No one remembers Rachel. No one knows what color her eyes are. I don’t know anything about her. All I know is that she was my my mother’s younger sister. And that she was burned to death in the Concentration Camp called Treblinka. She may have been about 20 years altogether when her life miserably ended.
I couldn’t really ask my Mother about her sister. Growing up as a child whose mother lived with the ghosts of Blue Smoke, I was sensitive to what was acceptable to ask. The point was to not bring back that pain which nothing could contain. Mom did not talk about Rachel. She spoke generously about her brother, Mother and Father. Rachel’s Blue Smoke left the planet without anyone noticing.
Holocaust holes are black hole dynamics which whirls a soul manically. The memories of Rachel are in that hole. “Blue Smoke” is the term coined by the living witnesses of the killings in the death camps. Blue was the color my relatives made when disintegrated by the fires in the burning chambers. Blue Smoke was the only escapee.
During a house cleaning, I found the photo that was taken of my Grandparents and their children. It is the only photo of them. Looking at Rachel’s sweet babyface, I realized how deep the dearth of information about her meant to me: it radically changed a perspective I had. I never realized it before but I must have been dispositionally similar to her. She did not survive; she did not get tough with life’s hardships. She melted in the fires they threw her into.
She fell into my pastel painting I named “Blue Smoke”.
Remembering Rachel, I know that being gentle is good. Becoming hard with life is a hard task. It’s not for everyone. Bless you Rachel. G-d reminded me of you.