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 apartWe must be awfully smallAnd not as strong as we think we are”-Rich Mullins