Everything hurts,Our hearts shadowed and strange,Minds made muddied and mute.We carry tragedy, terrifying and true.And yet none of it is new;We knew it as home,As horror,As heritage.Even our childrenCannot be children,Cannot be. Everything hurts.It’s a hard time to be...
Here's what I most want you to know: this really is as bad as you think. No matter what anyone else says, this sucks. What has happened cannot be made right. What is lost cannot be restored. There is no beauty here, inside this central fact. Acknowledgement is...
In the late 1930s-1940s, Michael Bond, author of Paddington Bear, saw Jewish refugee children (Kindertransport children) walking through London's Reading Station, arriving in Britain escaping from the Nazi horrors of Europe. Mr. Bond, touched by what he saw, recalled...
Angel, a Jew, owner of the most famous bakery in Germany, often said: "Do you know why I'm alive today? I was still a teenager when Nazis in Germany killed Jews mercilessly. Nazis took us to Auschwitz by train. Last night in the ward was deadly cold. We were left for...
I can't reconcile the way that the world is jolted by events that are wonderful and terrible, the gorgeous and the tragic. Except that I am beginning to believe that these opposites do not cancel each other out. I see a middle-aged woman in the waiting room of the...
A man was shipwrecked on an island where no one else lived. He laboriously gathered some material from the island and built himself a crude house. One day he was away from the house when he saw smoke rising from that direction. He rounded a bend and, to his horror,...
There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilizations—these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit—immortal horrors...
The encouraging thing is that every time you meet a situation, though you may think at the time it is an impossibility and you go through the tortures of the damned, once you have met it and lived through it you find that forever after you are freer than you ever were...