The Ovens of Auschwitz
One need not expend great energy trying to come up with a brand new metaphor for describing the horrors of mass gassing to death of concentration camp prisoners. It is not the power of the metaphor that conveys the dimensionality of soulless evil, but the literal subject the metaphor describes. Nevertheless, some imagery is more visceral than others:
“The chimneys at Auschwitz-Birkenau were constantly belching foul smoke, breathing out the souls of Jewish innocents and sending them up to the heavens. Meanwhile, down on earth there was only hell.”
Living in Fear
The one thing you did not want to find at your door during this time—regardless of who you were, really, but especially if you belonged to one of the “elements” of society the Nazis had deemed expendable—were German soldiers. The simile used to describe the reaction below almost certainly was one heard somewhere in Europe every single night the fascist regime remained in power:
“When Nazi soldiers banged at the door, Mamishu let out a strange screech— like a scream that was strangled by fear. She had meant to calmly say Come in, but of course pleasantries weren’t necessary.”
Ruth Who Became Kristina
The narrator relates the story of a five-year-old girl named Kristina who becomes the central figure in a small subplot about convents, Catholics, adoptions, and the light that should never be missing from a child’s eyes. Except, of course, in those terrible times, such was a common fate:
“After the woman watched and visited with the boys and girls at the orphanage for many hours, her eyes kept returning to one little girl with olive skin so warm it looked as though she had been basking in sunlight. There was little sunshine in the child’s smile, though.”
America
For Mamishu—David’s mother—America existed more as metaphor than literal country. She is described as saying the word with the same sort of dreamy joy that children possess when saying the word “candy.” Everything about America is intensified into a thing of greatness existing as promise. She doesn’t even need particular context to turn the name into broadly expansive metaphor:
“It had to have been hard for Mamishu to even mention Samuel. I felt sorry for her when I saw pain wash over her face momentarily. Just like that, though, she defaulted to being happy. `America!’”
Darkness
Starting sometime in the late 1800’s, “darkness” began its move toward becoming the single most omnipresent metaphor used in literature. For much of that time, it was a metaphor relegated mostly to fiction as a means of implying evil. Darkness did not usurp the position of society’s go-to metaphor from whatever occupied that position before it until just before the mid-century mark of the 1900’s. The catalyst behind this power grab also allowed darkness to become a widely used metaphor in non-fiction since it was the historical realities of the Third Reich that was behind its prominence:
“One thing you could count on inside Nazi-occupied Poland, though, was that whenever hope appeared it was always closely followed by torment. Days after that impromptu dance in our living room, more trouble arrived. There was suddenly no amount of citrine-colored fabric or rose lipstick that could hide the darkness outside our doors.”
