A Healing Visit

Lately, I have been struggling with what happened after the war. How do you piece a world back together? How do you "peace" a world back together?

I see myself as a spiritual humanist. I celebrate all humanity and I know we are imperfect. I know there is so much we cannot understand, and yet that doesn't stop me from trying. I know that I will never understand the hatred and violence that is central to war. I still try, though, to make sense of it so that I can make my little mark in helping repair the world.

When I learned about situations at the DP (displaced persons) camps after the war, I was horrified. So many people had no home and no country even to return to, and they ended up as prisoners of a system that had no place for them. There were great acts of kindness in these camps, and there were beautiful stories of reunions. But these are the exception.

In my attempt to make sense of all of this, I met with a gentleman named Ed Harris yesterday. He is a veteran who had been serving in Europe at the end of WW2 and he ended up working at the Dachau trials in the months after liberation.  Afterwards, he became a lawyer, father, and grandfather and impressed me with his gentle manner and his subtle sense of humor.

His wife and I spoke about my experience in Poland. You probably have figured that there are things I saw there that I don't want to write about. One of the survivors said in an iWitness testimony that his stepmother advised him not to force his sorrow on other people. I believe that, for me, too. However, it was helpful for me to commiserate with her about images that will never leave my head after being at Auschwitz--- images that haunt her still, twenty five years after she visited the extermination camp. 

Ed waited until she and our friend John stepped out of the room to get coffee, and then he told me about his shock at the huge piles of ashes he saw when he arrived at Dachau. As former altar boy in his church, he knew that even the tallest of people could eventually fit in an urn, ashes to ashes, dust to dust and all. The mound that grew so many feet high and so many feet wide must have had so much life, he marveled achingly. Where does that life go?

He spoke about his role during the early Dachau trials in the spring of 1945. One part of his job was to get people from the local town to come in and watch the trials. He said that at first they did, in great numbers, but quickly, so quickly, the numbers dwindled. The locals claimed they knew nothing about it and didn't want to know or believe anything about it. How can you take in that all this happened in your backyard? And yet... How can you not?

My parents went to Dachau sometime in the 1960s and they said that there were no signs for the former Nazi concentration camp and the locals couldn't or wouldn't tell them where it was located. This story fits with what Ed Harris told me.

He also told me that most of the prisoners who were able to left the camp after liberation.  He believed they went home (ah! to have that belief! You can never go home.) However, a group of men survivors stayed to act as witnesses during the trials. Despite language barriers, they communicated with him and told stories and formed connections with him and the other young veterans who were stationed there. Again, some of the stories they told him, still so raw at the point, were beyond haunting.

I am grateful for this new friendship and for the eye-opening conversation we shared. I wish I could have had this conversation with my high school guidance counselor, Irv Faust, who was at the liberation of Buchenwald. Mom recently found for me an article that he wrote about the experience, and I would be happy to share it with anyone who asks. He wrote about the unspeakable relief and thrill of knowing that Hitler was dead, followed by the shock a few days later upon hearing of his father's sudden death. He wrote about wondering if his father lived long enough to know the war that had killed his relatives from Kraków was going to end. I wish I could have shared this part of my life journey with Dr. Faust; he believed in me so much and would have had helpful insights. 

This all goes back to my main point: have conversations with the people in your life while you can. And greet new people into your world, see them as people with stories, and learn from them. Life is so vast. I will always keep learning.