One more post, and I believe I'll finally be caught up with my excursions from last weekend, and just in time to go on more this weekend. Unlike the happy little tale of Joan of Arc, this monument is dedicated to one
of the saddest stories ever told. Each crystal in the wall represents a French person who was killed in the Nazi concentration camps. I'm crying now just thinking about it again. There are 200,000 of them. I've gotten to know these people here in the streets, they are happy dads holding hands with their sweet daughters, and old women who really like French bread and smile a lot. They are my neighbors and coworkers. Yet they were taken away from home, seperated from those they love and forced to live, and die, away from their families. I can't be away from my wife for longer than a day without being lost, imagine those camps. Just imagine it. 200,000. That's the number of
mi
nutes in 139 days. I'll be in Paris for 106 days, just over three quarters of that time. How can we forgive? If only we could forget. This monument was built to simulate the feeling of walking into nowhere and not knowing if you'll ever come back, and it certainly accomplishes that feeling. It is directly behind the Cathedral of Notre Dame, with no fanfare and no signs, only five people are allowed inside at a time, and the narrow stairway to get down into the pit is only 1.5 feet across. Though the monument is on the bank of the Seine you can only see the incredible view through a tiny window at the bottom of a wall, fenced off so you can't get close enough to see anything but green water. Total helplessness. The seagulls mock you as they fly up and out. The walls are covered in the names of the camps, and quotes of philosophers, etched sloppily as though by the prisoners leaving their final words. I just can't write about this anymore. I love my family so much. Thank you everyone for making me have a reason to live.
One more post, and I believe I'll finally be caught up with my excursions from last weekend, and just in time to go on more this weekend. Unlike the happy little tale of Joan of Arc, this monument is dedicated to one
of the saddest stories ever told. Each crystal in the wall represents a French person who was killed in the Nazi concentration camps. I'm crying now just thinking about it again. There are 200,000 of them. I've gotten to know these people here in the streets, they are happy dads holding hands with their sweet daughters, and old women who really like French bread and smile a lot. They are my neighbors and coworkers. Yet they were taken away from home, seperated from those they love and forced to live, and die, away from their families. I can't be away from my wife for longer than a day without being lost, imagine those camps. Just imagine it. 200,000. That's the number of mi
nutes in 139 days. I'll be in Paris for 106 days, just over three quarters of that time. How can we forgive? If only we could forget. This monument was built to simulate the feeling of walking into nowhere and not knowing if you'll ever come back, and it certainly accomplishes that feeling. It is directly behind the Cathedral of Notre Dame, with no fanfare and no signs, only five people are allowed inside at a time, and the narrow stairway to get down into the pit is only 1.5 feet across. Though the monument is on the bank of the Seine you can only see the incredible view through a tiny window at the bottom of a wall, fenced off so you can't get close enough to see anything but green water. Total helplessness. The seagulls mock you as they fly up and out. The walls are covered in the names of the camps, and quotes of philosophers, etched sloppily as though by the prisoners leaving their final words. I just can't write about this anymore. I love my family so much. Thank you everyone for making me have a reason to live.
1 comment:
Wow Kason that's pretty amazing. The war memorials in D.C. are pretty touching, but the one place besides the Lincoln Memorial and Arlington that really hit me hard was definitely the Holocaust Memorial. Wow, how sad. Have you read "Night"? It's a very sobering book. Another monument that hits you pretty hard is the USS Arizona at Pearl Harbor. It's a tear-jerker. It's terrible how people can treat other people when they forget that they really ARE people. It's so great to have the gospel to know that it will all turn out the way it's meant to in the end.
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