I'm a teacher in a small Michigan community college. In the same small town, I have also taught a Sunday School class. One day, in the Sunday School room, a small family came to register their daughter. This would have been a normal event, but I had a deep sense-impression of the "father" as a Nazi officer - so much so, that I pulled back from him.

Some time later, this same man enrolled in my college research writing class. He no longer gave me the impression of being a Nazi officer, but I was taken aback when, leaning arrogantly back in his schoolroom chair, he said he wanted to write his research paper on the "fact" that in World War II the Holocaust never happened - no ovens, no dead Jews. I tried to talk him out of this topic, saying it was impossible to prove a negative - especially since after the liberation of the concentration camps, Germans who lived in nearby towns were photographed carrying out prisoners who had starved to death.

"No," he said, "that is a lie. Trick photography. It didn't happen." The upshot was that the man, unable to find trustworthy sources, dropped the course.

A few years later, supposedly by chance, I again met this same student in a hallway of the college. I was astounded by the physical change in him. He was bent, twisted, his face contorted in pain. I asked whether he had been in an accident.

"No," he said. "No accident. I've had operations. But now I've had all the operations the doctors will do. Now I will have to live with it," and then he added angrily, "But that's not the worst of it! The worst part of it is the voices I hear when I'm in the shower!"

I asked him what voices. He peered angrily down into my eyes. "Yes, that's what I told you - I told you it's the voices! I get in the shower, I turn on the water. That's when I hear the voices!"

Taken aback again by his intensity, I could only think to ask him what the voices were saying. "Saying? What is the matter with you? The voices are not saying anything! The voices are crying!"

Darby Mitchell
castlepublishing2003@yahoo.com

Posted June 13, 2006