Realization

The weather was certainly not unpleasant or uncomfortable but overcast and cool. The early morning became the early afternoon, but the sky did not grow brighter.

It is somewhat cliche to claim that everything worth saying has already been said. Some things, however, can only be described as they are.

It wasn’t until I saw the grave of Anne Frank that things became real to me.

We had been touring Bergen Belson for several hours. Another interesting and informative tour about NAZI Germany and the Holocaust was, until this point, all that I had seen. Reverence was only natural as we walked from the museum to the campgrounds. Reverence was an instinct; not evidence of any kind understanding.

We walked until we reached the memorial. Upon our arrival, it began to rain.

Could it be any more appropriate that as we stood in the place the sky itself did cry? As I kneeled before this symbolic headstone placed at random in the honor of one girl out of thousands who had died, my eyes became wet and my face red.

Stuffed cats and small toys were placed at her stone. What better for a child of twelve?

Anne Frank was a living, breathing person.

We look at numbers so much that we forget that everyone of the thirty-thousand people who died at this camp and the millions more who died over the course of the war were all living and breathing at one point; that all of them had a life story, and that all of them are worth crying over.