Because of the ten plagues, the Nile River ran red with blood, livestock
diseased, locusts, boils, hailstorms, three days of darkness,
every firstborn threatened by an avenging angel—you had to mark
the door with blood of a sacrificed lamb so that God would pass over it.
Because to identify those when deported to the camps in Nazi-occupied
Eastern Europe they were required to sew a yellow Jewish Star
on their jacket. Later, in the camps, a white armband
with a blue Jewish Star bound on their left arm. Babies in prams, too
had to wear them, infants tossed in the air and used as targets
for machine guns. Oh, holy war. Because someone painted a Swastika
on the door of a dorm room where three Jewish students reside,
Jews will not replace us, because in the complex, only the apartments
of minorities had signs marking their doors. Because on a college
campus, a Swastika was carved into the purity of white fallen snow.*
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Excerpt from Asylum c. 2020 by Jill Bialosky, by permission of Alfred A Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC New York.
