If you breathe, it hurts less


 

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

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Bad blood

Image
  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...
Read more

Passing for Christian

Image
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...
Read more

Kind Eyes

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...
Read more