Kathy's Story

The following are a series of interwoven reflections on Mark Romanek’s Never Let Me Go, a tragically beautiful, under-recognized film based on Kazuo Ishiguro’s award-winning novel. I’ve tried my best to foresee the unseen tides.

We’re not immortal. We’re mortal.

By the meadow, Kathy waited. Standing before her, guarding, was a barbed wire fence on which two white pieces of cloth shivered, timelessly, and ricocheted against the metal and against the wind. Far out, beyond the solemn gate of reprisals, were memories of her youth, those which she could see but not feel. Death had taken them from her. Life had, too.

But Kathy waited. She thought that if she waited long enough, that maybe a tiny figure would appear on the horizon across the field and gradually get larger until I'd see it was Tommy. He'd wave. And maybe call.

And if he did? She’d be reminded of all she’d lost and gained. Of how she hoped to lock the treasures of her innermost with her closest, but how time had dwarfed them all. Outplayed them. Outsmarted them. But not outlasted them. Not her. Not yet.

And if he did? Perhaps then her heart would ache stronger than before, and she’d be brave, though wishing furiously that what she had been told could never be true was in fact a lie—that she could get a deferral. That there, then, if she waited long enough, Tommy would come with buckets and shovels and they’d go running down to the beach, sit down and build a castle. And if the waves were conservative and their water on short supply, that the tears they had cried at Hailsham would fill the empty space where passageways and bridges were to be.

If only we could stop the seconds on our mortal clock, then maybe half the tears would go to joy and not to sadness.

To love and not to madness.

It depended on how hard she squinted. Also on Tommy’s ability to rise, resurrected, and return with the hair he had grown at the cottages where paths split and then diverged. And split again and converged. And split a thousand times like blood that spatters and friends that disappear. And splinters. That hurt. But how that pain makes you feel alive and how if you never felt it, you’d be worried.

Time can’t make us happy. A closing window can. If we were given a preview. But what does that tell us about the way we live our lives?

Hailsham didn’t just change them—it was them. Before they were born (if they were ever that), it waited for them. Not across a meadow like a longing or a hope, but across a prison where a guard awaits to escort a new inmate—like a minor, for example, who had been accused of breathing on the wrong street or looking in the wrong direction.

I didn’t know they made laws like that.

They did.

I think Kathy sighed. When she finished, I think she frowned. When she finished, I think she inhaled again. And when she finished, I think she cared, and held on.

It had never occurred to me that our lives, which had been so closely interwoven, could unravel with such speed. If I'd known, maybe I'd have kept tighter hold of them and not let unseen tides pull us apart.




We all complete, no doubt. And maybe we’re all distraught by the time life has lapped us; when we fall down against the barrier gasping for the air we never thought we’d need. But Kathy, if she were with us now, would likely argue that as much as we may often want to look back, or look forward, it may pay more dividends to stand in place. She’d talk to us across the meadow, where her and Tommy would be reunited and from where they would run to the sand and make it into a castle, to compensate for all the years that were taken from them.

Kathy would tell us to live.

Life in Death

Sometimes, when I stroll along the cracked pavements of city squares and pavilions on a cold New York City night, when I breathe and then watch curiously as the water condenses to fog, when I pass a perfect, silent stranger painting smiles on the faces of passerby, I pause and think of them.

I think of victims. All victims of an unknown time who died in an unknown place.

Perhaps the sky is their graveyard, or maybe the open field at Treblinka, or the forest of Sobibor. Or maybe it's the streets of European towns that bear the marking of their deaths.

But, particularly, I think of the victims whose memory has been ingrained in my heart—those whose stories I have read and whose personal, but universal messages I have come to know. And to cherish. And to cry over. Sometimes, when all around me I see vivid signs of life, I think of death.

And then the death haunts me and when I sleep it chases me. In the morning, I awake, and it awakes with me. I wish not to overcome it, for I fear that I will forget it. And then, who will be left to return to the open field at Treblinka? Or the forest of Sobibor? Who will be left to teach that bystanders are as complicit as killers? No, I cannot forget.

So, instead, I look for ways to keep death. To enshrine it. I carry the pain of death with me. I tuck it in the pocket of my consciousness when I walk and talk and run through meadows where lilies sing and dance before the knowing sky—the sky that remembers all that we cannot—above a graveyard somewhere.


Today is the 66th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau camps, designated by Resolution 60/7 of the 2005 UN General Assembly as International Holocaust Remembrance Day. Today, member states, communities, and individuals everywhere renew their commitments to the values of human dignity and reaffirm their resolve to fight the forces that would do away with us.

On its face, it seems that, though late, the world has made progress—that which can be measured, poured into a cup and quantified. Yet, while the establishment of this universal memorial is to be celebrated, it is not to be taken for what it’s not—a sign that the countries of the world have dealt adequately with the past and are working together in common purpose to build a better future. Many, in fact, are not nearly. Many have failed—as evidenced last week, when the Simon Wiesenthal Center published a report of nations’ grades based on their efforts to bring former Nazi criminals to justice. Many literally failed.

Holocaust memory—fancy it a species—faces the threat of extinction. In America, two states out of fifty have instituted high school curricula focused on the rise, atrocities, and moral implications of Nazism. Record counts of antisemitic acts have been recorded in communities across Europe over the past year. Neo-fascist groups bent on the indoctrination of youth have surfaced all over the internet. And while it may seem plausible to some, no—Iran’s Ahmadinejad does not stand alone in his denial of the Holocaust. Nor does Venezuela’s Chavez.

A "Day," no matter how "International," will not prevent the ultimate reality if each of us does not step in and speak out on behalf of the victims. If we do not take to the streets and call for the extradition of those who had consigned them to their deaths. If we do not build a foundation upon which their stories can rest and teach and inspire our contemporaries not only to learn about the perils of intolerance, hatred, and bigotry, but to make meaning of them in these changing, difficult times; arrive at mutual understanding through dialogue; breathe life in death.

We must always remember these truths. That there is, at the end of every tear, a smile. There is, at the end of every tunnel, light. There is, at the end of one generation’s responsibility, another’s.

And sometimes, when the air is cold, I breathe it in and out again. And then I close my eyes and think of those whose breaths were taken from them. I feel the whistle of the wind around me and hear the clucking of distant steps. I see the open field at Treblinka. I imagine the forest of Sobibor. And the streets in Amsterdam, and Paris, and Prague.

I think of life. And then of death. And then I take my breath and slowly, between my lips, breathe one into the other.