What do you do when all the problems of the world are solved?
There is no Chrysler bankruptcy setting a pall over the sputtering global markets. No swine flu among other things, bringing restaurant business in Mexico City to a grinding halt. No neo-Nazis burning synagogues and painting crude messages on the Jewish grave markers. No planned May 5th, 2009 country-wide pogroms to commemorate the 40 days since an ostensible suicide in the famous Petrovka solitary cell of a leader of a militant national-socialist movement “Russkaya Volya”, accused of 8 murders spanning Russia, a dedicated teetotaler and “revolutionary”, Maxim Basilyev, 28.
Those historians are dogged. Dogged, I tell you!
And yet, one of the biggest stories of the week is a 65-year old message in a bottle found by workers demolishing a wall at the State Higher Vocational School in the southern Polish town of Oswiecim, the site of the infamous World War II Auschwitz Nazi German death camp.
The bottle with a note signed by 7 concentration camp prisoners inside was literally unearthed in the crumbling mortar of a structure built to house the guards stationed at Auschwitz-Birkenau.
“We know two of the Auschwitz prisoners who signed the message survived the camp, but their later fate isn’t known,” the Auschwitz museum historian Jerzy Mensfelt said in a telephone interview, leaving it open whether the ensuing publicity would be used to search for more information on the survivors.
And now, time for yours truly to be crucified. But, SERIOUSLY, why? Why should we bother these two very old men? And why is there a growing media frenzy? Why. Does. Anyone. Care?
No, about the archaeological find, not the horror of the Holocaust. Jew by descent, this topic has infallibly left me scared, depressed, maddened beyond measure. It is a colossal crime — against Gypsies, Jews, Poles, gays — the likes of which is practically impossible to truly internalize unless one has lived through it, I imagine. Or rather, don’t want to imagine.
But why precisely is it imperative to know what happened to people who had been lucky enough to have made it out of that slice of hell alive?
Certainly, they couldn’t but have come out with some sort of PTSD. Just as certainly, their acclimation to a world still convulsing after the devastating effect of the second global war within less than three full decades couldn’t have been easy. But that is nothing that we can change now — or could have even changed then. They have made it out, and while hardly their oyster, the universe was at that point just as much theirs as it had been any man’s.
Here’s hoping they have made some sort of peace with their ordeal and carved out the kind of life for themselves that gave them love, prosperity, happiness — and hurt as few of their neighbors in our global village as possible in the process. As far as I am concerned, that is the most any one of us can ask for.
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