Reading Journal #8

This poem made me sad, and prepared me for another story of the Holocaust. The request for meditation struck a cord in me, and it made me stop and consider what I was reading a bit more carefully. The poem says, in a sentence, remember we are still humans despite what has been done to us. The narrator seems to be someone who is looking back on something as someone who now knows better. He mentions things like “I thought this, but now I know better, or I soon learned better.” It is as if he is writing about something that he has separated from the rest of himself and is yet an integral part of who he is. I think that this makes the narrator more real to me, for who can undergo what he has gone through and not be changed? Yet at the same time it makes him inaccessible to me, for he has gone through so much and so many times he mentions moments where he has lost all semblance of civilization and he has become hardened or cynical or has completely lost touch with both the future and the past. These moments set him apart as someone that I would never be able to fully relate to because I have never been pushed to that extreme. The moment that stands out the most to me in this text was when the narrator was talking with Schlome, the boy who has been in the camps for three years. He narrator tells the boy that his mother is in Italy, and the boy is amazed that there is a Jew in Italy. He is so deeply moved by this, and that stuck out in my mind. It seemed to me that the thought that somewhere in the world the narrator’s mother might be safe, even though she is a Jew, brought hope to that boy. The thought that something that simple could have that much of an effect on someone is mind boggling to me.