My thoughts are free
Like many people, I was both stunned and puzzled a few weeks ago when I heard that the infamous sign over the entrance to the Nazi death camp at Auschwitz had been stolen. The sign, which said in German "Work makes you free," was a cruel lie told to the 1.5 million people who were slaughtered there.
Who would steal that sign? Who would want to have such a piece of Auschwitz? What motivated the theft? Anti-Semitism? Holocaust denial? Notoriety? Money? (But who would buy it?) Now that the sign has been recovered -- in pieces, but recovered -- I'm sure we'll get some of those answers.
In the meantime, I've been looking for a word, an adjective that describes my response to the news that the sign had been recovered: Glad? Pleased? Not appropriate. Relieved? Closer, but not quite right.
I was sickened by the theft, feeling it as a desecration of an important piece of history. Even though I am not Jewish, even though I wasn't yet born when the Holocaust happened, the theft of the sign touched that part of the collective psyche where the horror is imprinted. My original title for this piece was "the truth will set you free," as counterpoint to the foul lie of the sign, even though in a literal sense, knowing the truth of what was happening in the death camps did not set those prisoners free, any more than "work" did.
But I was thinking about how important historical truth is, how important it is that we know the truth of what happened in Auschwitz and Dachau, that we teach our children what happened there, and in Rwanda, and in the Killing Fields of Cambodia, and in Deir Yassin, and here in the colonial Americas. I would like to believe that teaching our children the truth of these atrocities will prevent such things from happening again. But history shows that hope to be misplaced. For whatever reason, truth notwithstanding, human history is one of wholesale slaughter and genocide.
Even so, truth and freedom seem to go hand in hand. The Nazis, like oppressors of every era, sought to twist both. They even tried to ban an old German folk song about freedom: Die gedanken sind frei.
Thoughts are free, who can guess them?
They flee by like nocturnal shadows.
No man can know them, no hunter can shoot them,
with powder and lead: Thoughts are free!
I think what I want, and what delights me,
still always reticent, and as it is suitable.
My wish and desire, no one can deny me
and so it will always be: Thoughts are free!
And if I am thrown into the darkest dungeon,
all this would be futile work,
because my thoughts tear all gates
and walls apart. Thoughts are free!
(Translation from Wikipedia.)
When this song, familiar to me from both Mahler's liede and its use in an old World War II movie, started running through my head, I understood my reaction to the news of the sign's recovery.
The Auschwitz sign represents a particular truth -- an ugly truth, but an important one -- and its theft felt like an attempt to steal the truth, to stifle it and lock it away, just as surely as the tortured millions were imprisoned. With its return, I felt free again. Free to breathe. Free to know the truth.
It seems so timely: It feels as though there is much that we are not allowed to know, not allowed to talk about. People on THE RIGHT don't want us talking about x; people on THE LEFT don't want us talking about y. THE GOVERNMENT surely doesn't want us talking to each other. The truth gets hidden away, but it is there. It may be hard to find, hard to talk about, but the truth does exist.
And the truth shall set us free.
Original post to 50-something Moms Blog.
