Lange Hofstraat 26

I AM STILL ALIVE

Remember and never forget and forgive. That is what my parents gave me with the memory of the Holocaust. It's mixed with what I had absorbed throughout   my life and my experience. What the memory of the Holocaust had embedded into my consciousness is: Never give up when facing any difficulty. If a person is alive, one always must strive grow and become like a thick tree trunk. Like the cyclicality of flowers and grasses growing and deafening endlessly. As a person, I must find the spark within me, and every human being. Nurture it and find a way to savor it, like a light that quavers against the shadow. Doing for the other elevates one’s spirit, like the sugar cube that my mother's friend gave her on her 21st birthday at the Death March on 20.2.1945.

Life is full of dilemmas that have no easy solution, and they are tangled as ropes within us. Like the huge seaweeds in the ocean. Sometimes we climb this inner rope. Our spirit carries us on its wings, up, up, and up, and we break through forward with joy of life and wondrous creation. I often slide down into a dark pit, a melancholy, into deep despair, a sense of paralysis and of losing my way, to a point where the sense of loss sinks into harsh solitude. I ask myself to die, to lose myself, my home, and my life
All humans are looking for a way float up. Sometimes they use different religions and rituals, sometimes they use the culture they belong to, sometimes they draw strength from the elements of nature. But all rely on the forces and energy they absorbed from the initial relationship they had with their parents within the family unit. Same as the umbilical cord links the mother to the fetus, and through it streams the fetus becomes   a whole person.

A very difficult dilemma confronts me as a person in view of the cruelty of people, of poverty, famine, war. I ask myself: Are those who bear the flag of destruction truly human beings who passed through the bellies of their mothers, bound by the umbilical cord to the bloodstream that brought them to life, just as I was, just like everyone else? The second dilemma is the values   I grew up with. I do not know whether those values are binding me preventing me from acting against destructive forces? Or do they motivate me to be a part of human race to become a continuity of the moral vision I leave behind me?
Will I be like my late mother's friend in the Second World War.? OR like the people who travel the world and help others in difficult times? Situations like: earthquakes, floods and hard wars?
Will I share the last piece of my bread with the other? Will I leave my comfort zone and run to help the victims of disasters around the world? To help people their house had burnet, to help the elderly the children,  Any person? 

Will I be excited with joy and my soul blossom, simply blossom?

NECHAMA BOR  2018