This is Real, Too

In the same way that those who look for adventure often find death, those who look for knowledge often find sorrow.

I believe in knowing about history, but sometimes it’s hard to look. When I was young, my parents had lots of books and nobody really told me that there were books for written for kids and books written for grown-ups, so I read a lot of things at perhaps a tenderer age than I might have if my parents had known where my forays into the bookshelf were taking me. This is how I was first exposed to the Holocaust. I was one of those kids with a sensitive and over-active imagination, and scary movies, books, or just random scary thoughts that would come into my head would creep up at night and send me to my parents’ bedroom, where they would assure me that everything was okay, because the monsters, ghosts, and zombies of my imagination were not real. I would be comforted, have a glass of water and go back to bed.

When I found out about this thing called the Holocaust, I processed the knowledge with that pure horror that only a child, unequipped with the coping tools of experience and context, can. And for the first time, I did not go to my parents. There was nothing that they could say. This was real. It had really happened. No comforting words, no glass of water, no clean sheets and warm bed could undo that.

I have never gotten over my horror at the ugliness of history, but I have also never gotten over my need to know what happened. My husband and I recently finished a series on the Great War — the “war to end all wars”, as contemporaries, with innocent irony, called it. Each night that we went to bed after watching an episode, that same horror that had tortured my child-self kept me awake, taunting me with the thought that everything I had just seen was all too real. Millions of soldiers really went to war and lived and died in a hell on earth for no justifiable reason. German mothers really watched their babies starve to death in the economic aftermath of the disastrous Treaty of Versailles. Men really came back from war with faces so shattered by bomb shells that people could not bear to look at them. This is all real. This and so much more.

The horror of war is not all in the past. I watch the footage coming in from Aleppo and put my baby to bed knowing that there are mothers facing the night who have no child to lay down, and children who have no mother to lay them down. This is real. No matter how hard I close my eyes, when I open them, it will still be real.

I don’t have the power to put it all right. There’s nothing I can do about the past, and so very little I can do about the present.

I look around my little world. Falling asleep next to my husband while we watch Star Wars for the 500th time. My daughter saying her first word (it was “Papa”). The luxury of getting up in the middle of the night and seeing her warm and full and safe. Christmas carols playing as I wrap gifts and stuff stockings. This little, fragile island. But it’s real, too.