I’ve been struggling a little more the last few months. Struggling with something dark and damp and desperate, twisting itself among my veins, reaching across my heart and nipping at my soul.
My growing morbidity. I’ve been morbid since I can remember. As a kid, I had freakish nightmares despite a safe and happy daylife. I had an imagination that overran my little brain. It was an amazing thing to grow up with, and I still love tapping into it now. But the morbidity came with it too.
I had a lot of Holocaust nightmares while I was growing up… I remember being in first or second grade and hearing about the Shoah in a school assembly. I remember my teacher speaking about her parents. I remember the nightmares that started to haunt me for years, through high school.
Now that I have kids, it’s only getting worse. Iran is the new face of my freakish thoughts and it’s already blown up out of proportion or it’s not enough, I’m not sure yet, I guess we’ll find out. But the evil that embeds itself into our world consumes me while I hold my children, while I bathe their little bodies, while I shh shh them to sleep.
I think about death. Destruction. Terror. Injury. Hate. Apathy. I wonder about killing children. Stabbing a sleeping baby. I wonder about pulling the trigger on a seven-year-old. I wonder what goes through your mind when you line up mothers and their babies and shoot them. How you plan to deploy missiles where kids grasp each other in shelters.
Is their blood a little brighter? Are their screams a little higher pitched? Do they know how to scream in terror before they’re devoured by it?
And how it’s possible for a person to be alive, breathing, born to this world, who considers without a second thought that a child has nothing worth living for. That a child has no worth. No feeling. No pain.
So I guess it’s really been building up. And after watching this video – My Child, The Holocaust Denier – something unlocked in me and I just let it all come out through streaming, salty, bitter tears.
Every year, you kinda wonder when this Holocaust stuff will go away, when we’ll lose touch.
Every year, there’s something else to remind us it’ll never go away… we’ll never be given the opportunity to forget.
As long as we have everything to lose, we’ll never be free.
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Here’s some more Shoah education for today: My Brother’s Keeper: Jewish Solidarity During the Holocaust
The poster above is by graphic artist Doriel Rimmer, winner in the “Designing Memory” competition run by Yad Vashem and the Israel Ministry of Public Diplomacy.
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