the beginning

Today marks the beginning of HSI-learns-Holocaust week, and also the beginning of a series of actual, assigned journal entries.

We'll see if I'm capable of maintaining any kind of quality in my writing. To repeat one of my new favorite words: assigned pieces? Fabricated.

Evian-Les-Bains, home of the famous bottled water, was also home to a conference which could have saved half a million human lives. There, in 1938, world leaders from 32 "Countries of Asylum" met to discuss potential solutions to the growing problem facing German and Austrian Jews-- the problem of pogroms, the problem of random arrests, of public humiliation, of hangings and corruption and the hatred of Jews.

They met, they talked, they played golf and had spa days and rode horses through the lovely mountain scenery. Not so far away in Germany, countless Jews were looking down the barrel of a fate that no one deserves. And these bureaucrats spent ten minutes each saying,

O, O God, it's so sad, so terrible, those poor innocent men and women and children. Those poor innocent Jews, we pity them so immensely, we care so much.
But I'm afraid that laws are laws and the people are the people and
no.
No, we won't be helping.
We can only pray that someone else will.

And again and again throughout history, people express their sympathy and look away and move on. The conference at Evian was just another moment that people chose to wait, another moment when politics left us with a dream-- a dream of life --deffered.

Making a difference is not something that can be postponed. We have to make a difference now, or we'll all really be screwed; you can't postpone the issue because in the case of the men and women at Evian it was as good as murder. And if all they wanted was to point at that weekend in France and say, look, we tried; say that so they could sleep at night, then fine. They got what they wanted. They didn't take issue with the extermination of innocents.

But someone has to. Someone has to take responsibility for the things and the people that the fools of this world shatter like clay vessels. Someone has to care for the broken, someone has to stick the earthen sherds back into one another like a jigsaw until our water glasses can be the mirrors for the voices we can only just hear, like the dull roar of ocean in a seashell.

Someone has to fix it,
someone has to listen.

If we don't, who will?