I still have my map of Boston’s Freedom Trail from having visited the nearby New England Holocaust Memorial 21 years ago. I kept the map because I had scribbled a quote on it while walking through the glass towers of the memorial. Each of the six towers, open to the sky, symbolizes a chimney of a Nazi extermination camp. Steam rises eerily through metal grates at the base of each tower. Quotes from Holocaust survivors are etched into the glass, interspersed among tiny six-digit numbers representing the 6 million Jews killed.
The quote I recorded that afternoon touches my soul as much today as it did then. It’s from Gerda Weissman Klein: “Ilse, a childhood friend of mine, once found a raspberry in the camp and carried it in her pocket all day to present that night to me on a leaf. Imagine a world in which your entire possession is one raspberry and you give it to your friend.”
Imagining such a world requires strenuous effort on our part because most of us can’t fathom such poverty.
