The Postcard of Sophie Scholl

There is the lightning-white moment when I learn— the way my costive train to Krakow stopped and I woke to find myself, in jostling twilight, at the Auschwitz platform— that the Italian postcard I garnered in Milan years ago as a genial talisman isn’t of a pipe-dreaming Italian boy, no, no, but an androgynous image of Sophie Scholl, the young, intrepid resistance heroine— as if I’d registered, in my Schubert-adoring daughter, my school-resisting son, a fire undetected before: Doric-strong nouns demanding What would you undertake to stop tyranny?— stouthearted nouns: integrity, probity, courage; in benighted Munich, the spit-in-the-eye swiftness, the unbossed bloom of a crossed-out swastika, the fierce integrity in the gust of the word freedom sprayed over the walls and ramparts of a deranged fatherland that rent flesh as if it were foolscap— Someday you will be where I am now, a steely, premonitory Sophie proclaimed to the rapacious Nazi tribunal that rushed her to execution— Gazer, collector, in clarity’s name, look close, then closer: it’s not just a bud-sweet, pensive beauty, a bel ragazzo’s charm; all these years: it’s the spirit of crusading youth that I’ve cherished.