Well maybe kick is not the right word. You have to admire a group of people whose hatred was so complete that it not only defied logic but also deified it at the same time. Perhaps what I mean is that in the absence of humanity, the cold calculus of brutality becomes a passion of its own, an austere lust.
Or not.
All I know is that swirly thoughts of the dire and the dopey both came to mind when I came across this odd little twidbit in the album. It was a small coin, of all things. Not a coin exactly, but a token made of wood and imprinted with the cartoon face of a wretched fellow. It took some time but I eventually found out just what it was. The face was supposed to be a caricature of a Jew and the token was from a board game popular in Germany before the war. The game was called Sammeln die Juden. Find the Jew.
I never could find anything else out about the game but I can easily imagine the board and dice and tokens like this one along with others of upstanding citizens and playing pieces like little swirls of colored custard. A swastika somewhere of course, and maybe a whole city laid out on the board. A Candyland for haters.
And I imagine that this was no Glass Bead Game with its vast and mysterious synthesis of all arts and sciences. Nor in any way like chess with its endless rich variations or even checkers with its amusing leaps and jumps. No, this was the game of life reduced to the most routine, ordinary callousness. A slow game, a quiet game, of methodical moves and small advances. Dumb fun like the games we play now on our smart phones.
I can even imagine a relative of mine – let us call her Doria for the moment – sitting at a kitchen table in an apartment in Vilna playing this game. Why, you ask indignantly? Not because she believes in it but because she does not. Because it is ridiculous and ludicrous and any other “ous” you can think of. The game is the horror all around her reduced to its greatest inanity. Monstrous evil arriving as a dim joke, a giggle in the middle of a nightmare. In other words, comic relief.
In the movie version, she would be playing this game with a young German officer who has become attracted to her. Let us call him Andra. It is the only way for them to spend secret time together, there in her kitchen, and both of them see how bizarre it is. But it is a game and they are young and dice are tossed like flirtations, and they laugh. In two days, the rest of his unit will arrive and there will be no more games. They know this and still move their pieces around the board like a coy dance.
Think of it like that knight playing chess with the devil on the beach in that movie. You know the one. But here the knight is day and the devil is just a boy and the beach is apartment #13 on Knorder Street in Vilna, Poland.
“And what will happen when we have played this through?” she asks, and his snap answer is: “When I win you mean.”
“What if I win?” she says.
“You cannot win, you can only play longer. Or no longer.”
But that is all movie motif or maybe even cliché. There is no knight, no soldier, no shy glances between moves. Doria sits alone at the table watching the sky, inhaling the odor of lemons, inhearing the sounds of tanks rumbling towards the outskirts. In the street she notices a blonde girl on bicycle, a woman carrying bread in a brown canvas bag, a rat nonchalantly sniffing at the curb. She plays the game by herself, tossing and counting, moving the tokens around, anticipating the next move, waiting for the game to end, waiting for that singular instant in which the inevitable becomes commonplace.
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