Die Rosa-Winkel & Me
Annette Covrigaru The three of us strut like hitchhikers far from the edge of the road when Anzelm proclaims, “There’s still some around here,” and I swivel my neck as if my eyes alone could scare off skinheads, seeing nothing but our shadows swelling in the sunlight. We’ve grown accustomed to this sun, Andrew and I, since arriving the other night, which, at nearly 10 P.M., lit the platform of the Berlin-Schönefeld Flughafen train station, making us wonder aloud if Earth herself were playing some sort of prank. Aside from the staggered shuffling of our steps and the muffled cadence of buses and birds caught in the wind, Oranienburg is silent. Yet, we hear the remnants of its past enshrouding us in a noise otherworldly and follow it like foxes tracking prey and truth. – Like witnessing a parent cry for the first time, or getting your first period, my first time hearing the word “Holocaust” remains a flashbulb memory, not because of any gruesome details, but the judgment thrown at me for not already knowing. It was a fifth grade American History class about the Revolutionary War, and Ben V. somehow let the word slip out of his mouth. “What’s that?” I asked, only to receive an open-mouthed stare and a pre-Bar Mitzvah-boyed non-explanation. After school, my Dell desktop provided me with endless black & white photographs of contorted bone people amassed in pits and piles, their elongated faces fossilized in voiceless screams. – The three of us split up, or maybe we stay close but don’t notice. Our presence is overshadowed by absence. Our bodies seem solitary, our movements understated, our thoughts asinine. I watch the heels of my Docs kick up plumes of dirt that hover around the ankle before settling back down again on the ground. The boots, worn and gifted by a somewhat recent ex-girlfriend, fashion wrinkles and trenches in the leather circling the tips, as if any misstep could expose every last toe. I listen to them stomp on the barracks’ creaking floorboards. The fragility of it all makes me gag. I rush back outside to the dirt. – The previous Christmas, that somewhat recent ex, at the time my new girlfriend, gave me a copy of The Pink Triangle: The Nazi War Against Homosexuals by Richard Plant, adding an inscription of “Happy Holidays” with a black bubbled heart on the title page. It was the first book I ever owned chronicling what were typically repressed and overlooked Holocaust narratives of queer men. It was, along with Lesléa Newman’s short story “A Letter To Harvey Milk” and Rob Epstein’s documentary Paragraph 175, a literary opening into a history whose pulse, however faint or distant, I wanted to feel and revive. What I didn’t know then was where that pulse would take me: to the University of Haifa for a Holocaust Studies M.A., which would place me in a course “The Second World War” with Andrew, a sensible yet open-minded skateboarder from Florida who, later that summer, would insist on a trip to Berlin to visit our German friend Anzelm, whom we’d met during first semester, but mainly to see a Modest Mouse concert, and, because of our mutual academic passion, the nearest concentration camp, Sachsenhausen – my first. – Between 1933 and 1945, it is estimated that 100,000 men were arrested by the Nazis under Paragraph 145, a German law that made male homosexuality a crime. A Prussian law initiated in 1871, Paragraph 175 was expanded and rigorously implemented by the Nazi regime, deeming not only “homosexual acts” a crime, but “homosexual intent” a crime as well. It was finally repealed in 1969. – A section of brick wall bordering the camp is marked with a memorial plaque: TOTGESCHLAGEN TOTGESCHWIEGEN DEN HOMOSEXUELLEN OPFERN DES NATIONALSOZIALISMUS Nearby, an enlarged black & white portrait of one of the camp’s queer victims glances down at me. They are seated in a cramped space – on a chair in the kitchen, or perhaps a stool in the bathroom, cabinets slightly ajar, the aftermath of having looked and found. Wrapped around their head and knotted just above the ear, a scarf, resting on the right shoulder, reveals dangling opal earrings and matches a kimono, which the knees of their crossed legs protrude from. The subject’s arms curl out of the sleeves like vines. They fidget with a bracelet on their wrist. They finger a cigarette and purse their painted lips. They are elegance. They are genderfuckery. They are joy. I drift from site to site – death to death – until I’m standing in the execution trench. The sun slashes my face. I reach my left arm across to my right ribcage and hold myself. Under my hand is a tattoo, my first – an outline of an upside down triangle. I close my eyes. I inhale. I feel the pulse of absence. |
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About the Author:
Annette Covrigaru is a gay/bigender American-Israeli writer based in Brooklyn, N.Y. They were a Lambda Literary Emerging LGBTQ Voices nonfiction fellow and writer-in-residence in 2014 and 2017, respectively. Their work has appeared in Entropy, Hobart, Cosmonauts Avenue, and The HBO Inspiration Room, among others, and is collected at www.annettecovrigaru.com.
Annette Covrigaru is a gay/bigender American-Israeli writer based in Brooklyn, N.Y. They were a Lambda Literary Emerging LGBTQ Voices nonfiction fellow and writer-in-residence in 2014 and 2017, respectively. Their work has appeared in Entropy, Hobart, Cosmonauts Avenue, and The HBO Inspiration Room, among others, and is collected at www.annettecovrigaru.com.