Maria Hulyk

I have been debating about how and what to say in this post so much that I have let the story go too long. I don't have the words to describe the emotions I have been going through. The woman's name above is the name of just another customer I had to help at work a week or so ago. Just another older woman calling to order her medication. Just another sweet voice, heavily accented, on the other line.

I often wonder if I was meant to take her call. If, by some act of power much larger than I, her phone call was directed to me. Maybe if someone else had taken her call, they would not have heard her tell them she was a Holocaust survivor and spent time suffering in a concentration camp.
Maybe they would have been too wrapped up in their own lives that they would not have heard that she was only 15 years old at the time.
Maybe they wouldn't have had sympathy for her when she began crying over her husband that she missed so much.
They wouldn't have asked if she had children to help her. They wouldn't have learned that she lost the ability to have children because the Nazi's at the concentration camp put "poisons" in what little food they fed the 'prisoners' so that they wouldn't need to provide "napkins" for the women.
Maybe they wouldn't have cared that she could never adopt because the government felt she and her husband were too old for a baby and her mother in law didn't want to help care for a grown child.

I told her it was an honor to speak with her, but I don't think she caught that. It was a great honor. I don't have the poetry to explain what the Holocaust means to me. I am not of Jewish decent, although I am of Polish decent. In a sense, I feel that I lived through it or died during that time in a previous life. Ever since I was a child I had a certain fascination with the Holocaust that went beyond some sort of sick interest. It all seems very familiar to me. The languages, the fear, the confusion, the architecture. Air sirens strike a terror in me that I could/can never begin to understand.

It is surprising to meet someone who survived such cruelty because they are all passing away from age. Why is this story significant to me? Because people are forgetting. In tears, I started to speak to the woman who sits next to me at work about the amazing life that just touched mine. The woman that is the same age as me. The woman who has a child. The woman who did not know what a concentration camp was. She didn't even know what I meant when I said The Holocaust. Her response. "oh, I think I saw a movie about that once."

A movie?!

History repeats itself, there are Holocaust's going on at this very moment all over the world. Isn't it imperative to not let people die in vain, to remember such important faucets of history? I wish I had the words to express how disappointed and shocked I was that she truly had no idea what I was talking about. When I told her 6 million Jews were murdered along with countless numbers of Gypsy's, Gays and Lesbians, Poles, disabled people, and those denying Hitler she gave me the most horrifying blank look I have ever seen.

Abu Abdullah Muhammad al-Harithi al-Baghdadi al-Mufid said, "No tool is more beneficial than intelligence. No enemy is more harmful than ignorance."


**In looking for an image for this post I came across a very interesting website/article about "The Holocaust Myth". If you are kind enough to read this far, please be kind enough to quickly check out the website. It is short and very interesting. You can find it HERE. Thanks!