Elegy for Kate Rose Silva Xavier (may her memory be a blessing), by Evan M. Olszewski
This is half to process for myself what I saw today in my newsfeed—your face with that huge grin leering out beneath a caption that reads “Missing Texas State University Student found dead in Blanco River Friday night”.
I didn’t know you well at all so I feel guilty being stuck up on your soaked body, but neither can I claim my feelings are from any noble humanitarian concern. You factored into so many of my thoughts this last semester (we were in the Holocaust seminar together—though now I know it as the Shoah seminar). Dr. Leder gave you so much room to speak even though every time you raised your hand the things you said defaced any point he was trying to make. You weren’t in class half the time. Even the times you were there, half of them you were asleep.
I remember the first time I met you, you came into class and smiled that huge, disarming smile at everyone. Leder wasn’t there yet, just us, apprehensive about how the Holocaust, the actual, flesh-and-blood, life-destroying, history-demolishing, infamous, odious, unspeakable, cursed Shoah would be covered. How could that be done respectfully? How could we ever learn enough to assume any authority over the topic? You came in and the polite conversation dimmed so you could introduce yourself, slip into the gentle apprehension of the room. You sat, pulled off your beanie, and looked everyone in the eyes, “So…anyone know any good Holocaust jokes?”
That first impression has never, ever left my mind, hammered over the image of your face on the back of my eyes. Any words you spoke from then on echoed from the silence of the room that first day. The level of insincerity, disrespect, and unawareness you showed in that class never improved. You told Leder that you couldn’t be sure, but maybe the Jews dying was a necessary part of human evolution, that sure it was bad how they went, but it had to happen eventually, right? Better to move past it. They could’ve deserved it.
I never moved past it. That is a fault and a curse on me. I never hated you but I never forgave you, either. I wished some fiery fingers would reach down and scratch MUTE on the walls of your throat every time you spoke up and I covered my ears with my hands when you began to answer a question. I wished that you would never speak about the Shoah again because I couldn’t imagine someone who said the things you did would ever understand.
The level of misunderstanding and disrespect you showed to all those lives was almost as much misunderstanding and disrespect as I showed to your life.
You worked at the sandwich bar. I eat there all the time. As long as we didn’t talk about the seminar it was cool to see you, and I didn’t avoid the place because of you ever. I was blown away that you would go out of your way to come talk with me when you saw me because I was sure that the contempt that welled up by practice was apparent. Yet with every uneasy conversation you joked and laughed and grinned that huge grin and condemned me, who resented that the happiness of casual conversation was all I could remember of you in that G-d-forsaken seminar.
I stopped seeing you. You just weren’t at work. I heard your coworkers talking about it one day but I never asked because I’d gone weeks without seeing you before and because I didn’t think I cared. But I couldn’t stop thinking about you, out of the sheer bewilderment at your insensitivity that began to haunt me months ago and continues, magnified now, to this moment.
When your face appeared on my newsfeed I swore and felt no feeling but utter non-understanding. Death is completely unintelligible it seems and I think the inability to grasp it appears as sadness. I absolutely cannot understand the end of a life which persists so strongly in my psyche. I cannot grasp your disappearance from the world when the egregious matchlessness of your inability to understand the gravity of the Shoah resonates at long last with something, when its resonant pair is my same inability to understand the end of your existence.
The article says your death is being investigated as a suicide. I misunderstood you. I mistook you for a person so powerful in your own estimation that you were disgusted by the people who let themselves be killed. I mistook you for a person who couldn’t understand the vitriol of a cursed ideology and instead saw it as an unfortunate accident.
But if you killed yourself then you are the person who let themselves be killed and I misunderstood. If you killed yourself then you know that there is no accident in vitriol and I misunderstood. If you killed yourself then I am the person, swelled with pride, who was disgusted because I didn’t understand. I didn’t believe you could ever improve, ever learn, ever respect something as grave as the Shoah and missed the fact that in your own mind you played both sides of the story. Your grin and your jokes were symbols of your ignorance to me but I have never been more uncharitably misunderstanding.
You are gone, your existence snuffed out like a candle. I pray to G-d that your death was an accident. You asked once in class why the Jews didn’t just kill themselves when they got to the camps (or before) to avoid the torment and the question I read as complete inconsideration may have been entirely rhetorical.
Kate, I am sorry for your death.
I am sorry for your family and for your friends. I am sorry for the cruelty I have in my heart. I am sorry for the heaviness that was in yours. I am sorry for the hurt which broke you and I ask your forgiveness for the hurt in my heart. I feel guilty for my sorrow because all I wished for you was an end to your ignorance, the hurtful things you said, and all this time I hope that I didn’t wish it in the wrong way. Dr. Leder understood something. He gave you time and space to talk when no one else there wished to. Perhaps he heard something or perhaps he is just a noble man. I don’t know. All I know is I thought of you the way you thought about the Shoah and your death has shown that your misunderstanding is also mine, it has poured out my disapproval on my own head.
Kate, I am so sorry for your death.
I never wished you were dead—but that’s not enough. I never wished you were alive, either. I could not reciprocate that huge grin without feeling like I was betraying the lives lost. I could not hear one of your jokes without thinking about that first joke. Now I hurt to believe that I loved the millions of lives gone and not coming back, not to me, to the one vibrant and beaming life in front of me. I don’t think you deserve the same memory as those millions. But yet you died to the same death. The same breath left you. The same ground will swallow you. In a small way, the same misunderstanding hangs over you.
If you warranted the same memory, I would call up the image from Lanzmann’s Shoah. I would write of Simon Srebnik, the boy prisoner now grown, boating down the river to Chelmno, singing alone to the current the songs the Nazis taught him. But you deserve another song, a different renaming of your pain and my misunderstanding, but I cannot imagine it. I am trying to think of one but all I imagine is your grin and the sound of you laughing at tragedy.
For what it’s worth, may your memory be a blessing.
Photography by Nathan Bailey