The Day Johnny Died.

Warning: I'm not good. Anything you read in here is probably also not good.


I think I’m trying to say sorry. Never Again was an empty promise.

Christmas Day. December 25th, 2023. 9 AM.

It was a chilly, relatively snowless day. The sky was pure white. My head pounded a strange thing.

For some background: My family doesn’t celebrate Christmas. Since we’re Orthodox, we do most of our dairy eating on January 7th; this difference in practice simply means I don’t give a crap about Christmas. After all, my name was supposed to be Ebeneezer; I am Scrooge, and Scrooge is me. So when I first woke up on December 25th, 2023, I did not saunter down the stairs to have a fun little breakfast with my parents or open presents with my brother. Me being me, I had nothing to do during the two week stretch our school gave us as psychological torture. I decided to check my phone to see what my more sociable friends were doing (out of pure jealousy).

I did not expect Johnny to be dead.

You do not know Johnny. Let me explain.

Ephroim Jablon, known to many as Johnny, was a man of pure will. He had been a Polish Jew caught up in the midst of Hitler’s wet dreams come to life, and come ‘41, he and his entire family were moved to the Krakow Ghetto. From there, he found himself in a labour camp… with a wolf of a man by the name Amon Goth. If you know not of Johnny, surely you know of him.

In ‘44, he was deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau, the factory where Death worked overtime. Due to the advancement of the Allies, Johnny and other prisoners were forced onto death marches in January of 1945, torturous long things where they would trek in the freezing cold to other death camps. He went through 7 of them. When May rolled around, he was finally free.

Well, not quite. He was stuck in various DP camps in Poland for the next two years, which if you’ve ever seen a DP camp you’d groan in frustration right about… now. When he crossed the seven seas to reach Canada, then he was really free. If you’ve got a minute, search him up. I can’t do his life and his strength justice in such a plain summary.

On that Christmas morning with the white sky (and little to no white snow), he was also freed from his physical body.


I guess here is where my little note comes in.
Dear Johnny,

I don’t have much to say to you other than I’m sorry. I could spend page after page recounting how disappointed I was that I never struck up a proper conversation, or that I didn't pick up your book, but what would that do? The only purpose of those long winded memorials is to torture the living and make the dead become graveyard centrifuges. Funny what we do to assauge our own egos.

But I will say that I'm furious you had to spend the last months of your life with the knowledge that the one promise you believed in was broken. It should've never been that way for you, or for any survivor.

For all it's worth, I hope the Other World is treating you better than this one did.

May your memory be a blessing.

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