I have been studying the Holocaust since high school and have never been fully able to accept the capacity even one human being has to inflict such brutality on another, and the capacity another human being has to survive such brutality. I cannot begin to conceive of the conscious mechanisms of the collective will of the state to persecute and murder such large numbers of people. Yet, just as the Holocaust happened in all of its misery and horror, genocide continues to plague humanity in various incarnations. Therefore, we must make a more profound effort to understand our proclivity for genocide.

Genocide always introduces itself to us through fascism. One of the things I cannot accept today is our collective inability to see fascism approaching, even as it manifests itself in new forms, in different uniforms, using folksy slogans and unrelenting lies for sinister purposes and deceptions. What is the nature of this blindness? Why do we welcome the sonneteers of fascism before the hard poetry of their song hollows out hate from us and leaves love and life abandoned? In James Moll’s The Last Days, Hungarian Holocaust survivor Alice Lok asks, “What do our books teach us?”

As a teacher I often taught William Golding’s Lord of the Flies as a Holocaust allegory. In a BBC interview, Golding revealed that his masterwork was a microcosmic reflection on World War II and, in particular, the capacity people have to do the most unimaginable things given a certain set of circumstances. He went on to assert that “there existed a little Nazi in all of us,” and that “political nostrums” and privileged social rank have very little to do with our capacity to behave with civility or savagery when certain conditions that threaten our security prevail. His book then bears this out in frightening and heartbreaking detail as the children pursue their own form of island fascism, where justice, safety, freedom, choice, and survival itself are confiscated in the name of absolute power. It’s one of the many books that serves as a warning to the literate masses that the frail nature of humanity is vulnerable to totalitarianism; and that the less vigilance we practice, the more peril we invite.

I wrote “Selection” from the idea of revealing the final moment of the confiscated soul, where the inventory one makes of one’s life before annihilation is unable to resonate with hope, with innocence, and with anything consecrated with the idea of democracy, justice or faith. This must be where many Holocaust victims found themselves in their final seconds, unable to reconcile on any level the rationale of their tormentors with any estimable essence of their own deaths.
It was a death before dying.

The bitter observations that are collected in the verses and the tender warnings of the chorus are dissipating mists merely sniffed in by the beasts that bloat themselves on the hatred that slaughters the lambs. I can only guess this is how Primo Levi felt.

Perhaps the worst thought of life is to be indifferent to one’s own death.
What is death before dying?

That has to be the greatest act of inhumanity the Nazi’s delivered upon the Jews and all others who perished in their camps.

“Selection” is the endgame of the hopelessly indifferent under the boot of the mercilessly uncivil. It is the unraveling of the individual in the face of certain mob annihilation. It is the systematic confiscation of the cell’s instinctive drive to rebel and survive, leaving the cell to decay, unable to replicate, to rally. It is the warning that the mindless, unquestioning giving into power is the giving into oblivion; and within the darkness of oblivion are the accompanying fire and ashes, the triumph of the irrational, and the desperate hope for permanent sleep of the condemned and appalled. As the final choice, it is the final giving in to a secondary world without pain, without betrayal, without any reconciliation to the problems of life.

It is a death before dying.

It is a wished for suicide built on a long life of witnessing the creeping personal and national political nihilism that metastasizes in full view of the bystander; a longing to receive the knockout punch, to end it all so that one can utter in the last breath, in the vacuum of the unconscious language of denial, that at least the ‘I’, the ‘ID’, the ‘Superego’ took no part in its own respective selection and destruction. How can certain annihilation be otherwise? Isn’t the tiniest speck of consciousness beholden to the consideration of its own demise? If you factor in the death of children, the end of innocence makes more dark the fiction of civilization and makes hard rain out of the mist of doom.

Truly, for all of us, a death before dying.