Hope

{by Maggie from Okay, Fine, Dammit.}

They march into his home, the law on their sides, and rip him and his father from their family like scabs. It is November 9, 1938, Kristallnacht. The “Night of the Broken Glass,” the night of the breaking family tree branches, all crushed beneath the German soldiers’ boots. Obliterated.

At night he lies on an eight-foot plywood “bed” with seven other men and he thinks, This is the end. The crisp, frigid air is as merciless as his captors and so he gives his own underwear to his father to give him just one more layer of warmth. He watches men murdered in a manner too wretched, too unbelievable, to be written casually by a stranger here. He notes that the officers are hardest on the most devout of his people, the ones praying on broken knees each night for a saving that never comes.

Seventy years later he will stand, shaking, a 92-year-old Jewish great-grandfather, an honored guest in our tiny church, and in a thick accent he will tell the congregation that he left his faith behind in that concentration camp’s latrine. That he associates the idea of faith with certain death.

Ironically, his very presence will fill me with hope.

***

I grew up in the famed Driftless Area, a particularly beautiful patch of Wisconsin passed over by the glaciers and snatched up by blond haired, blue-eyed Scandinavians. My small town was 99% white, 105% Christian. I had dark hair and eyes, olive skin, and a nose not nearly as button-cute as those of my friends on the dairy farms. I knew my last name ended in –berg, but I had no context for what that meant and I didn’t think a thing of it. Every year we put up our Christmas tree. We wrapped gifts, hung stockings, told stories about the baby in the manger. I don’t remember when I figured out my dad was Jewish; he never went to temple. He eschewed all religion, hadn’t attended services since his Bar Mitzvah, fled New York at the age of 17, met my mother (a Wisconsin farmer’s daughter) at 19, and never looked back.

I was in sixth grade social studies class the first time I ever heard the word “Holocaust.” We watched a movie called Escape from Sobibor and it was so powerful that when the screen flashed to a line of people headed to the gas chamber, not a single sixth-grader giggled at the sight of all those naked bodies. It was the first time I ever thought, That could have been me. That’s what Jewish means. I called my grandparents that night to talk about what I’d learned in school. They told me I was never to bring it up again.

For a long time I struggled with this mystery of my heritage, with an identity I couldn’t claim. In a way I’ve remained ignorant, and in other ways I probably overcompensated. In college I studied History, specifically Nazi concentration camps. Twice in high school I visited Auschwitz. I saw it all for myself, the claw marks on the cement walls, the piles and piles of eyeglasses and human hair. Afterward I tried again to talk about it with my grandpa, a U.S. World War II veteran. Normally a kind, gentle, laughing man, he was uncharacteristically furious with me. He said, “Why would you ever set foot in that place willingly, Maggie Snow?”

He has since, all these years later, softened about the subject. He speaks more freely now about his friends from the tennis court with the Auschwitz tattoos on their arms, about the refugees that slept in his childhood bed, about the china he and grandma passed on to me 12 years ago, a wedding gift that survived Hitler though its original owners didn’t.

Sometimes I think about the kind of faith my distant relatives must have had to send their precious belongings on ahead like that, certain they’d arrive later to claim them. Or, maybe they knew they were doomed but they just didn’t want the Nazis to get even one more beautiful thing, who’s to know? All I know is that we’re all here—my grandpa, my father, me, my children–because of that hope.

***

I refuse to look away from hard things, and so many come into view around the holidays. For me, the holidays are still magical, filled to bursting with love and riches both figurative and literal. For others, though, the holidays are wicked reminders. I feel like it’s our responsibility to recognize that, to somehow honor both.

I know all this can seem a little gloomy. I know my loved ones worry about me now and again, that my husband knows not to read me the sad headlines because I can’t let them go. I know some of you have told me you can’t look at the stories posted on Violence UnSilenced, and I empathize with you but I’m gonna keep looking—not because it makes me some kind of misguided martyr, but because it actually gives me hope. I said in my last post that faith is hard work, that I’d taken some blows lately that made me doubt. But today I woke up hopeful, because the threat to faith and the dawning of hope are deliciously intertwined for me.

I have seen battered women find and believe in themselves again. I have helped Hurricane Katrina victims rebuild their homes from the ground up. I have witnessed my family members bury children and husbands, and then watched in awe as they gathered around the Thanksgiving turkey, trimmed the Christmas tree, made tentative plans for the New Year. I have seen people fall down and get right back up again, and then again, and then again. The way I see it, it’s not for me to figure out why people keep finding reasons to believe. It’s for me to follow suit.

***

I stopped obsessing a while back over whether or not I should be marking Christmas or Hanukah. I started celebrating instead, with the intensity of a true revival, the Religion of People. I lie here prostrate to the brave survivors all around me and I do my best to learn from what they teach, whether they know they’re teaching or not.

That 92-year-old stranger may believe he’s lost his faith, but the fact that he was standing there after everything was, to me, a pretty powerful argument otherwise. And maybe it would have seemed a better story, a sure six-figure deal with the Hallmark Channel, if he had preached that day of his own unwavering belief. But this isn’t TV. In real life bad things happen every day and they can crush your faith, but if you are still standing at the end of the day then you are a person of hope.

Look at him, still standing. Look at you. Look at me, still standing, still pushing forward, still loving the guts out of my family over these holiday meals, still reaching out to you all with these words. Hope lives here, whether I invite it in or not. Hope is my kid taking my face between her hot warm hands and smashing my cheeks up so before I know it I’m grinning. Faith is hard work, but hope is so much easier. If faith is what we work so hard to give, hope is that reward we all get in return.

And I’ll take it.

***

Maggie Dammit is a writer, one of those real writers that the rest of us as readers get to soak up and wonder how she’s able to spin such magic with her words. She writes a personal blog, Okay, Fine, Dammit and is the creator of Violence UnSilenced, a blog devoted to supporting survivors of abuse. Don’t miss any of Maggie’s beautifully crafted posts, subscribe to Okay, Fine, Dammit, and follow her on Twitter.

***

Loads of Hope for the Holidays

Please join us at Blog Nosh Magazine as we share stories of hope this holiday season in support of the Tide Loads of Hope program, a mobile laundromat offering laundry services to families affected by disasters.

Share your own stories of hope, along with Blog Nosh Magazine, Velveteen Mind, and a gathering of inspiring bloggers, and enter your own post link in the blog carnival below. Explore featured bloggers as well as three featured posts selected from carnival participants listed in the linky (that could be you!).

Lend your voices now, then participate live during a two day event in New Orleans, Sunday and Monday, December 13 and 14, as we tweet stories of resilience from laundry recipients and volunteers on the ground. Follow along on twitter via #loadsofhope and be sure to follow @TideLoadsofHope.

Learn more about how you can extend hope to families affected by disasters by visiting http://tideloadsofhope.com

Blog carnival hosted by Blog Nosh Magazine, sponsored by Tide Loads of Hope.