Weekly Zephyr #12: August 17th, 2017

Janice Wu, Matchsticks, 2015

Since a zephyr is a light breeze there's a limit to what it can carry. This week is very heavy, so we can't put too much in here. One small story that suits the week and that's it.

Long ago I worked at The Children's Museum here in Seattle, beginning as a guide for a touring exhibit from the Holocaust Museum in D.C. called Remember the Children: Daniel's Story. I loved this job. I'd been reading Primo Levi when I applied, and I went into the interview full of fervor and armed with some weird math; I'd been trying to comprehend the numbers of the dead, and had figured out that if each person had been killed in front of you one at a time—so you could at least see who they were and get a sense of their humanity, rather than losing them all in one bundled number—you'd be witnessing a person die once every six seconds without stopping for...it was either 100,000 years, or a little over a year.

(I'm pretty sure I gave her a different number than either of those, but I don't know what it was. I just tried to work the math out right now and I gave up.)

The point was:

Humanity.

My boss was simultaneously weirded out and impressed by my fervent (if wrong) math, and she gave me the job on the spot.

Every Tuesday we were visited by a handful of Auschwitz survivors who would hang around at various spots in the exhibit and make themselves available to the children, answering questions, telling stories.

Klaus Stern was my favorite. Once, or many times, he told a story about something that happened two years after they'd been liberated from the camp. He said that after two years he and his friends who'd survived were still more animal than human. When your humanity is removed from you with that kind of force, it doesn't pop right back into place.   Klaus and a couple of his friends were driving around the Polish countryside one late spring afternoon in a jeep they'd borrowed from a friend in the U.S. army. They saw a cherry tree full of cherries on someone's private property and without a word they pulled over and climbed the tree and started stuffing themselves. 

It had been years since they'd seen fruit growing out in nature on the spot, well before the war.

A woman came out of the house and called for them to stop.

  They didn't pay any attention to her because these were cherries.

  Then she started yelling, and then she started yelling anti-Semitic things.

Again without a word, they climbed out of the tree and went back to the jeep and got a chain and went back to the tree and tied one end of the chain around the tree and the other end to the jeep and then they drove away

  with

the

tree.