During the second world war, a young woman was taken from her home in Łódź, Poland by Nazis. Deemed by the Reich to be not as "despicable" as Jewish people, yet not as "advanced" as the Germanic race, Poles were "allowed" to live, so long as they worked. They were marked with a "P" on their clothing, and in squalor, worked for the Nazi regime, with starvation and illnesses at arm's length. Many did not survive their time in the labor camps.
The young woman from Łódź was sent to a factory in Hannover, Germany. At this particular factory, they made bombs.
Judging by her actions at the camp and their inherent risks, I can only assume that she was unable to find peace in her conscience at being forced to manufacture things that killed people. So this young woman, along with a handful of other brave and rebellious souls, sabotaged the bombs so that they would not detonate. Instead, they would plummet to the ground, invalid metal balls from a nefarious heaven, infertile as Eunachs.
Somehow, the supervisory staff caught wind of this "betrayal" and relayed it to the S.S. Soldiers were called in to dole out an "appropriate" punishment, one that would be in accordance with the severity of this rebellious crime. One of the supervisors, fond of the young woman, sent her to pick up materials from a neighboring city the day the soldiers were scheduled to come. When the S.S. arrived, every one of the rebels who was present was shot.
The woman survived the war. She fell in love with a man who was also a slave laborer. They brought a life into this wild world, albeit one cut so short by meningitis that she was forever preserved as a toddler in the hearts of her parents. Two years later, the war was over, and the young couple welcomed a second child.
That child was my father.
The most interesting twist of irony to this story is that another one of my grandmother's descendants says, does, and displays things that leads me to believe he is a Neo-Nazi. Or at the very least, one who supports Nazi principles.
Which has led me to understand, once again, how very little I understand. Why does such an ugly, grotesque thing continue to persist in our world? Shouldn't it have, in this case, been worked out of the psyche of the surviving victims, and subsequently their progeny? When the evil madness of Nazi-occupied Europe finally was drained of most of its blood, the world swore that such a thing would never happen again.
And then when the Pol Pot regime finished its reign of terror, the world again swore the same thing.
And then there was Bosnia. And Rwanda. And now Syria…
WHY are we failing, over and over again?
I am wondering if we ever will stop our cruelty. Are we really as flawlessly divine as so many hippie mantras repeat?
.........
In this moment of damning humanity to hopelessness, I remember that I have in my bag a gift: an envelope, which I was instructed not to open until I was on the plane. On it, two names are carefully written in pencil. Monica. And Sena.
Within this tiny, precious trove, a handful of treasures tumbled into my open palm, gifted to me by a sweet, smart 9 year-old girl, the daughter of my cousin. A polished piece of Lapis Lazuli, a bracelet, a little blue flower, a dolphin pendant, and three plastic jewels. And perhaps most significantly, there was a drawing: a picture of a giraffe and an elephant in a savanna, with the word "Afrika" written across the top.
Since leaving Dortmund, I had been assuaged with images of elephants, all with their trunks up. Over and over again they appeared on the bus ride from Dortmund to Berlin. I noticed them because one of my aunt collects statuettes of elephants, each with her trunk raised. I tried to make sense of it, tried to decipher what the elephants wanted to say. And I think here I finally found it, in the color-penciled drawing gifted to me by this child, this precious, precious creature.
An elephant with her trunk raised in the African savanna.
This child gave me a blossom.
You know, sometimes the math doesn't add up. People die by the thousands for the resources on which they sit. The natural world is being systematically divided and conquered. And yet, through the madness, we must remember to love. To forgive. To take care. To respect. If we don't, it will be our own flaw. We will wither away, crumbled and anemic and malnourished in our potential.
Our time here is so short, perhaps at the most, five scores of rotations around the sun. In some sense, it shouldn't matter what we do, because it is all temporary anyway. But a life lived in hatred is a sad life indeed, and an illness more devastating than any that wreaks havoc on our biological systems. A heart filled with hatred must be a sad, fearful, and lonely place, masked by anger and violence.
We must teach our children well. And they can teach us, too.
