Star of Remembrance

For the past four or five months or at least for a helluva long time around here, the sky has been gray, cloudy, often raining. We are all sunlight deprived. Today it is in the mid 60’s with a crystal-clear blue sky.

So, I come home and go for a walk. Not far up the hill I decide to walk next to a Jewish cemetery that rests on a curved hillside. I notice a gravestone that - for some reason - I have not noticed before. 

It has a name: “Star of Remembrance”. A loosely drawn sketch of a child holding a doll is engraved in the stone accompanied by these words:

“In memory of the 1,500,000 Jewish children who were murdered during the Holocaust”.

The pure blue sky could hardly be bluer. The wind is warmish and soft. I am so happy to be out in the sun and walking. I am so glad that it is not raining. But here I stop and I am drawn into this sweet little headstone, memorializing something so hugely monstrous as to be incomprehensible. 

Monsters do not exist in hidden or alien worlds or in the waters of deep lakes....they live among us. Humans become monsters. Humans may never stop murdering each other. Nature gives us the ability to commit murder but also the intelligence to think about our actions. The insects do not seem to have this consciousness. We do.

When children are murdered the entire world shrinks in size and everything is diminished even more than when grownups are killed by other grownups.

This little carved slab was dedicated on the anniversary of Kristallnacht in 1993.

1, 500,000 little souls are remembered below the bluest of skies in the season of rebirth and regeneration.