It’s 1984, and there’s a feature story about the Holocaust in the magazine section of the Sunday newspaper. At age nine, I have an adult vocabulary and an insatiable appetite for reading material. I devour the story without knowing what I am getting into. Within the first page, there is a description of a lampshade made of human skin. I shudder with revulsion. The feeling is queasy and stinging, like when I eat a whole chili pepper because my taste buds are bored.
I hear my father coming and hide the magazine under the comics section, even though he is not the one who tries to police what I read. I say no thank you to his offer of grilled cheese and wait for him to leave before returning to the article. I read about people crammed into rail cars with no bathrooms for days at a time. The idea of having to wet yourself in front of other people gives me a pang that starts in my belly button and ends up between my legs. The pang is familiar from when boys invaded the changing room at the pool. I don’t like the feeling, but I want to figure it out.
I grasp that the Nazis had it in for Jews, and I am indignant. I do not comprehend why their religion would make them a target any more than I comprehend why my sex makes people assume I am only interested in boys and babies, which is another thing I am indignant about. I find it a little fun to be indignant, in that it involves being right and explaining why other people are wrong. Normally I share my latest indignation at the dinner table, so that I can watch my parents exchange looks of wonder and exasperation at how precocious I am. This time I am sure they will not find my indignation charming. I shove the Sunday magazine under my mattress and keep my feelings to myself.
The next time I am dropped off at the public library, where I am trusted to occupy myself while my mother shops at the noisy market that causes me tantrums, I look up the Holocaust in the card catalog. I enter the stacks via the aisle of thick James Michener novels I have been inhaling of late and sidle along the wall to the aisle with the call numbers I am looking for. The books are dusty, nondescript hardcovers, but I find in them tales from survivors who want me to put myself in their shoes. I feel the pang when they are forced to take their clothes off. I shudder when they must shovel their friends’ bodies into the crematoria. I join their clandestine prayer sessions and know not just indignation but rage.
When my Gifted & Talented teacher assigns a multimedia project, I cannot resist telling her I want to do mine about the Holocaust. I promise to write a report, create a radio play that I will audiotape, and build a scale model of a concentration camp. Until now, my teacher has believed me to be a people-pleasing sort of smart, like the other girls in the class. I see her mentally regroup me with the boys, whose obsessions with combustion and bodily fluids embarrass all of us. I never start the project and suffer from a debilitating stomachache the entire week it is due. When I return to school, no one mentions the missing project, and I am allowed to resume my status as an obedient little girl. I stop visiting the aisle at the library and start reading Ayn Rand.
It’s 1991, and I am on a bus packed with high school band kids headed for Dachau. My crush, a Jewish trombonist, fills me in on the horrors of the Holocaust as though I am as ignorant as all the other WASP kids in the tour group. His version is somehow both hyperbolic and sanitized, but I know better than to say so.
I wander the monument alone. I expect it to kindle revulsion and rage, just as the books did. But the concrete structures are ugly and mundane, and I can’t seem to feel a thing. Back on the bus, my crush professes to have been overcome by the experience. I don’t dare share my indignation at the sterility of the place. I worry what it says about me.
It’s 2018, and I am being evaluated for autism at the age of 42. The therapist asks me if I had special interests as a child. I flash back immediately to the public library and feel the pang that I now know as vulnerability. I remember the multimedia project and the shame that stopped me from completing it. I recall my desire at Dachau to be wrecked by emotion as penance for my grisly interest.
Sharing these things with the therapist will help him conclude that I am autistic, which I need if I am to continue to function in my overly stimulating workplace. Being autistic will, in turn, excuse my erstwhile obsession.
The therapist raises his eyebrows encouragingly. I prepare to confess and blush from my collarbone to my hairline.
Well, I say, I guess I liked to read.
Xavier George (they/them) is the story-telling alter-ego of academic political theorist Dr. Gwen Ottinger. Curious about things most people take for granted, their fiction imagines how social and political change can happen through the actions of individuals who are neither paragons nor monsters. George is inspired by their experiences in communities on the front lines of petrochemical pollution across the United States and the peculiar challenges of being an autistic, female-bodied GenXer.
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