For Holocaust Remembrance Day, I stood in the cool and cluttered pantry of my house. I took a few breaths and thought myself back thirteen years to the first time I visited Amsterdam. Then I took this picture of the doorframe:
Always growing.
What does my dinged up pantry molding have to do with Remembrance?
If you’ve been to Amsterdam, I hope you’ve been to the Anne Frank House. If you haven’t made it there yet, I hope you will go someday. Take a virtual tour. Read The Diary of a Young Girl.
Richard and I went on a snowy morning. Both of us were so moved by the experience that we couldn’t really speak. When you step behind the bookcase and climb into the Secret Annex to occupy the same space where eight people hid from the Nazis, you can’t help but understand the horror of that time. The floorboards creak. The blacked out windows still let in the sound of the church bell a few blocks away. The walls are covered with magazine pictures of Anne and Margot’s favorite actresses. And on one wall, their father Otto drew lines on the wallpaper to show how much the girls were growing.
Anne on the left, Margot on the right
Anne grew 13 centimeters while they were hiding.
At the Imperial War Museum in London, I watched raw film footage taken by the British when they liberated the death camps and had to use bulldozers to bury the dead. In Prague, I walked through empty synagogues that have become museums because the Jews who built them are gone. I told the story of one in “Doris and the Dragon.” In Paris, I crept down a flight of cold cement stairs to the river bank where boats were loaded with Jews for deportation. I’ve stood in a cattle car and tried to imagine when it was filled with terrified families. I’ve read the statistics and the history and the memoir, but nothing brought the story of the Holocaust home to me like these narrow pen marks on a wall.
I can hear “6 million Jews were killed in the Holocaust” and believe it, but not comprehend it. When I look at those marks climbing the wall and know that Anne was still growing, still becoming who she was meant to be…I understand that because my wall looks the same. We so often try to learn history from the big numbers down, but I learn so much more when I start from the one–the one life.
Every single one of the six million had a life. A mama who reminded them to shush now and then and a papa who marveled as they grew. A first kiss. An annoying sibling. A dream of becoming something in the world. A story to live.
This was a beautiful and moving post. I re-posted it on my facebook page. Thank you!
Thanks for sharing it, Fran!
Perfect! Thank you!
Thanks for reading, Kathy!
Your post is a beautiful, moving tribute to all of those we lost. I was similarly moved by the Anne Frank house. I visited it when I was about 12 and had just read Anne’s diary. I already felt close to her from reading her words but the house really brought home her story, her ordeal and her brilliant, important (albeit short) life.
Amen. I remember standing in the apartment and hearing the church bell ring–realizing how CLOSE the world was to them and how torturous it had to be, minute by minute.
Thank you for sharing – you really brought home the horrors of WWII with your connection to the growth chart. I have visited the Jewish Quarter in Prague and was completely overwhelmed with grief when I saw all of the children’s art work from when they were held at Terezin Concentration camp. Some children survived, but not all. I hope we never forget about the Holocaust. Thanks again!
That art display broke my heart, Stacey!
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