SHAKE OFF THE DEMON

A child approaches a prisoner with a simple gift. For one brief moment, the uniforms, the fences, the hatred and machinery of death seem to recede. She is the daughter of a Nazi death camp officer. He is a Jewish prisoner condemned by the very system her father serves. He knows what she does not: his death is approaching, and her father will play a part in it. Still, he accepts her gift. That small exchange is the heart of Shake Off the Demon. David imagines two people meeting in a fleeting moment of humanity inside a place designed to extinguish it. The child has not yet learned to see this man as an enemy. The prisoner, despite everything that has been taken from him, has not lost his capacity to receive an innocent act of kindness. For David, that contradiction is almost impossible to reconcile. How can tenderness exist beside such cruelty? How can a child offer kindness while the adults around her participate in unimaginable evil? Perhaps that is what makes the moment so painful. Even in humanity’s darkest places, our capacity for compassion survives, sometimes in something as small as one person reaching out to another. And for an instant, he is not a prisoner and she is not the daughter of his persecutor. They are simply two human beings.