It's Personal

“That they were torn from mistakes they had no chance to fix; everything unfinished. All the sins of love without detail, detail without love. The regret of having spoken, of having run out of time to speak. Of hoarding oneself. Of turning one’s back too often in favour of sleep. I tried to imagine their physical needs, the indignity of human needs grown so extreme they equal your longing for wife, child, sister, parent, friend. But truthfully I couldn’t even begin to imagine the trauma of their hearts, of being taken in the middle of their lives. Those with young children. Or those newly in love, wrenched from that state of grace. Or those who had lived invisibly, who were never known”
― Anne Michaels, Fugitive Pieces

I could write so much about today but it is already tomorrow and I have been awake for over 22 hours. The trip to Auschwitz was organised by the "Lessons from Auschwitz" project which is run by the Holocaust Education Trust. The Scottish Government supports the initiative with funding and by so doing helps several hundred S5 & S6 pupils to take part and go on to be ambassadors for the project, teaching others about the vital importance of understanding and never forgetting.

All of it was moving, some of it was distressing but in the end the extraordinary message from Rabbi Andrew Shaw during a brief service in the dark at the end of the railroad tracks in Birkenau was what , at present at least, speaks most strongly to me. Telling his personal story about his grandfather and grandmother he encouraged us to leave that awful place with , in his own words, pride and hope - pride that the Jewish people survived and survive still and hope for a world in which good does triumph over evil, no matter how evil.

Again and again during the day it was the personal that struck home - the awful shock of a vast pile of human hair taken from the corpses , two glass cases the length of a room filled with shoes, a bunch of keys in the pocket of a newly arrived prisoner, thousands of photographs that were in wallets and purses and these suitcases, many of them named by those who thought they were being moved or resettled and who packed their lives into them.

So Raphaela Sara Tausik it is personal. We know you lived and we don't forget you.