There. Now you know everything. Sorry? Another question? You want to know if this is a true story? A true story? Of course not, absolutely not. There were no cargo trains crossing war-torn continents to deliver urgently their oh-so-perishable cargo. No reunification camps, internment camps, concentration camps, or even extermination camps. No families were vaporized in smoke after their final journey. No hair was shorn, gathered, packaged, and shipped. There were no flames, no ashes, no tears. None of this, none of this happened, none of this is true. Any more than the poor woodcutter’s wife and her poor woodcutter husband, any more than the heartless and the hunters of the heartless. None of this, none of this is true. Not the liberation of the towns and the fields, the forests and the camps, which never existed. Nor the years that followed that liberation. Not the grief of fathers and mothers searching for their missing children. Not even the fringed prayer shawls woven from gold and silver threads. Not the man with the goat and the shattered face, nor the man who wore a moleskin hat—thanks be to God, if indeed He still exists!—the man who wore a mole that had been disemboweled and turned inside out to make a hat. None of this, none of this is true. Not the poor woodcutter’s ax, the ax that sliced the mole in two before dispatching the two wretched militiamen, hunters of the heartless.
None of this, none of this is true.
The one thing that is true, genuinely true—or deserves to be in the context of this story, because there must be a grain of truth in any story, otherwise why sweat blood to tell it—the one true thing, truly true, is that a little girl—who did not exist—was thrown from the window of a cargo train, out of love and out of despair, was thrown from a train, wrapped in a fringed prayer shawl embroidered with gold and silver thread—a prayer shawl that did not exist—was tossed into the snow at the feet of a poor woodcutter’s wife with no children to treasure, and that this poor woodcutter’s wife—who did not exist—gathered her up, fed her, treasured her, and loved her more than anything. More than life itself. There.