The children. Image after image touches my heart with great sadness. What kind of seeds of trauma, tragedy and suffering are being planted within these poor pure children right now? To what will these terrible seeds flourish?
We the Jewish people know what such pain filled odysseys yield and the generational trauma that is their pain-laced harvest of these seeds. A living terror or anxiety for the cruel world around them? Unbridgeable hate between Russians and Ukrainians — two people thus far linked in friendship and connection? An inability to function, or ever feel inner peace again?
As many of these children externally will go forward in life, inside, the weight of these excruciating escape and displacement moments might be their constant, unwanted companions. In some shape or form, this trauma will leach into their lives, gripping them, forcing them, yet again, to grapple.
The images keep growing. The father rushing from a burning barn, his daughter in his arms. The little girls who got to each choose and take along one favorite toy or doll, standing all bundled up, huge eyes, the smudges of exhaustion visible, blank stares, their chosen toy dangling lifelessly by their hands. Two children, innocently smiling faces that are barely seen through the glass from the inside of a train window, waving faintly, but on the outside of the window — as sharp as can be — an older hand is pressing on the window between their tiny waving hands. Like a 3-D of two tiny faint hands but one older, stronger, pressing, clinging to the outside of the train car window. Is this third hand, outside, their mother’s? Their grandmother’s?
Maybe he’s three years old, his large brown eyes and beautiful face are contorted in pain, over his white plastic cup of water. A young, new mother, a mane of long luscious raven black hair cascading down her back, as she gazes, face to face, deep into her newborn’s eyes whom she holds out before her, cradled in her arms. A sweetly smiling boy of maybe about nine years old, joining his hands and fingers in the hand-heart gesture, forming an invisible heart that floats amidst this tragedy.
Children fleeing in foil blankets. An abandoned empty mattress in an unremarkable plain room at one of the short-term shelters, save for a little golden Winnie the Pooh stuffed animal and a green toy, left behind, laying on the naked abandoned mattress. A woman crouching on her knees as she wraps her arms around a tiny little pink clad girl, at a border crossing. The children still in their hospital beds, a web of tubes around their faces, lying practically lifeless as they huddle in hospital hallways for shelter. The endless images of huge crowds of children in the freezing cold — the cheerful colored hats and coats that warm them, a jarring collision to the collective of their blank or pained faces as they wait . . . wait for what? for whom?
Another image, another one among throngs, another separation scene framed by a train car window as children are ripped away from their mother, the little sisters together. A Jewish family from Odessa. And again, three hands. Three waving hands that against their will seem to weep the words “farewell” or “will we see one another again?” or “I love you” or “I can’t bare to part from you” or “I will never be the same again” or “life will never be the same again” or “I am broken” or “a part of me is dying right now.” An older sister, 12-year-old Alexandra in her white knit hat, holds her little six-year-old sister Asya, round faced and apple cheek-ed, encircled by her green knit hat, her eyes and lips seeping sadness as the tears flow. Their two small hands, waving from within the train car, as seen through the barrier of the window, with — again — an older, more wrinkled hand, and more sharply visible too, for this time it is on the outside of the car in broad daylight. Separated from the train window is their mother Irina’s more wrinkled, maternal hand, again pressing against the window, again hanging on to her children till the very last minute before the train’s cacophanous percussion commences, the high pitched whistle audibly signalling that the train is about to jerk into motion, the wheels about to carry these children far away from their mother. A journey into the unknown, suffused with panic, a slicing away of their little life, their world of foundational loves.
They have officially joined the swarming flow of fleeing children.
What have we done? What have we done to the children?
We are living through Europe’s next great reckoning.
I wonder how all this will impact the memory of the Holocaust.
Between then and now, just as the dying embers of the survivor generation still glow, Europe has, just like that, created a new trauma, instantaneously placing us in a new kind of Holocaust era.
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