REal and unreal-- Holocaust monologues

  On liberating Auschwitz-Birkenau (for Rocko Impreveduto)   Email to Al Sullivan   All the windows are black now Bruised light seeping through somehow A blind eye groping for its edge Blind fingers feeling for a blistered edge   Thick walls built long before I was born Decorated with people’s hopes forlorned A limb left here; a heart dropped there Reading  doesn’t capture its terrible air   My ming standers by the numbers who came this way The six million sould whose faces fade What terrible thing did any of them do Except to bear the burden of being jews   Gone are all those who kept them here Ghosts who haunt can shed no tears Only the living can if they will That is those who can remember still   I read a book and it’s not the same No Nazi guard screaming out my name A soldier tole me hw once stepped on bones He at first thought were stones Then each time he tried to tie his shoes He wondered what in their place he would do Remembering above a...

  Email to Al Sullivan   Who puts crosses up in concentration camps, Rattling the bones of the Jewish dead? Good Christians putting their stamp On the ghosts of souls they have never met. Nun rub magic beads over the ashy ruins Where civilization had its finest hour Like Shakespeare’s witches predicting doom Upon people graced with God’s golden shower. Whose bloody hands do we willingly shake? Whose rotting heart do we so admire? In whose oven does our bread bake? How hot must we make the fire? Doing nothing for years I only looked Ignoring the cries I knew must be pain I pretended that I never understood, Then cried as loud when my turn came. How inhumane we humans can sometimes be, Casting stones at the weak and most needy, We who are special and criminally free, Force our brothers to believe what we believe. Who put the crosses on concentration camps? We do, and we hang people on them, too.   holocaust menu email to Al Sullivan

He has a nice face, and kind eyes, and very soft hands. So I don't understand how hands so soft can cause so much pain? He wakes us each morning and tells us how unworthy we are, striding up our lines to look closely at each of us for something none of us can see. If we could see it, we might change it before he sees it, we think a flaw in our faces or a look in our eyes he does not like. Sometimes, he even smiles before he frowns as if to tell this person or that all will be well when it won't be. We all know this person or that person in this line we stand in must die today. After so many times, we know someone must die, we just don't know who. And we understand we die because he wants us to die, and it is up to him to decide which one of us he wants on which particular day. So when he wakes us up each of us wonders which one of us his kind eyes and soft hands will kill next, and how many days it will take him to kill us all, and if in the end, which ones of us are really...

    I know Pa As the train I’m on reaches St. Louis, he’s still on the front porch in his rocking chair with the rest of my folks on either side, staring down the dirt road I dove off on, thinking I’ll be coming back. First born girls like me ought not to leave home unless we’re married, and even then no so far as Flatville let alone heading to New York like me. My kin – like most kin in those hills n—figure family ought to stick close, not go wandering off where nobody knows them or cares to. More than once Pa’s told me to quick acting so uppity, like I’m such a superior being when I’m of the same flesh and bone as he and Ma, and my siblings. He doesn’t want to hear that I got a mind of my own, and dream of making myself over into something other than what he and ma have become. I look at ma and shudder, knowing she isn’t half as old as she looks, and how she’ll die long before she has a right to because of the life pa makes us leave. She works harder than any slave ever did,...

  I make up a face for the Jew in my head, whose hair makes up my bed and my socks. I know it is more than one Jew, but I ache for a face to comfort me. It is so cold here under the Atlantic, American or British ships constantly on the prowl in their search for us. We slither silently along the bottom. I am always scared and cold and lonely. Even a Jew's face is better than no face at all. This is something I know none of the others trapped inside this hull understand. They tell me to love the fatherland. They tell me I must hate Jews or gypsies or Soviets or any others listed on the list of enemies the Fuehrer issues. But how do I hate the man or woman who keeps me warm? The Americans have a saying about walking in another man's shoes, and here I walk in their socks and sleep on their heads. How can I hate them? How can I not wonder about them? Was this a good man? Did he raise good sons? Sometimes in my dreams I call out names I have never heard in waking, Jews names, dead n...

Published Because some professional actors said they could not use the work unless they were published; I have finally published these monologues and others -- and these are available at Amazon.com. This collection includes other material not originally available on this site -- slightly over 40 monologues.   My landlord is convinced I am a Jew. No matter how much I study being Christian, something small always trips me up. I need to leave Germany, but Christian guards are savvy to every trick, grilling people like me to make certain we really are the Christians we say we are. Each time I think I am ready to take that test, I panic. I pray for guidance, not as a Christian, nor even as a Jews, but at a desperate girl, having faith that God didn’t mean for any of this to happen and that he will eventually help save me. I am luckier than most in that I look German. On the street people nod at me as if I was one of their own. This has kept my landlord in doubt. He fears that I might re...

  The problem is in my blood. I was born with it. It keeps surging through my veins making them hate me for it. Somehow, it makes me inferior to them like some disease for which there is no cure. But they are always trying to find a cure anyway. We wear stars on our chests or backs We see notices of doom on our doors. We go to ghettos to keep from spreading what we have to people who cannot catch it. They try to starve it out of us, work it out of us, beat it out of us, when they know like we know it is something in our blood. So they spill that, too, herding into this place where we might be kept safe from hurting anyone, stealing away the weakest of us so as to leave the rest of us for work. And still that is not enough, sweat and tears unable to rid us of this thing that stirs in our blood. And I think as I take this razor. If I let out all the bad blood will they finally let me live?     Published Because some professional actors said they could not use the work unles...

Published Because some professional actors said they could not use the work unless they were published; I have finally published these monologues and others -- and these are available at Amazon.com. This collection includes other material not originally available on this site -- slightly over 40 monologues.   I always thought of myself as a good Nazi. In those days, we all needed to believe in something. We once saw ourselves as the Holy Roman Empire, feared -- we thought -- throughout the world. We once marched through Europe in grand majesty -- too proud perhaps. So many others sought to destroy us, and eventually did. My father never recovered from the humiliation he felt when the emperor surrendered in 1918. Better death by mustard gas, he said, than the slow death he suffered later, his mind becoming twisted with rage before the end. I saw Hitler as our salvation, a man with ideas, a man who could bring back to the fatherland the pride my father saw ooze away. I put on the uni...

  If you breathe, it hurts less, I think, feeling my bones rattle with each breath I take. I no longer crave food I know will never come. I crave air, but fear if I take too deep a breath someone might notice me and tell me to stop. I breathe less and hope the pain will cease, though I know it never does. Each breath reminds me I still live when many I know have died. This is the real dilemma: to breathe or not to breathe. There is no other question, As long as I breathe, I will feel pain; and as long as I feel pain, I know I am alive. And yet, if I breathe, it may hurt less.     Published Because some professional actors said they could not use the work unless they were published; I have finally published these monologues and others -- and these are available at Amazon.com. This collection includes other material not originally available on this site -- slightly over 40 monologues. Holocaust Monologues: the real and the unreal holocaust menu email to Al Sullivan

Published Because some professional actors said they could not use the work unless they were published; I have finally published these monologues and others -- and these are available at Amazon.com. This collection includes other material not originally available on this site -- slightly over 40 monologues.   The trash cans rattle in yard outside my window like Marley’s chains. A screen door yawns with a squeak so loud someone should be charged for torture. My night light flickers to vibration of each footstep down the alley. My landlady tells me people living in the room I just rented sometimes hear ghosts. An old Polish Jew lived in this flat before I got it, always jerking up at the least sound, as if he was the ghost and not those making the noise outside. He bore a numbered tattoo on his army and usually drank too much on Weekends, one of the parade of Polish men staggering back to their homes after the bars closed. My landlady says she could sometimes here hear singing songs ...

In the last hours before the darkness comes, they choose: right or left. After all the badges we wore, and ghettos we lived in, after the box cars and bunk beds, after all the ditches dug and sweat of having not been buried in one, it all comes down to right or left. I have never been a man of great courage, choosing things more out of necessity than conviction, with the hope all would turn out well in the end with whatever choice I made. So doing what I was told made sense to me, even when what they told me to do did not. Perhaps I truly believed God or fate would steer me right when logic could not, each stumbling step through each strange change making me more desperate for some divine plan that lacked in mankind. But I know better now on this walk to the showers that are not showers, I know neither God nor fate holds my hand, only blind luck and some man in a uniform steering me to the right or it is the left?   Published Because some professional actors said they could not use...

   Published Because some professional actors said they could not use the work unless they were published; I have finally published these monologues and others -- and these are available at Amazon.com. This collection includes other material not originally available on this site -- slightly over 40 monologues.     My father called any music other than Jewish music, German music, and hated me for playing it. His idea of an orchestra was comprised of 12 instruments and resigned to the Temple. He always complained about “that screeching in the attic” when I practiced, thinking my violin as something evil. “Why do you knot learn to play the lyre or harp?” he always asked me. But I was always an ambitious boy and wanted to play great music not associated with scripture. I wanted to play in the great concert halls in Berlin or Paris or Prague. Now, I play here, scratching out “German music” each day when the work men march out of camp to the factories and each evening when...

  Look at them, standing there looking at us as if we do to them anything more than they deserve! Are they not to blame for all the bad things that we have suffered before we figured out who to blame? These self-righteous, self-pitying people who think they own God and us, doing every bit of foul work proud people would never do, always trying to subvert us, to cast themselves above us and sometimes, we don�t even know who they are, this pathetic breed who breeds as to squeeze us out. That's why we mark them. To make sure we know who and where they are, and so that they cannot continue to ruin us. Look at them! Why do they stare at us like that? Do they think they deserve what we take from them? They work hard, but then so do insects. We cannot trust them. Even the ghetto is too good for them. They conspire so, and compiling them in one place only makes them worse. Even the cattle cars are too good for them, a wasted resource upon which we can't even feed. And yet, they stare...

Published Because some professional actors said they could not use the work unless they were published; I have finally published these monologues and others -- and these are available at Amazon.com. This collection includes other material not originally available on this site -- slightly over 40 monologues.   Momma always told me that if I didn’t eat right I would turn to skin and bones. I always tried to make momma happy. But I am a leaf, so think I can see the bones through my flesh. We never have enough to eat. Some say I am lucky to have survived our first coming to camp. Someone else says a German law prohibits the Nazi from killing anyone until we turn 18. But since when did German law protect a Jew? I saw them shoot many men, women and children when we got off the cars, people they say weren’t strong enough to work. I must look strong. They let me live. But the men in uniform always yell at us, whipping us to do more, beating the women -- even my mother. I don’t know how to ...

  I touch momma's lips and they are cold. Sometimes people get cold like that, she told me once when we saw someone go cold on the train. But I never though momma would. She's always the one who keeps me warm, especially when I am lonely at night. I've been lonely a lot since we left home and still don't know why we had to leave, only that momma said we must. I didn't like it so much when we slept in the street with all our neighbors who talked around fires about all the other people who went cold. I want to make momma warm again like she did for me. So I rub her hands until another lady makes me stop and the men with guns come and take momma away. Everybody is waiting here. But no one will tell me for what. Even momma wouldn't say. And I'm cold and I'm scared that I might go cold like momma did, and I have nobody to rub my hands while I wait.     Published Because some professional actors said they could not use the work unless they were published; I ha...

(This is my next film – a single act play) New photo/video menu   Scene one: (Open with an image of men carrying a wrapped up body out of a brownstone – camera draws back then, slides into images of torn up post cards)   Scene two:   (Danny and Tom meet on the street in front of a store along Kennedy Boulevard in Jersey City,  then both start walking towards Hoboken)   DAN: Hey, Tom             Have you seen the old lady today?   TOM:             You mean you ain’t heard?   DAN:             Heard what?   TOM:             Hey, Man             I don’t want to be the one who tells you about it, you two being as close as you are an all.        ...

  If I have so much, why do I feel so poor? We live in this place because they do not let us live anywhere else and then blame us for living as we do. They call us greedy, and say we earn our livelihood in dirty professions, as if we could earn our keep in any other way. I count coins at night because I have so few to count, and must squeeze what I can out of each, knowing I will be blamed for being cheap. They hate us not merely for what we are, but also for our ability to survive. Each time they take something from us, we manage, and so they take more until we have nothing left for them to take except what we cannot give up, and then they take that, too. When they put us in ghettos, they thought we would act like rats and devour each other in such a small place. But we survived. So then they put us in an even smaller place, and even smaller after that, and a place finally so small, we turn to dust.   Published Because some professional actors said they could not use the work...