Childhood Memories

          Last week, Steve and I ventured to the Kentucky Theater  to see Woman in Gold. The scenery in the film is beautiful, the story line factual and Helen Mirren, one of my favorite actresses, has a starring role.  Not to reveal the plot, Woman in Gold  is about a woman's quest to reclaim a painting that was wrongly confiscated from her family after the Nazis invaded Austria during World War II.  All in all, the film is brilliant; I highly recommend it.

          That said, I must tell you frequent tears silently coursed down my face as I watched the film. Some of the scenes depicting the Nazi occupation of Austria shook the very core of my being, bringing back sad childhood memories. Growing up in the Jewish community in Cincinnati, I was frequently in the company of men and women who bore serial numbers tattooed on their arms, permanent reminders of the time they spent in the Nazi concentration camps. I learned the words Auschwitz, Triblenka, Bergen-Belsen, Buchenwald and Dachau before I even knew where Germany was. One of my father's closest friends was Eli Grossman, who as a young teen was being schooled to be a concert pianist. When he was in Dachau, all of his fingers were intentionally broken. After he and his father immigrated to the United States, Mr,Grossman made his living selling men's clothing, his permanently deformed fingers no longer able to play a piano. Ralph, another friend of my parents, never seemed able to overcome the guilt he carried because he was the only one of his parents and siblings to survive the camps.

          The afternoon after I had visited the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., I was so angry at God. Why, why and how could God allow millions of people to die at the hands of the Nazis? Where was God when men, women and children were herded to their deaths in the "showers" of the extermination camps? Had those people prayed to God as they gasped for breath?  Several days after my tirade towards God, it occurred to me the question I should have asked was where were we? Where were all the people in the world who could have taken steps to stop the slaughter but didn't?

          Yes, Woman in Gold brought back memories, so many I had managed to push into the far recesses of my mind. But, the film also reminded me of all the genocide that goes on today in Africa, the Middle East, Latin and South America. What about the senseless murders that take place in our own country? I suspect that for the family of one person whose life is snatched from him or her, that one person matters just as much as the millions whose lives have been taken from them.

          I have many prayers I say to God, both thanksgivings and petitions. But my constants in all those petitions are for God's peace and continued strength for me to do my part in spreading word of God's love and in loving my neighbors, wherever they may be, working to obtain that peace for all of God's beloved children.