Hugging a Holocaust Survivor

So tomorrow is our last class. The semester is almost over and I feel obliged to write a post looking back on what we've learned, about how our eyes have been opened….Or I could write about the Helen Sperling talk I just got out of and hope that it relates back to this class. I think I'll go for the latter.

I think any time you go to listen to a Holocaust survivor's story, there's this numbness that infects the whole room. No one can feel anything. You can only sit there shocked by the fact that the living testimony of arguably man's greatest crime is sitting in front of you, recalling memories so indescribably painful, so irrationally cruel, that you begin to question why this person would ever want to relive these memories over and over again. 

I felt that very numbness tonight. I felt that sense that I could never touch, or feel, or even imagine the pain and suffering Helen and millions upon millions of others endured during the Holocaust. During the brief break about an hour into the talk, I turned to my friend and just said, "This is so incomprehensible" not because it didn't make any sense, but because I couldn't even begin to think that I understood her pain. No one could and I don't think anyone ever will.

But then, after she was done telling her story, a story similar to the many I have read in books and seen in movies, she started talking about history. She said that the survivors go out and tell their stories not to relive them and not just to help people understand, but for them to realize that history is repeating itself. The hatred, the ignorance, and the violence that brought about the Holocaust still exist. It's still out there. It's still killing people. Genocide is not a figment of the past. Hatred is not a relic to be preserved in history books. It lives on and survivors like Helen are watching it consume this world.

And when I think about this, I know that many will deny it. They’ll deny it because when they study it from a history book, they fell safe from it. It has happened and therefore will never happen again. We’ve all learned. Done. Close the book. Walk away. But that’s just it. Books can warn us of man’s follies and his greatest failures, but very few can incite action. That’s because people feel safe when they read stories because their influence only exists when you’re looking at the page. When you look away, you can forget about what you were reading. By existing within the physical medium of a page, a story, like history, is isolated and disconnected from us. We can look upon our world from a safe distance and be ok with it when it’s all said and done. The pages of a book are, in essence, man’s greatest safety blanket and man is therefore made into an eternal bystander.

But then there are stories like Helen’s that defy the nature of books and live instead through the medium of the human voice. When Helen said that she saw history repeating itself, that’s when I felt it. I felt her sorrow. I felt her pity for this world gone wrong. I felt her horror and helplessness to see man consume himself once more. History came alive to me and everyone else in that chapel. Beyond the confines of a book, stories can make us feel. I went up to Helen tonight and talked to her about how much I agreed with her. And we hugged. If I had just finished reading a book, there would be no person to hug, no warmth or love. I would just move on.

Thus, we are left with the task of seeing beyond the medium of novels and books. We must look past everything we’ve learned in this course and see the bigger picture. We must see that the stories we read are not scraps of paper but products of human hands and the sounds of a human voice. We must recognize stories, like history, live on around us and are not simply latent words weighed down by meaninglessness. They must become parts of our lives, not just simple observations. In the end, I reflect on one rule that sums it all up: Thou shalt not be a bystander.