The venality, corruption and cruelties of power, when these become our daily focus, can harden the heart. The risk of cynicism is ever present, especially for we who come bearing no solutions other than the non negotiable precursor that we open up to the nature, scale and needlessness of the problem.
(Hinduism in its wisdom has Siva the Destroyer up there in Godly triumvirate with Brahma the Creator and Vishnu the Preserver. For one like me, better at finding fault than implementing solutions, there’s much needed validation in that deist division of labour. We too serve, who only pour damnation.)
This morning I was fortunate. Two inbox items went some way, if not to softening my heart then to putting on hold the hardening. One was a response by Chris Hedges to the death, yesterday at age 92, of his friend and Auschwitz survivor Lola Mozes. It was a republishing of a piece he’d written a decade earlier, and let me confess up front to being habitually suspicious – see what I mean about that hardening of the heart? – when invited to remember one Holocaust as another is perpetrated, and defended in its name. But since no one could accuse Chris Hedges of Zionist apologetics, I read in full …
“You Have a Mother”
We lost my dear friend, Lola Mozes, who survived Auschwitz, this morning. I wrote her story a decade ago.
Brooklyn. Lola Mozes’ childhood came to an end in the fall of 1939 at a small bridge in Poland. She was 9 — seated in a horse-drawn wagon, her back propped against her family’s silver Sabbath candelabra, which was wrapped in a blanket — when she saw the aftermath of a German bomb attack. The sight of human bodies, along with eviscerated horses gasping in pain and struggling to rise despite their gaping wounds, reduced her to tears and panic. Her mother, Helena Rewitz, born Schwimer, who would hover over her daughter like a guardian angel later in a Jewish ghetto and the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp, took the terrified child into her arms.
I sat with Lola Mozes at her dining room table in Brooklyn on Friday. Short and petite, with curly black hair and white gold hoop earrings, she had a soft, infectious laugh, an impish sense of humor and fine facial lines that she inherited from her father and mother. Her charm and warmth were girlish and slightly coquettish.
“I am the great pretender,” she said, smiling. “It is always there, what I went through. I am tormented by it. It keeps repeating and repeating itself in my head.”
Lola grew up living next to her family’s small grocery in Katowice, a city in southwestern Poland. The language at home was German. She learned Polish in school. Her parents, especially when they wanted to talk privately, spoke Yiddish. Her parents and older brother celebrated the Sabbath and went to synagogue on religious holidays but lived as secular Jews. Her father, Emil, who sang arias as he bathed in the mornings, dressed in imported German suits and spats when he left the house. They lived in a working-class section of the city. Catholic children in the neighborhood taunted her as a “Christ killer” and once pushed her brother Oskar off a tram and beat him. But nothing prepared the family for what was to come. A dark future was only hinted at when the parents, their faces knotted in consternation, listened to Adolf Hitler on the radio …
Read the full 4134 word account …
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The second was brought to my attention, as so many great pieces have been over the years, by Jan Oberg at Transnational Foundation. Viewed in the abstract, divorced from a context I’ll get to in a moment, its conclusions could read like those routinely seen in the most banal settings. Have you noticed it’s the uptightest person at the office who posts life wisdom stickers next to their computer: dance like no one is watching … live each day as if it’s your last ..?
The same could be said of the conclusions here, but for one thing. These weren’t dreamed up by a get-rich writer sensing a gap in the buoyant market – what does that say of a sick society and its spiritual poverty? – for DIY therapy. They were written down by a nurse at the bedside of 300 terminal patients as they breathed their last.
Why 300?
After her 300th patient, Laura stopped taking notes. She didn’t need to anymore. Every confession, every tear, every whispered goodbye pointed to the same truth:
We’re all chasing something—success, control, attention—but every chase ends in stillness. What matters is who we loved and how we showed up while we were still running.
Those seven truths became her compass. She said they saved her life long before they ended anyone else’s. Her notes reveal something haunting yet hopeful: most people don’t fear dying. They fear not having really lived …
For his part Jan Oberg, introducing Thomas Blake’s piece, says:
This – moving – account of what really matters in the ways we live our lives, made me think of two things: Perhaps, if we all thought of these 7 things, the world would be a more peace- and joyful place. My second thought was: What will today’s decision-makers who advocate violence and war – and practise it too, killing a lot of people – think and say on their deathbed about how they lived and what they should have understood mattered to them?
Here’s the 980 word piece in full …
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Can’t for the life of me think why, but I found myself minded to look up the lyrics of “Enjoy yourself”. Written in 1949 by Guy Lombardo, here they are:
You work and work for years and years, you’re always on the go
You never take a minute off, too busy makin’ dough
Someday you say, you’ll have your fun, when you’re a millionaire
Imagine all the fun you’ll have in your old rockin’ chair
Enjoy yourself, it’s later than you think
Enjoy yourself, while you’re still in the pink
The years go by, as quickly as a wink
Enjoy yourself, enjoy yourself, it’s later than you think
You’re gonna take that ocean trip, no matter come what may
You’ve got your reservations made, but you just can’t get away
Next year for sure, you’ll see the world, you’ll really get around
But how far can you travel when you’re six feet underground?
Enjoy yourself etc
You never go to night clubs and you just don’t care to dance
You don’t have time for silly things like moonlight and romance
You only think of dollar bills tied neatly in a stack
But when you kiss a dollar bill, it doesn’t kiss you back
Enjoy yourself etc
The words shift but not the message as Prince Buster puts a little Hootenanny skaa into the mix:
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“What will today’s decision-makers who advocate violence and war – and practise it too, killing a lot of people – think and say on their deathbed about how they lived and what they should have understood mattered to them?”
The real problem is, that they don’t ask that question until the deathbed, and by then it’s too late. And because of that, I sincerely hope that karma is a real thing.
Beautiful