the scars of memory

It is strange how the seasons can betray your senses.

The veil of snow that betrothed Poland changed the spring landscape I battled with previously and left it the befitting black and white that colour Holocaust stories. Both are so familiar.

Gone were the wide-open spaces and left are the narrow paths that confine a journey. Paths crossed with a group of Israelis who were blind, accompanied by their guide dogs at Majdanek. Hauntingly vivid sightlessness.

And on the bus driving through forests, the trees blaze past, keeping their secrets of partisans and blood. And crouching in Auschwitz as guided by one of the sixteen-year-old participants; others march past, footsteps heavy in sound and impact. And so the two merge, trees with feet and shoes with branches. Distorted. Transforming.

And you touch the newly worn walls of Belzec, you feel the prayers of the Kotel and when you touch the Warsaw ghetto’s last remaining bricks you feel the creases of your grandfather’s palms.

Such are the scars of memory.