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Today at sundown I finished my homework and sat in my bedroom, looking out my windows. I wondered if seventy years ago there were some other girl, maybe my age, with dark hair and dark eyes, who liked reading, who was sitting in her room in some house in Germany or Austria, thinking about her schoolwork and if she would be going to college and if she would have a career and when she would get married. And it made me sad- foolishly, simply, childishly sad- to think that I will get to do these things and this made up girl didn't get to finish any of those things.
And then I got up and went to shul.
Sundown marked the beginning of Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day. Every year my family goes to the Yom HaShoah commemoration speech at my synagogue. The Holocaust goes deep in my family, at least on my father's side. My mother's family lived in New York and Boston since the turn of the century and my Bubbe (my grandmother, my father's mother) had roots in Montreal going back two decades by the time Hitler came around. But my Saba's family lived in a tiny village in Romania (it's called Stroznitz, but that's not important) for generations and that was bad news when the Nazis came around. You can read more about that story here.
Because of our family history, my dad is called up every year at the ceremony to light one of the six candles that represent the six million Jews killed in the Holocaust. Every year, there is a different speaker. Sometimes it's a survivor, sometimes just a researcher or historian. This year it was an American soldier who helped liberate Dachau. He told us some awful stories- about how General Patton threw up from the smell of the camps, about his company running across a Dachau subcamp for gypsies where the Germans burned the barracks with the prisoners inside and machine-gunned anyone who managed to escape when they saw that the Americans were coming- but the thing that stuck in my mind was something he said about Buchenwald. He said that when the soldiers got there, the SS had already left, they had abandoned the camp, but before they did, they shut off the water and drained the reservoir. And what struck me was the hatred those officers must have felt to subject the people in that camp. That they could watch them for years, suffering and slaving and starving and getting sick and weak and that it still wasn't enough for them. That they were so impassioned with the need to kill off these people who had done nothing to them, nothing but exist, that they would give them one last torturous horror to remember them by before they died in agony from starvation and dehydration and disease.
I refuse to believe that people are born evil, hating sociopaths. If I believe that, I will lose faith in humanity and believe that the people I know are the exceptions to the "humans are evil" rule. I must believe that people were and are convinced of the subhumanity of others and that allowed them to persuade themselves that what they were doing was acceptable. Therefore, I have to say that we have to stop hating each other.
It sounds so simple. But go back thousands of years and people just hate other people. And everyone should realize that people aren't better than others. That's wrong. There are people who are better than other people. To clarify: There are individuals who are better than other individuals. Mother Teresa is better than Osama bin Laden. But no group of people can say that another group of people is worse or has less of a right to live or be free based on their gender or race or appearance or what they like to watch on tv.
This post turned out a lot less articulately than I wanted it to, but I think I got what I wanted to say across.
Saying this won't change anything, but someone once told me that it is better to say what you mean, even if probably won't help, than to stay silent and make sure that it won't help.
I'm going to end with two quotes that might be dismissed because of their sources, but which I'm quoting because they tie in very well with what I want to say:
"A person's a person, no matter how small."- Horton Hears a Who by Dr. Seuss. Never forget that every person, no matter how different from you, can put their fingers to their wrist and find their pulse beating there.
"Fear is the path to the dark side. Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering."- Yoda, Star Wars Episode I (it goes against everything I believe in to quote something called The Phantom Menace, but there you go.) Don't let your fear of things that are different or that you can't understand allow you to make those things less human. People allowed that to happen before- they let Hitler tell them that the Jews would take all their money and make off with German women- and it led to such suffering that the people who were at the camps can still recall the stench sixty-five years later.
It is late and I am tired. I have work to do tomorrow, decisions to make, life to live. I am especially thankful to have that life tonight, because I so easily could not.
And then I got up and went to shul.
Sundown marked the beginning of Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day. Every year my family goes to the Yom HaShoah commemoration speech at my synagogue. The Holocaust goes deep in my family, at least on my father's side. My mother's family lived in New York and Boston since the turn of the century and my Bubbe (my grandmother, my father's mother) had roots in Montreal going back two decades by the time Hitler came around. But my Saba's family lived in a tiny village in Romania (it's called Stroznitz, but that's not important) for generations and that was bad news when the Nazis came around. You can read more about that story here.
Because of our family history, my dad is called up every year at the ceremony to light one of the six candles that represent the six million Jews killed in the Holocaust. Every year, there is a different speaker. Sometimes it's a survivor, sometimes just a researcher or historian. This year it was an American soldier who helped liberate Dachau. He told us some awful stories- about how General Patton threw up from the smell of the camps, about his company running across a Dachau subcamp for gypsies where the Germans burned the barracks with the prisoners inside and machine-gunned anyone who managed to escape when they saw that the Americans were coming- but the thing that stuck in my mind was something he said about Buchenwald. He said that when the soldiers got there, the SS had already left, they had abandoned the camp, but before they did, they shut off the water and drained the reservoir. And what struck me was the hatred those officers must have felt to subject the people in that camp. That they could watch them for years, suffering and slaving and starving and getting sick and weak and that it still wasn't enough for them. That they were so impassioned with the need to kill off these people who had done nothing to them, nothing but exist, that they would give them one last torturous horror to remember them by before they died in agony from starvation and dehydration and disease.
I refuse to believe that people are born evil, hating sociopaths. If I believe that, I will lose faith in humanity and believe that the people I know are the exceptions to the "humans are evil" rule. I must believe that people were and are convinced of the subhumanity of others and that allowed them to persuade themselves that what they were doing was acceptable. Therefore, I have to say that we have to stop hating each other.
It sounds so simple. But go back thousands of years and people just hate other people. And everyone should realize that people aren't better than others. That's wrong. There are people who are better than other people. To clarify: There are individuals who are better than other individuals. Mother Teresa is better than Osama bin Laden. But no group of people can say that another group of people is worse or has less of a right to live or be free based on their gender or race or appearance or what they like to watch on tv.
This post turned out a lot less articulately than I wanted it to, but I think I got what I wanted to say across.
Saying this won't change anything, but someone once told me that it is better to say what you mean, even if probably won't help, than to stay silent and make sure that it won't help.
I'm going to end with two quotes that might be dismissed because of their sources, but which I'm quoting because they tie in very well with what I want to say:
"A person's a person, no matter how small."- Horton Hears a Who by Dr. Seuss. Never forget that every person, no matter how different from you, can put their fingers to their wrist and find their pulse beating there.
"Fear is the path to the dark side. Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering."- Yoda, Star Wars Episode I (it goes against everything I believe in to quote something called The Phantom Menace, but there you go.) Don't let your fear of things that are different or that you can't understand allow you to make those things less human. People allowed that to happen before- they let Hitler tell them that the Jews would take all their money and make off with German women- and it led to such suffering that the people who were at the camps can still recall the stench sixty-five years later.
It is late and I am tired. I have work to do tomorrow, decisions to make, life to live. I am especially thankful to have that life tonight, because I so easily could not.
