Kristallnacht

Today marks the occurrence of "Kristallnacht", the German "Night of Broken Glass" in 1938 that marked the beginning of the Holocaust. 14 million people were systematically killed in the Nazi Death Camps, 6 million of whom were Jewish. There is not much that I can say that would even come close to describing the horrors of those times. So, instead I will let the 1980 Nobel Prize Winner, Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz speak for me.

This poem was written in Warsaw in 1943, after the ghetto had been destroyed and replaced with "Concentration Camp Warsaw." It describes the feelings of Mr. Milosz, a Polish Christian, who witnessed all of the events in Warsaw; from the formation of the Ghetto, to the subsequent uprising by the Jews, and the final inclusion of Polish Christians as victims of the Nazi horrors, within the grounds of the former Ghetto. In looking to distinguish the "ashes of each man", he alludes to an unearthly power that can distinguish those of the victims from the ashes of the rubble. But he concludes that no power can mark the difference of the Jewish ashes from the Polish ones. It is a remarkable poem, one which could only have been written by someone who was a witness to such inhumanity. May they all Rest in Peace.

"A Poor Christian Looks at the Ghetto" by Czeslaw Milosz

Bees build around red liver,
Ants build around black bone.
It has begun: the tearing, the trampling on silks,
It has begun: the breaking of glass, wood, copper, nickel, silver, foam
Of gypsum, iron sheets, violin strings, trumpets, leaves, balls, crystals.
Poof! Phosphorescent fire from yellow walls
Engulfs animal and human hair.

Bees build around the honeycomb of lungs,
Ants build around white bone. Torn is paper, rubber, linen, leather, flax,
Fiber, fabrics, cellulose, snakeskin, wire.
The roof and the wall collapse in flame and heat seizes the foundations.
Now there is only the earth, sandy, trodden down,
With one leafless tree.

Slowly, boring a tunnel, a guardian mole makes his way,
With a small red lamp fastened to his forehead.
He touches buried bodies, counts them, pushes on,
He distinguishes human ashes by their luminous vapor,
The ashes of each man by a different part of the spectrum.
Bees build around a red trace.
Ants build around the place left by my body.

I am afraid, so afraid of the guardian mole.
He has swollen eyelids, like a Patriarch
Who has sat much in the light of candles
Reading the great book of the species.

What will I tell him, I, a Jew of the New Testament,
Waiting two thousand years for the second coming of Jesus?
My broken body will deliver me to his sight
And he will count me among the helpers of death:
The uncircumcised.

"The Courageous Heart of Irena Sendler" with Anna Paquin and Marcia Gay Harden

Not since "Schindler's List" has a film dealt with the Holocaust, in particular the Warsaw Ghetto, in such a moving and realistic manner.

This story is true, taken from the book "The Mother of the Holocaust Children" by Anna Mieszkowska. It is the stuff of fiction, only this is real. A social worker in Warsaw, outside of the Ghetto, working under the noses of the Nazi's, smuggled out 2,500 Jewish children before the final destruction of the Ghetto.

Utilizing various means, including wheelbarrows, Ms. Sendler is able to place these children with Christian families, who will raise them until the end of "the madness." As an employee of the Warsaw Social Services, Ms. Sendler had unlimited access to the Ghetto in Warsaw. When rations in the Ghetto are slashed to 300 calories per day, per person, she recruits all of her fellow co-workers into a scheme to smuggle food into the Ghetto. When she decides to rescue the daughter of a friend, an idea is born.

Eventually suspected and then arrested, she is subjected to brutality and torture in an effort to locate the children she has smuggled out. These names have been carefully recorded along with the names of the families who took the children in. This information is kept in a Mason jar and hidden. The penalty for all parties to this crime is execution. No trial, just execution.

When Ms. Sendler is about to be executed, along with her co-workers, she is spared at the last minute and sent off on her own to hide. One of the men involved in the plot to save the children has her taken away from Warsaw and hidden. Before she goes into hiding she passes the jar along so that the children can be returned to their families.

The most moving part of the film comes at the end when Ms. Sendler, who passed away in 2007, is shown on camera commenting on the importance of returning these children to their families. She delivers, in Polish, the most beautiful statement about the pain of both sets of mothers. The birth mothers who were seperated from their chidren, some forever, as well as the Christian Mothers who raised these children for almost 5 years and then had to return them to their rightful families, both suffered enormously. And both groups displayed extraordinary courage.

A powerfully written and directed film, this story, much like "Schindler's List", is the story of human beings at their best, even in the midst of the worst. A stunning film.