T H E E N D C O M M U N E

Let me tell you: that girl from the Brothers Karamazov fought for a handle on sanity just like the Jewry of Kamiyanets-Podilskye or Jozefòw did; she crawled brutally in the grossness of her own waste, and the Jews so did in the dirt of their own blood; she weltered in it, she was forced to eat her own soilage; the Jews of Kamiyanets-Podilskye were marched off to ravines and to ditches prepared for the burden of massacre, and as if in a single breath of air the town had lost about 23,600 of its former inhabitants. Men, children, women – not one person stands out in the abhorrent pools of death, the vortices swirling downward in degradation, how they whirl with its current of anonymity, for it is very evident that both five-year old girls and whole ethnicities alike disappear, fast or slow, unknowing or with burning clear-sight, into its great and ever-frothing maws – the omni-swallowing abyss of mortality.