Never


     FPO.
     I knew those initials somewhere in the part of the brain that remembers lost things.  It stood for Fareinikte Partisaner Organizatzie.  Yes, these were the famous Partisans of Vilna that my aunt’s great-aunt Rachel joined sometime after it was formed in 1942.  Their motto was "We will not allow them to take us like beasts to the slaughter."
     I still shiver whenever I hear that phrase.

     Shiver and see, in my eye’s mind so to speak, my wiry ancestor stalking through the forests outside of the town, ready to scratch and claw her way, if need be, towards survival.  They were saboteurs, these Partisans, fighters and scrappers, men and women who refused to give in.  Not reasoners or accepters; no theorists of the human right of submission.
     No.
     Into the woods with guns and sticks and hammers and the rage of those who have lost everything and therefore have everything left to fight for.

     Sometime that year, the Gestapo caught and killed one of the FPO leaders named Oskar Willenberg.  He very well might have joined my family, if you get my meaning, but he died too soon and his death was a terrible blow to Rachel.  Nonetheless the Nazis decided to make a big deal out of it and they organized a small group to take shovels and march into the forest to bury him.  They picked only the women for this, figuring they would be less trouble.

     Rachel, thin and young, was among them and on a gray day in November she was given a small spade and taken to a clearing where the women were instructed to dig.  Who knows what went through her mind as she struggled to stick the spade into the hard ground?  Visions of herself and Oskar sitting at that café in town and talking about Freud maybe.  Walks along the main street being seen by their neighbors.  His breath in her ear.  Or maybe something else.
     At one point one of the soldiers came over and pushed against her elbow.  He was just a kid himself and really trying to help her get some leverage but it was too late in history for that.  Rachel took his push to mean that he was shoving her into the grave – she felt the forest closing in – and something snapped.  She hauled the spade around, smashing him in the face, and shouted “keyn mol nisht!”
     Never!
     The soldier, stunned, looked up at her with a puzzle in his eyes and she thought the better of what she had done.  But that thought did not take and with another move, she swung around again and cracked the spade into his skull.  Two other soldiers nearby, suddenly jerked out of their daze, lunged at her but now she swung the tool like a dire pendulum, knocking down everyone in its path. 
     Soon swinging shovels and shouts of “keyn mol nisht” filled the air and resounded through the trees and the Resistance was reborn in that moment.

     This is the way she fought for the rest of the war, filled with a “never” and a swinging spade…or at least this is the way I have chosen to conjure her.
     And then sometimes, late at night, lost in the dark of my own fears, hunted by regrets, hounded by failures, digging an unwanted grave myself, I imagine my glorious Rachel, the fighter, crouching behind a tree, ready to pounce.  Is this my oytser, my gift, this hidden courage I have yet to know?  It could be.  Stranger things and all.  Perhaps it is there within me, a twist in the helix or some bibble in the junk DNA, a legacy handed down that makes my life, yes even that, stand for something in some way.
     Truth, lies, science, myth.  It is all the same…little moments in a tale told tellingly.  Rachel being one that I can call on for courage.  Unlike her, I do not speak Yiddish.  Just a smattering of words here and there.  Oh yes, but I know what “Keyn mol nisht!” means. 
     I know what it is to say “never.”
     Even here in my cozy room with the heat from the radiator hissing, I shout it when the forest closes in.

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