Horror happens every day… and it can shrivel your very soul. This is dedicated to those among us defying the horror.
It was one of those unexpected things. It just sort of happened on a trip to Washington DC. A friend lived in one of the row houses near Capitol Hill… one of the neighborhoods making a comeback. It was a girls’ weekend thing… starting with dinner on Friday night and Marg, she makes the most delicious Bloody Mary.
Saturday we started at Lincoln Center, then to the Washington National Cathedral where I especially loved the children’s chapel there. We went to the United States Botanic Garden in the mall, and I had to see Foucault’s Pendulum swing from its fixed point in the National Museum of History. For good measure, just before 3:30pm, Betty decides I have to be taken to United Stated Holocaust Memorial Museum.
To say it was overwhelming is but a start. Sitting in a cattle car and feeling sensations and vibrations… and Betty taking my hand, saying, they close at five and there’s so much to see. You’ll come back, she said, but now just go through it.
Each assault made me move slower and feel more hopeless. But Betty didn’t let me experience anything for too long, as she kept pulling me through the museum. Anyone who’s been there knows about the mounds of shoes… it is a show-stopper, I can tell you.
It was then that I could understand it: they first crush your humanity. And then they deconstruct your humaness, objectify you so that those not being hauled away can kill and defile you. I felt like I would get sick or faint or give up because how can you explain it? Ordinary people … killing and defiling their fellow human beings by the millions… And it was soooooo easy to do. I mean, what’s left after that. How can life have meaning after you understand that?……..
Before leaving, we saw a film about survivors who had been hidden by Poles or the Dutch or the French. I think a few stories went by before I could understand anything. As the world came back into focus, so did this old woman, telling her story of hiding in the house of a Polish woman. She said the woman hated Jews, but did not think they should be hauled away. They hid in her attic for I don’t remember how long… but long enough to see the liberators come.
Before leaving, they wanted to give the Polilsh woman the few things they had of value: their jewelry. The woman refused the gift, and only asked this one thing: Don’t let anybody see you leave here and never tell anyone you stayed here; if my neighbors knew, they would kill me.
Suddenly I understood: it is the power of one. One person to say NO… who would stand up to the entire German army and all of her neighbors… be willing to die to do the right thing. I starting crying… sobbing for joy and relief and redemption. She saved me, that Polish woman. She and everyone like her save us every day, in ways we will never know.
There is your big bang, the strength of us all, wrapped up in the act of just one human being. So screw BF Skinner and Karl Rove and all those Madison Avenue marketing firms that think they can ultimately control what we think or how we behave. The one outlier, that one stubborn exception changes everything…
It’s all in the power of one…
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just one person can take away the power of evil
This is somehow reminding me of the Burmese monks and the people physically defending them. It’s the courage to say “no” to evil, but try not to lose your life in the process, as that Polish woman demonstrated.
Very apropos today.
of character is not to eliminate all temptations of evil actions but to persevere when others fall prey to their temptations.
that was goooood.
one at a time, we’ll say no…
and if any good is to come of the tragic events of late, it will, hopefully, be that more and more people say no…understand, for once, the ultimate result of ‘me first’ and of quiet acquiescence.
and here’s a quote from this a.m.’s pony party:
Very well done. As usual.
On a lighter note, it appears you people needed this ‘power of one’ around today.
Goodness me, take most of the day off and all sorts of fights break out.
Obviously I can’t trust you people to play nice while daddy’s off making a living.
Sheesh. Kids these days.
Besos.
reconstituted a few times now. I keep waiting for the damn thing to die. How can it go on like this day after day? My spouse is packing and then last night out of no place I had a moment of absolute sheer bliss that can only come on the heels of a very long period of major sucking! I was completely free. No matter how any of this turns out I know who I am and I have been me. I’ve been sick upon sick of asking hard questions and then needing to continue to keep asking hard questions because people are dying in my name. Then suddenly for one small moment I had that thing happen last night. I’ve never felt that sort of detachment yet still looking at the problem dead on and attached to it in a way that it wasn’t able to drain me anymore and had almost even began to lovingly feed me as I continue to do what I can to challenge the dynamics that have brought us this unfounded disgusting war and human rights violations. It was sort of like the experience of doing that fire walking thing. As it began to fade I reminded myself that if I got there once I can get back to there again. I can get back to there for longer and longer periods of time and it fills me with giant hope because if I am one of many people feeling this way better days are ahead.
I’m glad you reacted the way you did. That is affirming somehow. I’m glad too that you point out that there were many people in Europe who acted as selflessly as this Polish woman ( Warsaw was a hell on earth – I’d have to think twice before writing about Warsaw). A huge percentage of these people remain nameless. We cannot celebrate them. They probably wouldn’t want it anyway – those who still live. We can and should honour their courage and humanity though, for they really were in such grave danger.
I have no prose or poem prepared, but I can give you one of my memories which your piece has jogged:
It was 1979 and about this time of year. I was stationed up between Bielefeld and Hannover at that time, ironically in what had been a Waffen SS barracks in the war. We wore black coveralls in my tank regiment, but would change into green barrack dress or civilian clothing to go into town, as the black was upsetting to some of the townspeople.
Anyhow, we had a Rugby game scheduled against the Queen’s Dragoon Guards on the Saturday ( a Welsh regiment with a fearsome XV) so we drove up to Hohne on Friday afternoon, arriving around three. With the game the following day we couldn’t hit the bars or any of that other stuff that soldiers do, so a few of us went to the museum a couple of clicks up the road. The museum is attached to what is left of Kz.Bergen-Belsen. Having toured the small museum we entered the cemetary and memorial. This was the strange part. As I said, it was around this time of year and all the birds were congregating before their annual migrations. There were thousands and thousands of Starlings wheeling as one and shape changing in the sky, all the while making a huge racket.
It was as we passed through the gate to where thousands were buried under mounds with stone slabs saying 10,000 buried here” and other numbers bigger and smaller that the noise just…..disappeared. There was complete and absolute silence. I’m not kidding, you could have heared a silk handkerchief flap and the atmosphere was heavy and sad – like a groan. We paid our respects and left very quietly.
We lost the game, but not by much and on the Saturday evening I asked Frau Wirtin at the kneipe we chose to carouse in on the way back about the phenomenon.
“Oh yes”, she answered, “No Birds sing over Belsen, I thought everybody knew.”
It remains one of the strangest experiences I’ve ever had.
A very memorable essay, thank you!
And of course, reminded me of going to the museum at Yad Vashem. I don’t know what to say, really. It was so horrible that tears seemed utterly useless; the soul is shocked, and changed beyond recovery. I’ve thought about it a great deal in the intervening twenty years, but the huge, overwhelming emotional impression, before words, was one of witness. Not of warning, nor courage, nor suffering, though it was of course all those things on reflection, but of memory.
pf8 – damn you were great today! and even better tonight! I am in awe of what you did at pff. I could barely dip my toe in here – I can’t imagine going there. Sorry I’m not a very good Thelma, but I’m with you in spirit at least.
So, I want to leave this painting for you. I don’t have a lot of art in my house but I came across this serendipitously – like I was meant to have it. It is a painting by a Burmese monk. I was going to post it here today in one of the many Burma essays and didn’t get to it. The guy I bought it from had a whole stack of these paintings – he said he bought everything the monks had. So of course, I’m thinking about those monks every time I look at it. Kind of like those Cuban paintings, I find it very hopeful. In the midst of tragedy and suffering people manage to express beauty and reverance.
There is a large mural in the Holocaust Museum portraying the horrors in Darfur. At least there was when we were there.
It seemed so oddly out of place in this museum that excluded so much.
There is a small room off one of the terrible cotton mill museums in Lowell, MA, that makes a statement that the Holocaust Museum tried so hard for.
Not much to be seen in that small room. There are children’s drawings like those of our own children we once pasted on the refrigerator.
But these were Cambodian children. They told of another horror beyond imagination as only a child can tell it.
Maybe it was the simplicity and considerable amateurishness of various displays that caught up this simpleton.
A Polish friend who served in the Polish Army before coming to this country as a refugee with others of his group returned for a visit to Poland years ago. Jon and his wife visited one of the concentration camps that are now a memorial with the usual tourists. One man yelled out to a Texan, “Take off your goddam hat.” That has meaning to me that all the money and good taste and bricks and splendor cannot match.
There is no real way of encompassing these horrors.
Best, Terry