Survivor

I spent Saturday at the Holocaust museum in Washington, DC. The museum is filled with symbols of the holocaust, both the evil as well as the good and it is incredibly well done. However, the one defining experience of the trip for me had nothing to do with the museum itself.

The fact that I made the trip alone had made it incredibly sombre and real and 3 hours into the experience I was tottering around quite thoroughly shaken. I noticed a group of 10-odd tourist types gathered around an 80 year old man and his wife. He was a survivor of the Holocaust who had spent years in a concentration camp and lost his entire family to the tragedy. In typical touristy fashion, they were quizzing him about his time there and how it felt to go through something so terrible. He said that it was something he didn't think was worth talking about and that he hadn't even told his wife of 58 years the gory details. The group continued the polite probing and finally he gave them this.

"Imagine the thing which you love the most in the world.

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Now imagine it being taken away from you.

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Now imagine all the things you ever loved in this world.

And imagine every single one of those things being taken away from you.

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That is how it feels."