KONSTANTIN FISCHER, HANIA, CRETE

I HAD COME AS A VISITOR

I had come on a school excursion

thirteen years old, in the early eighties,

with our German and history teachers.

I had come as a visitor and initially it had been

the plethora of colors and shapes that had caught my attention, their order, their system:

black, green, purple, blue and pink. Red and yellow of course, triangles, stripes,

triangles under stripes, triangles forming stars in all possible color combinations.

Yellow for the Jews, as everyone knew, for political prisoners red,

yellow-red stars for Jewish communists, for Jewish Germans caught abroad blue-yellow.

Green for criminals – well, they belonged behind bars, didn't they – and pink:

pink for homosexuals...

Criminals and homosexuals: nobody had told us in class.

Homosexual criminals?

Criminal homosexuals?

Suddenly,

in the dark basement of a camp turned into a museum

that word – not “criminal”, the other one –

that word that so often had been lurking for me

at the bottom of a page, in a book, in a newspaper,

suddenly, for the first time, for a split-second, that word applied to me.

As a visitor. Damn! I had come as a visitor.

Konstantin Fischer, 2013