Lovely mixed sky, frequent reveal of blue, but chill wind that will supposedly blow us snow over night. A night for leftovers and the book group chat, which is usually enjoyable.
White's novel
Riders in the Chariot just negotiated what is one of the most heart-rending and intense depictions of the transport of Jewish people out of Germany that I have ever encountered. White didn't dwell on one horrific detail after another,
or beat one over the head with the camp guards' brutality; more effectively, he initiated the chain of events from people crammed into trucks, then put on trains as the Germans in charge lied to them about sending them to Istanbul and eventually Palestine. Hope would rekindle in some, and persisted even into the "dressing rooms" of the gas chambers. Some remained unconvinced. People wondered aloud about why they had been put on the train, if it were not to a new life: "Until the father in the stiff hat could bear it no longer, and had to shout, 'The train - don't you see? - was all they had. The trucks were bombed. And so many Jews on their hands. There was no alternative.'But solutions do not always console. Ah, if they could have opened something, and found the truth inside.
Like the two lovers, at least, whose faces were cupboards containing antidotes, but only efficacious on each other."