Tuesday, December 09, 2008

I watched the old Spencer Tracy movie "Judgment at Nuremberg" yesterday. I also saw footage of a woman in Zimbabwe and her four-month-old baby who are both certainly near death from cholera. (Cholera. Cholera? I've never even heard of someone contracting cholera.)

I woke in the night and couldn't expunge these images from my mind.

This morning, I'm left with the question of how we cope with witnessing this kind of horror. My grandfather (we think) participated in the liberation of Dachau. But I can't even see 70-year-old footage without losing sleep. After visiting the camp all of these years later, I lost sleep for nearly a year. I am haunted. In a true sense. The unanswerable question gnaws at the corners of my mind: did He forget them? Can He forget me?

How do I put this to bed in my mind? How do we continue to live and eat and breathe and have babies knowing what kind of world this is?

What do I do now?

These are honest questions. I can't but despair in finding their answers.

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