.

__________________

My writing has stopped again. Perhaps the emotion of my day trip is getting in the way. I haven’t had a brush with death in the sense that I was ever in any physical danger. But I felt the power of death all the same. And when I allow myself to feel the emotions of the trip, perhaps especially to put myself in the shoes of the Slovene soldier, I stop all over again. Only by writing about writing can I continue with any sort of fluency.

Perhaps that is because death is final. I can’t write about death because that’s the end of the story. If I reframe death not as final but as mysterious, I might be able to think more creatively. By obscuring what I know about death, I can better move on. I can add meaning. I can think about other things.  

Maybe the best way to overcome terror and grief is to do what our caveperson ancestors did and imagine all deaths as having a greater purpose and that things will be better in the future, despite the physical evidence that bodies burn and decay. Most of us would like to believe we live in reality, but many of us wouldn’t last very long in an objective reality. Happiness comes from meaning, not from reality.

Maybe I’ll write about that.

-The Plague Doctor