I saw a beautiful photo of a flower the other day and thought about when I would introduce this. I did not come to any conclusions. I've been thinking about it for a few months. When would be the right time to write about it. There is a question in that hesitation, when is the right moment to bring something fragile into the world? And the question itself is a kind of privilege. Not everyone gets to ask it.
Jadwiga Ankiewicz was a Catholic Jewish girl living in Lublin Warsaw, Poland. She was arrested and sent to Pawiak prison. From there she was taken to Konzentrationslager Lublin, Majdanek. During the war the Nazis used intense psychological methods to disorient and demean every human being under their control. Every day they came in and told the group that many of them would be freed later that day. They built optimism to drive energy and then destroyed it before supper. From medieval games in the yard where Polish men and women were forced to do inhuman things to each other, to endless hours of work without sleep. You watched every move, how they walked, what they said, how they held their form. The eyes never left them. Many at Majdanek were transferred to Auschwitz, Birkenau, and Monowitz (the factory).
She kept her head up and her smile steady every single day. She was a loving human being, a writer, an artist. Those who were released often found themselves sent to Auschwitz anyway. She was released once but the world had other plans. Intolerance, die glocke killed her. They tried to "change her". Standard experiments and "processes". She was not trained on a gun. The gun does not ask whether you are trained. It only asks for your breath.
I still wonder when to step forward with my own fragile things. Perhaps never. Or perhaps now, while there is still time before the yard goes quiet and the bells begin their endless ringing. I suppose it does not matter much whether you are ready or unready. The gun answers either way. And so do we. But oh, how efficiently it takes what you love most. It hardly bothers to look at you first. Leaves you standing there with your hands full of things you cannot bear to drop, watching the world turn without you. Either way, the flower will bloom again. I just hope someone is left to see it.