reading my book

For my class on The Holocaust, we have been assigned to read Primo Levi's Survival in Auschwitz.

I have been avoiding reading it for awhile. I've been carrying it around, thinking perhaps, that i will start reading it on a boring bus ride or while waiting for something. It's not one of those books, though. You don't just casually pull it out and start reading. It has been haunting me, even before I opened it.

When I finally started it, I felt myself trying to disconnect from it. My brain kind of going into denial- as if it was just a Stephen King story.

I didn't think I would get scared by it. I've read a few books on The Holocaust. It is so crazy how numb you get to it.

Up until now, we've been learning about how The Holocaust happened, Hitler, what the political climate was in Germany, etc. That is all much more palatable. To read the day to day experience of someone who was there is different. Don't like it.

I also became aware of how I have a personal concentration camp in my head. When I read about it, things are always set up the same. The bunks, the camp, what it looks like and sounds like at night when the inmates are sleeping- always the same.

One of the buildings or a building always looks similar to this factory (or some sort of industrial building) in Crystal Lake off of Rte. 31 near Rte. 14. That has always fascinated me- how we (or I) asimmilate things in stories to things we know- the "sets" we construct for stories that we are reading to take place in. Often stories take place a lot in my childhood or (strangely) in my friend Heather's house.

Forgive me if I quote Bette Midler again:

"The truth is scarrier by far
than anything that Stephen King could write."