Free The Heart Has Reasons by Mark Klempner

and a girl.” I said, “I stood so often under the clock at the Amstelstation.” But as we talked, the memory slowly came back to me.
    She told me how the people who had escaped from the ghettos and camps in Poland went to Israel and formed a kibbutz in the Western Galilee. When they were still in the ghetto, they had promised each other that those who survived would preserve all the things they had made and written—diaries, paintings, knitting, everything. So in 1949 they built the first Holocaust museum. But it was only about the people of Eastern Europe, and this woman, who is from Holland and spent time in a camp, thought it should include the Dutch too. She asked if I would get involved, and we started to do it together. Many of my things will be on display, like that embroidery of Piglet and Pooh.
    There was an unveiling recently of a very special stained glass window that was installed at a church in Vught. The window symbolizes the solidarity between the women who were in the concentration camp there. You see one woman lying on the ground, and the other ones helping her to get up. It’s a beautiful window, and when it was first shown they had a program that included music that had been sung in the camps. A choir sang some of the songs that Gisela and I had made up. My granddaughter was there, and it was very emotional for her. For the first time she could picture how life was for me when I was a young woman—as she is now.
    How can we prevent something as terrible as the Holocaust from happening again?
    It already has. Not on the same scale, but we’ve already seen the Khmer Rouge regime massacre its own people in Cambodia, the Iraqis gas the Kurds, the Serbs in Bosnia butcher the Muslims, the Chinese slaughter the Tibetans. And just a short time ago, the Hutus in Rwanda took up their machetes and hacked almost a million Tutsis to death! Who did anything about it?
    Recently I was asked to speak at a college in Israel. In the audience there were both Jewish and Arab students, and at the end an Arab boy raised his hand and asked, “Would you have helped my people if they were in trouble?” And I told him that at that time it was the Jews who needed the help. If it had been another group, I think I would have helpedthem also. You can’t let people be treated in an inhuman way around you. Otherwise you start to become inhuman. It’s a simple notion, but people tend to care only about their own people, don’t they?
    Yes, and it saddens me. . . . So, if I, as a Jewish person, say, “Never again,” thinking only of the Jews, I probably won’t take action on behalf of other groups.
    That’s right, and one group alone might not be strong enough to protect themselves from a bad situation; everything depends on their getting help from the others.
    Any other ideas as to how we can help bring about peace and justice in the world?
    I think only by being an example yourself. That’s the only way to teach anybody anything. . . . Shall I make you a bowl of soup?

    Like all children of those who barely escaped the holocaust, I have often asked myself the “what if” questions, the most prominent being: What if my father and his family hadn’t made it out of Poland? When considered deeply enough, these questions can become as confounding as Zen koans. For me, they also conjure up the little bit of pre-Holocaust family history I've been privy to.
    My father once told me that after his family had departed their village of Glowaczow and were waiting to leave Poland from Warsaw on the ocean liner M.S. Batory , they stayed for a few days with a cousin who tried to persuade them to remain another week. “It will be so long before we see each other again,” she pleaded. “Why not take the next ship?” My father, only a boy at the time, tugged at his mother’s skirt and insisted that the family stick to their plan. As it turned out, not another passenger ship left Poland until after the war was over and nine out of ten