I am still so very behind. I plan to catch up (and have a list of topics I want to cover), but this is something I have been wrestling with since last week and I felt like it was finally time to address it. I am using excerpts from a message I sent to a former student (now friend) who was one of several who wrote to me after the horrific shooting of the four Marines, one Sailor, and police officer in Chattanooga. She wrote, as several former students did, of her horror and fear, of her frustration with trying to believe there is good in the world when things like this happen.
I completely understand those feelings because I have them too. When I first walked in my hotel room and got on Facebook and saw that every post mentioned simultaneous shootings in Cleveland, Chattanooga, and Athens, I panicked. Thankfully, my three were at the beach, so I called my mom to check on them and she explained that the reports of multiple sites in three cities, the mall, etc, were false and that it was at military recruitment offices. Once that initial fear passed, I felt somewhat safer here in Israel than the thought of being at home, which is the height of irony, considering.
Then I turned on the news here. It was overwhelming to see images of my hometown and the site of the shooting, just a few miles away from my college. That, combined with the fact that the last three days have specifically focused on the extermination PROCESS of the Holocaust-- horrific information, awful imagery, heart-stopping feelings-- I just... We went to dinner and I faked calm the entire time. I had several people ask me about it, kind inquiries, and I answered but most of them do not get it. Big city people do not understand small town reactions. They don't get that when something happens in a small town, number one, everyone knows someone connected in some way, and that also, your sense of security is violated in a way that is violent and vile. They also don't get the way small towns come together and feel the joy and horror of the others, no matter the event. We are all connected.
By the time we got back, my insides were trembling. By the time we went to sleep, I was almost paralyzed with panic at the thought of leaving here to get on a plane in Israel and fly to NYC and then into Chattanooga. The entire sense of security in our tiny corner of the world has been ROCKED. I actually said these words the week of July 4: "I mean, ISIS in Syria ain't gonna target Nowhere, Cleveland, TN. I guess if they are calling for lone wolf American followers to act, that might be a problem, but I doubt our area is much at risk for that, either." Hm.
But here is the thing you (my former student, my reader, my friends, anyone who is struggling) have to remember: We were ALL brought into a world where terrible things happen for seemingly no reason. My parents were born to parents who were picking up newspapers out of mailboxes with images of what the liberators found at Auschwitz. I brought a baby home two years after we awoke to a world where people fly planes full of people into skyscrapers. Might the horror one day affect us PERSONALLY, take someone WE love? Yes. Might it one day harm us? YES. Can we live in sadness or fear over the anticipation of that day? NO. We have to keep living, keep being the good, keep reflecting our Father, keep showing love, keep teaching others, and know that it's all we can do to respond to the evil. And guess what? IT'S ENOUGH.
On Thursday, literally as the shootings were taking place (to the minute), I was listening to Frieda Klieger. Frieda is a survivor of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising and liquidation, Majdanek (one of the most horrific of the camps), Auschwitz, and Bergen-Belsen. She is 94 years young and the clarity of her memory as she described the most vivid horrors of her life, horrors imposed on her by one of the most developed and educated countries in the world... it absolutely amazed me and brought me to tears over and over again. She watched her sister and nephew being sent to their deaths, heard her nephew crying, "But Auntie, what if I never see you again???" She had one single possession with her in the camp-- a family photo. She watched an SS man rip it from her hands and tear it to shreds in front of her face. She kept pausing and saying, "I'll never forget that face... I'll never forget that date... I'll never forget that name... I'll never forget that place... I'll never forget that scene..."
She ended her story by telling us that hers was the first wedding in Bergen-Belsen Displaced Persons Camp. What beauty in the face of such tragedy! The morning of her wedding, she cried constantly, thinking about the absence of her father, mother, siblings, family... And then she put on that dress, and she walked down the aisle to the man who told her he would follow her anywhere on this earth, that he could be happy in any country as long as he was with her.
If Frieda Klieger can marry in Bergen-Belsen, board a clandestine ship to Palestine, a ship that was surrounded by British warships in Tel Aviv and then water-cannoned in Haifa, settle in Cypress until she could get to her Promised Land of Israel... If Frieda Klieger can witness the upraised hands of a little boy standing in the Warsaw Ghetto, about to be "liquidated" to Treblinka where his life was likely snuffed out, then become a mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother... If Frieda Klieger can live with terror, day in and day out, as her constant companion for 12 years, then have a career and a life as a citizen... If she can do all of that, we can get up another day, mourn for our losses, create a new "normal" as far as our security is concerned, keep facing evil, and keep being the good.
Gunnery Sgt Thomas Sullivan, Lance Clp Squire K. Wells, Staff Sgt. David Wyatt, Sgt. Carson Holmquist, and Petty Officer Randall Smith understood that. They had committed their lives to fighting terror so that we could live in our naively "safe" worlds. Now our responsibility is to do all that we can to show the world who we are and how we stand. We stand for good, we stand for our soldiers, and we stand against evil. We will not be intimidated. We will not buy in to the hatred that the shooter was expressing. And most importantly, we will not be confused with the difference between standing for good and sharing in evil. I will take Frieda Klieger's life as a testament to the fact that terror and evil start with words. They start with stereotypes. They start with allowing ourselves to be swayed by propaganda and media hype. What happened in Chattanooga, in my sweet home town area, while I was here, is heartbreaking. But it can stop here, or it can turn into heartbreak for more innocent victims, people whose names and dress and faith turn them into easy targets. We are better than that. We have to be better than that.
Martin Niemöller (1892–1984) was a prominent Protestant pastor who emerged as an outspoken public foe of Adolf Hitler and spent the last seven years of Nazi rule in concentration camps.
Niemöller is perhaps best remembered for the quotation:
First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Socialist.
Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Trade Unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.
(Thanks, Leah, for posting this quotation and reminding me of its appropriateness to this topic.)
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