Remember the casualties of war. Remember attempts to wipe out entire peoples; the murder of Jews, Roma, and others; the oppression of minorities. Remember T4. Remember.
I cannot go to a Yom HaShoah observance today, but I wrote this:
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What is life? What is horror?
What does it mean for either to be over?
We cannot say exactly when a life is gone
But we can count so many lives ended.
A horror can be behind you
While the experience and pain live on.
The world turns a blind eye to suffering,
Or perhaps its eyes are blind from the start,
Or myopic, and it needs a pair of spectacles.
What person, who, can fully see something
Enormous as human experience and life,
So huge that the smallest portion fills the gaze?
We can hardly see at all.
"How could such a thing exist?", we said and say
About the death factories,
We say "it's impossible", "inhuman",
Yet it lies within us all.
We are all human, and often we seem to
Strive to forget, to dissociate
From the state of reality, we say
"Barbarian", "monstrous",
When, really, it is "human".
So very human.
Not alone what it means
To be human
But part of our capacity,
Together with our kinder facets.
Even a conscience needs a guide, a basis,
Our sensibilities
Do not exist in a void.
A victim is not intrinsically innocent or pure,
A perpetrator not automatically evil at the core.
There is no clear division
Between "bad" people and "good",
And even some "bad" people
Are a victim of their own crime.
Lifting victims above the heights of criticism
Sinking perpetrators with the deepest insults
Does humankind no ultimate service,
It entrenches us where we are
In an internal battle in which
We are both "us" and "them",
Two in every one.
We treat death and the circumstances of death
As if they solidify the identity of the individual,
Though opinions in history change even then
- He was a hero, but then
- He really acted as a selfish pig
Under the guise of a hero, and then
- No, he was indeed a hero,
Flawed as he may have been.
If only our changing perceptions
Always brought us closer to the Truth.
Who am I? To whom belong
The horrors and beauties in my soul?
Human.
Horrors that become either unspeakable
Or mundane.
And beauties that somehow
Always transcend, no matter
How often their occurrence.
You have no excuse, we are all the same.
Human.
Life will not lose its value,
Regardless of how much you kill.
But, one day, depending on your choice,
All that horror could be left to you.
Whatever it means to be human,
To be bad or good,
To be a victim, hero,
To know or not know,
Still gives us a choice
For compassion, for sorrow.
To stand ready to forgive,
Or at least see
The humanity, the human,
Within a tarnished life,
To exercise understanding and
Understand our own faults,
To become careful in what we do with
Our own humanity,
To weep over the massacred
And weep over the twisted end
Of the promise of the slayer.
So much is lost in both, by both.
Life is a many-way stream,
No simple two-way street.
One name, one image,
One superficial capture, becomes
Our definition of an entire person,
Becomes categorical.
We say "a Hitler", but who knows
Everything about Hitler?
What does it accomplish
To reduce someone to someone else
Who has already been reduced
To an image or a phrase?
Some things we can know,
And some of our assumptions
Debase the value of our knowledge.
What does knowing do?
I love you, you are human.
I love you, yet I can be horrified
By the horrors you enact.
I love you.
I love you,
Lost and orphaned children,
Young people
Whose future abruptly derailed,
Elders
Whose wisdom is lost,
Survivors
Whose scars fester,
New generations
Who grew up with a legacy of strain,
I love you.
And what is love?
It is seeing the purpose in you,
Wanting to see it realized,
And know it will bear fruit.
You have always had it,
But it is your choice
With it what you will do.
11.IV.2018
SHL.
(Possibly to be subject to edits in the future. I had another version but misplaced it.)
(I had edits and misplaced them.)
