View from afar

    My big sister sent me an email on Friday, one which changed my whole weekend. The Museum of the City of New York has a temporary exhibit of family videos that were taken on vacations to Polish shtetls in the 1920s and 1930s.  The exhibit, entitled "Letters to Afar"  will be open until March 22nd.   The moment I received the message, I just knew I had to go.

     I wasn't prepared. The videos are projected on large floor- to-ceiling frames all throughout a large exhibition room.  Klezmer music and gently sung nigguns fill the room with an occasional narration or poem. Faces of ordinary people wave at the camera on one screen and children run out of a school in another. On the streets of Kraków, where I will be in about a month, people pass holding hands or carrying books. 

    The screens are white and transparent. It was eerie to look on the reverse side of the film, where life was blurry and indescript but still everpresent.  I think a lot about life force lately. Our Auschwitz:Past is Present wiki conversations speak a lot about luck as a factor in survival. (Luck amidst a lot of bad luck....) I think there definitely is a chance factor (in all of our lives), but I also think about Rudyard Kipling's poem, "If".  He wrote, 

If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew 

    To serve your turn long after they are gone,   

And so hold on when there is nothing in you 

    Except the Will which says to them: ‘Hold on!’

And I think that the requirement for this kind of life-or-death endurance is what was in store for the people in the videos. I couldn't help but think that ninety percent of the people in these videos would be dead by 1945. Killed.

What was most shocking to me was how similar some of the scenes were to street scenes in the US in the thirties. Especially in the cities, the clothing was similar and people are people wherever you go. There were photobombers and ladies putting on lipstick. Children played in a marching band just like I did in middle school. 

The houses in the countryside were distinctly "Old World", but again, the nature pictures could have been anywhere. I couldn't help but think how lucky I am that my family had made it to the US fifteen years before the war. 

In the end, I'm left with thoughts of our anonymity as small pieces of thread in the tapestry of humanity. The laughter and dancing passes, tears are shed, and names are forgotten. I hope and pray that the horrors of the Holocaust and other genocides will cease and never be repeated. It is likely that I will live a great many more years. But we are all walking time bombs with uncertainty as the only sure thing. And although I have made a small impact on a few lives, my laughter and tears and name will someday be forgotten. I will join these nameless faces in the videos as part of the fabric of life...

That was how life was in Poland back then.

This is how my life is here, in the US, today: I went to a museum with a friend and came home with much to think about. Another friend and I went to the grocery store together. Now I sit on the sofa with my cats and I write my heart out.

World, know this. I give thanks, every day, for my good luck and for my life force.