fast water. Within the layers of the terrible sorrow I carry in me
always, another feeling shoots through. It is the ĕrst melting trickle of
long-frozen snow. Pulsing down the mountainside, the water speaks,
the chambers of my heart speak. I am alive, the bubbling stream says. I
made it. A song of triumph is ĕlling me, pushing its way out of my
heart, out through my mouth to the sky up above and the valley
below.
“I release you!” I shout to that old sorrow. “I release you!”
* * *“Tempora mutantur, et nos mutamur in illis ,” I say to the chaplains
when I give my keynote address the next morning. “It’s a Latin phrase
I learned as a girl. Times are changing and we are changing with them.
We are always in the process of becoming.” I ask them to travel back
with me forty years, to the same mountain village where we sit right
now, maybe to this very room, when ĕeen highly educated people
contemplated how many of their fellow humans they could incinerate
in an oven at one time. “In human history, there is war,” I say. “ere
is cruelty, there is violence, there is hate. But never in the history of
humankind has there ever been a more scientiĕc and systematic
annihilation of people. I survived Hitler’s horriĕc death camps. Last
night I slept in Joseph Goebbels’s bed. People ask me, how did you
learn to overcome the past? Overcome? Overcome? I haven’t overcome
anything. Every beating, bombing, and selection line, every death,
every column of smoke pushing skyward, every moment of terror
when I thought it was the end—these live on in me, in my memories
and my nightmares. The past isn’t gone. It isn’t transcended or excised.
It lives on in me. But so does the perspective it has afforded me: that I
lived to see liberation because I kept hope alive in my heart. at I
lived to see freedom because I learned to forgive.”
Forgiveness isn’t easy, I tell them. It is easier to hold grudges, to