Your Reeboks step out of the box car and into a nightmare.
But it’s not your nightmare. You gaze shocked, as the life-
stifling reality grips you. Thousands of shoes in all sizes.
You peer down at your spotless one hundred-forty-dollar
basketball shoes, and wonder how it must have felt to wear
those thin, ugly leather shoes. Vividly you picture yourself
forced to remove those plain shoes for the last time. You lay
them neatly with your folded clothes and move on. Someone
tosses them in the pile. So many shoes. Two soles per bare-
footed, head-sheared soul, and in this sixty-year old nightmare
not your own, those shoes speak. Their sixty thousand mute
leather tongues cry out. You hear their collective cacophony
of aching grief, a dark dirge for friends, for family, for lovers,
for children, for life. Weeping with their frustrated guardian
angels you perceive the wind-borne ashes of those soles’ souls
blanketing the meadows – but their shoes are here. You brush
away a tear remembering that those shoes are not your shoes.
Inspired by a Holocaust museum exhibit of shoes confiscated
by the Nazis as their victims entered the extermination camp.
