Today’s reflection session offered time to pause and hear the thoughts of others on this journey we are walking with one another. Many personal narratives resonated with the disparate thoughts I jotted down in my notebook and that have been rattling around in the few quiet moments we’ve had over the past few days.
I first thought I would write about the juxtaposition of the pure beauty I see in the landscape surrounding us with the ugliness borne by the Jewish people whose home was once this beautiful land. But something is nagging at me that I feel a need to wrestle with by getting some unformed thoughts on the page.
The notion of choices continues to ring for me. We’ve heard about this in our seminars with Michael and as a repeated theme in Natalia’s teachings these first few days. Early in my journey, I wrestled with the idea these were true choices to be made. One of the first times I felt like I began to understand the enormity of The Holocaust was in my early teens, watching Sophie’s Choice with my mom. At the time, I didn’t appreciate or know of the controversial nature of Styron’s choices made in the novel that subsequently showed up in the film. And still, it was with the movie that I began to contemplate how the millions of lives lost all were millions of individual stories and histories, like Ellen said today at our reflection: it was 1 plus 1 plus 1…
In watching the movie, centered on Sophie as a mother with a “choice” to make as an impossible decision that was not of her making, I couldn’t really reconcile that it was a true choice. To me, it felt like a decision more than a choice. One that was anchored in imposition by evil, not a choice rooted in her agency.
Early in my professional life, I was trained as an advocate for those who were survivors of sexual violence. One of the first things we learned was how important it was to give agency to those impacted by sexual violence. The crimes committed against them were crimes of power, and anything we could do to restore power and agency to them would be important in supporting their healing.
I’ve been coming back to that training over the past few days when reflecting on the stories of Ringelblum and Czerniaków and so many others who made choices, impossible choices, as Jews facing the terrors inflicted by Nazis. Although they may have been choiceless choices, as framed by Langer, seeing them as choices offers me a way to reframe the role of agency for the victims of the Holocaust. And for those who witnessed the inhumanity of the Nazi regime and stood up to protect their fellow Poles with places of refuge to hide or helped smuggle food to them. These choices, these acts of resistance were all that some had in their power to hold on to their own and collective humanity in the face of atrocity.
As members of the CWB community who have walked this journey, who have heard the 2nd generation stories of survival, who have walked the path of those who didn’t survive, we have a responsibility to uplift the stories of those who perished and those who lived. As we sat in the memorial site of Treblinka, with every butterfly that softly approached, every flower that sprung forth from the soil, every tree that stood tall in a beautiful landscape, I am reminded I can choose to honor their collective memories by taking forward all that I’ve learned and experienced on this journey.
I am grateful to the educators of our experience—Michael back in Pittsburgh, Natalia on Bus 1, the Rabbis, Hedy, Adam, and all of you who have generously shared your stories with us. And to Tsipy, Ellen and Victor for curating and making possible this life-changing journey, you have my enduring gratitude.