Mankind in a Minor Key

Her forehead dimpled with concentration as her eight-year-old fingers drew the bow across the strings.  Sweetness spilled from more than just her violin, the music animated every muscle - she bobbed and swayed, eyes closed, lips alternatively rising and falling with each stroke of the bow.  Her hair was dark and natural in the way of children, her best dress blue and white, stretched across remnants of baby fat.  Vivaldi swept through her with an innocent passion, her instrument no less a part of her than skin.  It seems that angels play the violin.

 She reminded me of photos I’d seen just days before.  Photos of other children wearing best dresses, black and white photos of concentrated brows and violins and sweetness silently spilling from instruments through the glass and simple frames.  Children kicking balls and playing with sticks, braiding each other’s hair and leaning into one another, arms and elbows resting on shoulders, chins tilted to smile for the camera.  Each photo captured a singular tick of the clock, a singular moment when children with names and stories and dreams were animated with innocent passion, with freshness of life and with hope.  Each photo memorialized the moments before.  Before freshness and life and hope were ripped away.  These children’s photos hang in the Holocaust Museum.

I’ve read about and studied the Holocaust.  I’ve shuffled through the cramped quarters of Prinsengracht 267, touched the walls that sheltered Anne Frank and her family, leaned against the the tree outside that witnessed their discovery and forced removal.  I’ve written papers, essays, stories, seen movies and visited graveyards, I’ve remembered and remembered and remembered events that conspired before my lifetime.  I still don’t understand.

What sort of creatures are we humans that we can coldly and methodically research, engineer and execute deliberate torture and murder?  Frenzied attacks resulting in carnage I might understand (not accept, understand).  Revolutionary revenge striking brutally back against oppressive regimes I might ‘get’.  Ravings of madmen holding sway over a few dedicated henchmen willing to follow any order have peppered the history of mankind and surely left a bloodied and bitter trail in their wake.  Crimes of passion and insanity, though inexcusable, are explainable.

But what can explain the calculated, intentional, blue-print and supply order dependent, methodical, systematic process by which humans - flesh and blood persons with names and stories and memories, with first loves and favorite recipes, best friends and bed time stories – humans, just like me, were treated worse than animals and exterminated like ants?  Shot in the woods.  Shoved into cattle cars.  Burned alive.  Experimented on.  Deceived into thinking their captors might be human after all when a shower was finally offered.  They thought wrong.  A race that devises a freight elevator for lifting poisoned bodies to incinerators capable of turning 1,000 recently conscious souls into ash per day couldn’t possibly be human.

Yet, the blood of them both – German and Jew – floods my veins.  Racially, culturally, genetically I am neither, but their blood is the blood of humans, and it sustains my life beat by beat as it once did theirs.  When I witness the evil we humans are capable of, I am ashamed of it, ashamed of my relation to the rest of mankind.  “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry” are the only words I have when passing black and white walls of children, angels with their violins, photographs of what could have been.

How did they bear it?  Did they cry out to their God, the One their sacred writings deemed the only true God?  Did they, in desperation, call Him “Jehovah”, His given name, the name forbidden to say, forbidden to write, hoping He might then turn and hear?  Did their angry, weary, broken cry, “Where are You?” stick to the loud sun in its merciless sky or echo in whispers against concrete “showers”?  I know the question, I have asked it myself.  How could God allow His own people to be lain on the altar, innocent sacrifices once again filling the air with ash?  How could He see it and do nothing?

I know of many who can only view the Holocaust with numbness.  It’s understandable.  It’s safer that way, because to let even a fraction of its enormity in feels like a white-hot sword through the soul.  It’s enough to make one question the existence of God – or the existence of a good God, at the very least.     

The problem is, I know of no other sufficient explanation for calculated evil.  The simple evolution of man from animals adequately explains frenzied attacks and carnage, even madmen and the destruction of the weak – similar phenomena are found in the wild, and if such wildness is our heritage, the apple hasn’t fallen far from the tree.  But intentional evil exceeding mere bloodshed, cold systematic torture and pre-meditated murder on an overly grand scale are not found anywhere else in nature.  The proof of such suggests that humanity is an “other”, a creature with sides unseen, with capabilities and potentials that no other being on the planet has inherited.  There are animals and there is “us” – we are somehow something else, something more.  We possess another layer.  

Lest the picture be painted too bleak, humans are capable of tremendous charity, as well.  Self sacrifice for the sake of another is considered a virtue (an odd concept at best, if the survival of mankind has depended on the practice of self-preservation), and pockets of overwhelming good are found tucked not only among the dark moments of the Holocaust, but throughout all of history.  Our extra layers extend infinitely beyond both ends of the spectrum – we are as capable of great love as of great pain.

We are like the strings of a violin.  We play our lives so that either joy or sorrow sweeps through those who are near enough to hear.  We are humans, persons, accountable and significant, having authority and dignity – that is what we are, not who we are, and nothing, not cattle cars, not poisoned showers, not pain or disease or abuse, can take it from us.  We sense the truth of it in our “otherness”, in the space where the music plays.  And the music matters.  The effect our lives have on the lives around us matters.  It matters to us, it matters to them and it matters to the One who originally bestowed the gift of music.  If it didn’t matter to Him, it wouldn’t matter at all.

If there is no God, no good God, justice would not exist.  It could not exist.  Those who committed treason against their own race – the human race - would never ultimately pay for it.  The blood of children would not be redeemed, the brutal cutting short of their lives never accounted for.  Human acts of evil would go unanswered, the sacrifice of innocents empty and merely pitiable.  The Source of our “other” is the source of our authority and our dignity, the Giver of our significance.  It is because He deemed us infinitely valuable that we are held accountable for the music of our lives.       

The blood of humanity flows through me, and that is enough for me to bow my head in shame and lift it high with pride.  I have infinite potential, power to change the world for good or for evil, power to offer love or pain.  I try to let the sweetness flow, sweeping through me with passion so innocent that my notes are high and clear, good and full of joy.  I’ve learned, however, that I must ask for the score. The God who is good, whose sorrow is greater than my own when weary cries stick to the loud sun, has written it, though for now I see only the notes I am meant to play.  The rest is a mystery and I must trust that the symphony of humanity will ultimately echo through the halls of heaven, somehow richer for its harmonies, sweeter for its sour notes.  When I hear it then, I hope I’ll understand.  Black and white faces will be flush with color when we stand where freshness of life and hope are reborn.  When we stand where angels play the violin.     

“With our hells and our heavens so few inches apart

We must be awfully small

And not as strong as we think we are”

-Rich Mullins