Ever since I took a History of Nazi Germany class in college, I have been fascinated with stories of the Holocaust. While part of my interest is certainly the horror story factor (the same thing that draws me to books about serial killers), and some of it has to be biological (my dad will devour any book he can get his hands on about World War II) I think what keeps me drawn to this period over and over again are the happy (or, rather, bittersweet) endings for those affected by the Holocaust. The tales of triumph over evil, survival in the worst of conditions and forgiveness of unforgivable acts.
A few years ago, I interviewed a Holocaust survivor for the newspaper where I worked. Born in Poland in 1932, he spent his formative years in a ghetto and then a concentration camp. He eventually emigrated to the United States and spent years hiding from his past, bottling his feelings deep inside (and turning instead to The Bottle for solace). It was only when he began telling his story that he began to find peace.
While I was listening to him that day, all I could think was how amazing it was that this man was sitting in front of me. He was a living, breathing piece of history, and I was having a conversation with him. I had lunch with him a week or so later, and he asked about me -- where I grew up, my education, my goals -- and I couldn't help thinking that nothing I had to say could be all that interesting to this man who had known such incomprehensible suffering.
Talking to him made me feel very privileged, though not in a good way. I am ever grateful that this man's suffering is incomprehensible to me; his life is not one I want to understand from a first-hand perspective. But at the same time, sitting at lunch with him, I felt the age-old urge to clean my plate because people are starving elsewhere, an almost guilt-like feeling, because I grew up in such relative privilege.
But today, I read a Holocaust story that made me realize there are two sides to that coin.
He was a teenager living in a death camp; she was posing as a Christian and living in the village nearby. Every day, she would come to the camp's fence and throw an apple to him; he would catch it and run away before he was seen. He called her his "angel girl."
When he got word that he would be moving to another camp, he bade her farewell, and the two forgot about each other until, years later and an ocean away, they were set up on a blind date. They got to talking about their wartime experiences and realized they had met before. He proposed marriage to her that very night. The couple, now of Florida, has been married for 50 years.
It sounds like something out of a movie. But Holocaust experts who have studied the man's memoirs believe it to be true, and so do I, if for no other reason than that I want to. I'm willing to bet there are no adjectives strong enough to describe the horrors of what these two experienced back then, and so should their joy of finding each other and falling in love be likewise indescribable. And just like I could never fully understand the suffering, I don't think I could ever fully understand that kind of happiness.
I'll take what I have. But I am glad to know that those who suffer the most often have the greatest joys as well.
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