Crying and Laughing and 6 Million

I've completed my Holocaust project.

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When I finally had my window propped up, with the picture frames set up on either side of it as they will be when it's displayed, and my parents were sitting beside me, helping to hold it up...I just couldn't believe it. I couldn't believe, looking at my creation, what I had done. That I, Mollie, had created this piece of art, meaningful art...and I barely felt like it had been me doing it. I felt like the hands of 11 million victims of the Holocaust - 6 million Jews, 5 million other groups, 1.5 million children - were doing the work through me. I did it for them.

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On Friday night, I cleaned off the window. I scraped the chipping paint off of the wood, and I wiped off the glass. I have trouble concentrating on things like th

at sometimes, things that have to be done to allow other things to be done...but this time, I felt nothing of the sort. I was entirely engaged. There was nothing of me at that moment except for the scraping and wiping and the feel of the solid wooden floor beneath me.

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Last night, Saturday night, I stayed up late to work on it. I'd been working steadily throughout the day...well, pretty much the whole day, on the window. And my every waking thought was occupied by that project.

I started faintly coloring one of the pictures red. It's a picture that focuses mainly on one naked, pale white corpse, contorted with hunger, twisted to the side, mouth gaping open... My pencil began to scratch red over his face, and that's when it happened.

I started to cry.

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I hardly ever start to cry just like that, so suddenly. There's always a warning, a buildup. And there's usually some moment in there when I have a choice whether or not to let the tears flow. But this wasn't like that at all. One moment I was fine, my eyelids starting to droop lower out of tiredness, my fingers busy, holding that pencil...and the next, tears were streaming out of my eyes. There was possible a split second in which I knew, "I'm going to cry," but that was it. No choice. No deliberation. No hesitation.

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I suppose it was just too much - thinking about that all day. I'd kept the tears at bay, let the grief build up. Not that I was conscious of doing this. I suppose I was just set on doing something - cutting out pictures, or writing quotes - and I was able to think, and

to feel, and to connect with what I was doing...but not to let it all out. Then, in this moment...

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I bent forward over the picture, and let out a little gasp. I felt out-of-body...I guess I'm not used to doing things so unexpectedly. I let the tears come, and come. Thoughts ran through my head like, "Should I cry now?", "Cry, Mollie, cry! You've been bottling it up!", "God, my head hurts," and "Are these real tears?" Usually my thoughts kind of block out what I'm doing, and I just think. But this time my actions took over. I realized that my body was doing something I honestly couldn't control. I couldn't think, "Don't cry now," and not cry. And I was relieved. I was relieved to know that there was something I had so much passion for that I could cry about it without being conscious that I was crying...without deciding at any given time that I was going to cry.

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A teardrop slipped off my nose onto the photograph I was hunched over. I watched it spread through my blurred vision, the ink billowing on the edges and becoming a blue-ish color. I couldn't help but feel that this was extremely fitting - having teardrops on part of my project.

And I cried, and I cried, and I cried, letting myself carry the weight of all those deaths on my back.

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When my bouts of weeping lessened for a moment, I looked closely again at the photograph that had caused this outbreak...at the face of the corpse. And my tears doubled.

Because that body wasn't just a corpse...they were a person, a whole person, with hopes and dreams and friends and a family...they had knowledge, and secrets, and hobbies and talents...they cared about someone else, and someone cared about them...they made mistakes, they got angry, they laughed and cried and talked and listened and watched...

I just sat there for a very long time, thinking about these things

. I looked at other pictures, at other people who could have lived, maybe could have still been living, if it wouldn't have been for the Holocaust.

After a long while of crying, and telling myself to do this, I dragged myself up to my knees so I could reach for the set of picture frames that holds the picture shown below.

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It's a picture of a starved infant in the Warsaw ghetto.

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I didn't even know a human could look like that. Especially a baby.

This picture was emotional for me the very first time I saw it, when it showed up on Google Images. I didn't think it could be real. But there it is, real as ever. Now, of course, I cried and I cried and I cried.

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I cried over that picture for a long time. One of the other pictures in that group of picture frames got quite a dousing of tears. I couldn't help noticing when it was tilted a certain way in the light that the tears had run across the glass in two little trails. They were joined together at the bottom left and branched out...they looked like two fingers help up for peace. Ironic.

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Soon, I started talking to the baby. Well, at first, I talked to the room, to the dust, the the window, the ceiling...I even addressed God in my pleading of "Why, why, WHY," which I hardly ever do. But eventually, I focused my attention only on that baby. What I said went, briefly, somewhat like this:

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You were supposed to live. You weren't supposed to die. How could they do this to you? You were supposed to live!

You would've lived a whole life. First you would have learned how to walk, and how to talk. After a few years, you'd go to school, and you'd start learning things like how to add and subtract and multiply and divide numbers, and read words, and write them... And you would have made friends, and had fun...and you would have laughed. Oh, there's nothing like laughing. Laughing...you're so happy when you laugh.

And you never got to.

You were supposed to live. You were supposed to live.

I'll...I'll laugh for you, okay? I'll laugh for you...

And...and then you would have gone to a...well school would have gotten harder. You would be learning more complicated things. You'd interpret books you read, and do more complicated things with numbers, and...you would've, maybe, made some new friends, some different ones. You might have had some trouble with your friends because...you're changing. But you would've had really good friends.

And you would have laughed.

Eventually, you'd leave home and live somewhere else, away from your parents. Here, you would pick something that you want to study about especially, something you’re interested in, and you’d focus on that. And then…well you’d also…you’d get a job and…

And… I don’t know. I guess I just…I really don’t know. I haven’t gotten there yet so…well I don’t know. I don’t know what it’s like.

I’ll…I’ll live for you. I’ll live for you so I can tell you what it’s like. And I’ll laugh for you…

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I talked much longer than that, and went into much more detail. For example, when I talked about math, I tried to explain exactly what adding and subtracting and multiplying and dividing was. After all, somehow who hasn’t ever experienced anything like that wouldn’t know, right? Now that they would know what I was saying, either…but I think babies can understand. And of course, I was crying through the whole thing. My groups of sentences would be separated by gasps and moans, like spaces between paragraphs. And some words would barely be audible. At one point I had to get up and wipe off my nose, because snot was starting to drip from it, and I didn’t want that on the pictures…oh no. I think that was about the time I started talking about college…and it was scary, really, how I just didn’t know. I could tell about it materially, about what it is…but nothing personal. And even if my words about growing up and going to school weren’t any less materially, my mind was whirring like a video cassette, playing back those memories in my mind, transmitting them to the baby in the photograph. My words carried something with them. But when I got past where I am in life, they were empty. The film was blank, just static. Not recorded yet. So I’ve resolved to live my life for that baby, and for the other babies and children and any person that doesn’t live their full life. Any person whose life is taken from them unjustly. I will live for them.

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Somewhere in all this crying, I started to think about “6 million Jews.” Six million…that’s a lot of people. A lot of lives. A lot of names. And somewhere along there, I decided to collect a list of 6 million names. Before I die, I want to have 6 million names that I can connect with 6 million faces. I don’t have to know them personally, just have a face. Six million…so that I can try to begin to fathom how many people that is.

Six million names.

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I kept talking to that baby for a long while…and I realized how hard it is to explain what life is like. How much you’d miss if you…didn’t have it. And once again, it’s hit me how truly valuable every life is. That hits me every day – and every time feels like the first time. Every single person is unique, and has so much that makes them up as a person. How could you take that away from someone?

The last thing I said for the baby was, “I will laugh for you.” I must have repeated that fifty times over the course of that night. So that’s another thing I realized – the value of laughter. Real, true laughter.

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Eventually, I went to sleep. I asked my Grandma Bee for help. She’s not my real grandma, but she felt like one, when she was alive. And I think I saw her angel. One night, when I was about 4 years old or so, I saw her floating up near the skylight, clothed in a beautiful flowing dress, in my dreams. And she was so real. I’m sure she was real. So I asked her for help last night. I asked her to visit me again.

She didn’t come – at least, not that I know of. Maybe I don’t remember.

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I hope she comes tonight. And I really do have to go to sleep. But I want you to keep this with you:

Six million names.

and

I will laugh for you.