A metaphor for what we have become.
Was that something to do with the word altalena? I asked. “The Boger swing”? Yes, it was a meter-long iron bar suspended by chains hung from the ceiling. We could never have imagined what it was for until she described it, in a monotone spoken as by rote, its details recalled and rehearsed repeatedly during her months bearing witness in Frankfurt. A prisoner would be brought in for “questioning,” stripped naked and bent over the bar, wrists manacled to ankles. A guard at one side would shove him – or her — off across the chamber in a long, slow arc, while Boger would ask “questions,” at first quietly, then barking them out, and at the last bellowing. At each return, another guard armed with a crowbar would smash the victim across the buttocks. As the swinging went on and on, and the wailing victim fainted, was revived only to faint howling again, the blows continued —until only a mass of bleeding pulp hung before their eyes. Most perished from the ordeal; some sooner, some later; in the end a sack of of bones and flayed flesh and fat was swept along the shambles of that concrete floor to be dragged away.
From Frau Braun and The Tiger of Auschwitz
By Jascha Kessler
March 26th, 2007
http://calitreview.com/33