While in Paris in April 2009 on my honeymoon with Husband 2.0, we visited all the usual Parisian must-see sites including the Louvre, Musee D'Orsay, the Champs-Elysees and numerous cathedrals and points of interest. On a gray, Parisian day, while wondering through the Marais, one of the distinct arrondissement of the city, we stumbled upon the Shoah Memorial and decided to tour the memorial to get out of the cool, drizzly day. Much like the weather outside, the inside was gray and gloomy with a chill in the air. We discovered 12 sections for the exhibition starting with the intro to the history of Jews in France, the Rise of Nazism through to the last permanent exhibition consisting of the Children's Memorial. This part of the exhibit contains 3,000 photographs of deported Jewish children in alphabetical order who were sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau. This was a haunting reminder of the three small children we left at home and the fact that many parents during WWII lost their children to the gas chambers in Poland.
There were not many visitors in the memorial roaming the exhibits, so when my spouse and I somehow got separated I was a little uneasy that I couldn't easily turn a corner and find him standing there. I wondered through the exhibits slowly, half looking at the images and artifacts lining the walls and half looking for him to be just around the corner. The uneasiness escalated to slight panic as the minutes passed for what seemed like hours (and was likely only 30 minutes) until we were reunited. Again, I was thankful for a short separation from a loved one that was not permanent and noted to myself the irony of our separation to that of loved ones during the Holocaust...there is no comparison to be sure.
In 2015, I returned to Europe on a multi-country trip with my daughter. We started in Austria then travelled to Poland, Brussels and France. Europe was experiencing a record-breaking heat wave as we flew into Austria to stay with one of my former foreign exchange students. We loved touring Vienna with Astrid, our own personal tour guide, seeing the sites and swimming in the Danube. While cooling off in the river that runs through the middle of the city, we thought of the Von Trapp children hanging from branches and falling in the river from their canoe and acted out the scene from our paddle boat. My daughter has seen the movie numerous times and loved singing all the songs as a child. The backdrop of Naziism and the Holocaust we briefly discuss while she was young so she understood the significance of the movie and the fact that we could see the World War II influcents on some sites in Vienna.
Once we landed in Warsaw, the heat was still quite unbearable. Instead of taking day trips to Krakow or Auschwitz from Warsaw, we chose to spend several nights at a lake, lounging most days, putzing around the lake, playing in the water and mud, reading in the cool rooms during the heat of the day and meeting other Poles escaping the heat from the cities. To be honest, I was relieved not to visit Krakow or Auschwitz. After my experience in the Shoah Memorial in Paris years before and a visit to Anne Frank's hideout while in Amsterdam, I knew that a visit to the actual site in Auschwitz would have been very difficult for me and my highly-sensitive child. From movies like Fiddler on the Roof, Schindler's List, Life is Beautiful and Inglorious Bastards and books from The Key and the Reader, I have felt physically ill from the trauma endured by those during the Holocaust. In my head, I can hear the words of a dear Haitian friend who died a few years ago, "It is man's inhumanity to man that causes great ills in our society." He was quoting from Robert Burns poem called "From Man was Made to Mourn: A Dirge". There are days where I am ashamed for not having the courage or strength to visit Auschwitz while in Poland and I will deal with those emotions as best I can. Visiting the Shoah Memorial in Paris and Anne Frank's house will have to do for in-person accounts for me for now.
Yesterday, Kobe Bryant, his 13 year old daughter Gigi and 7 other people were tragically killed in a helicopter accident. I did not know Kobe personally and was surprised by how bad I felt about it. Then I thought about his wife Vanessa learning the news and what I have heard, and only witnessed second hand, about the pain of losing a child. I found comfort in the words of Bernice King who wrote, "Mourning a 'celebrity" does not = lack of consciousness.' And sometimes the death of someone we feel like we knew, but we never actually touched, triggers pain about the death of people we knew well. We are on a brief pilgrimage here, reconciling life and death. Love well." This helps explain to me the sadness of Kobe death, that death of Anne Frank and the millions of Jews who perished at the hands of evil. We are all here on this planet reconciling life and death.
I am consoled by the words of Norman Cousins who wrote, "The tragedy of life is not death...but what we let die inside of us while we live." Kobe seemed to be living his life to the fullest post basketball career and reminded me of my former father-in-law who passed away just before Thanksgiving. Pops lived a full life, loved to travel and loved his family immensely and was never afraid to tell those he loved, "I love you." He extended that love to me even though I was no longer married to his stepson, and told me he still considered me family weeks before his death.
Elie Wiesel said, "Every moment counts. Every second matters." This morning, as I was preparing my daughter's cinnamon Chai tea (2 teaspoons of honey with a splash of milk) like I have done virtually every school morning for the past 12 years, I looked out the window over my sink and could see, beyond the pool and the blooming pink knock out roses, the sun rising between the trees and bushes in the greenbelt behind my home. As the sun rose, I thought about gratitude. I am grateful for the simple and mundane things of every morning. This morning, I sent out a little prayer for so many souls who no longer have the luxury of experiencing the highs and lows of life, the spectacular and day-to-day moments that make a life. I turned the faucet on to wash my hands and recited in my head the motto I have lived by everyday since the devastating earthquake in Haiti in 2010, 'I am thankful that everyday I walk to the faucet, turn the water on and water comes out because so many live everyday without something so simple that we take for granted."
Lets also remember from Elie Wiesel "No one is capable of gratitude as one who has emerged from the Kingdom of night."
T✌🏽✌🏽
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