Happy Monday. Look around at all you’ve accomplished. What a victory your life is. Embrace it. Kiss it on the lips under a full moon. No one can take what you’ve built.
I mean, they can take almost everything, but it’s about how you frame it.
Now that school has entered the third nine weeks, the tone has shifted. No longer are these children sweaty, stinky, and generally nauseating strangers. They’re still sweaty, stinky, and generally nauseating, but now I know them.
I’ve seen them cry. I’ve seen them at their worst and at a little better than their worst, certainly not their best, but there have been flashes of real human beings bubbling beneath their gremlin skin from time to time. It’s something to see.
As we enter the downhill portion of the school year, we’re reading “Night,” the memoir of Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel. At the tender age of fifteen, Nazis took Wiesel and his family to Auschwitz in a cattle car and subjected them to all of the horrors one would expect from the most notorious concentration camp in history.
The students seem generally interested in the subject matter. Many of them are oblivious to the existence of the Holocaust, World War II, books, deodorant, and the word “please.”
They can’t believe that humans are capable of such cruelty, and because of their blissful ignorance, I don’t sugarcoat the material.
One part of the story that stood out to the students and me was just how complacent the people in Elie’s village were before the Nazis moved in.
Despite dire warnings on the radio and even first-hand accounts of life in the concentration camp from escapee and village oddball Moishe the Beadle, the townspeople sat on their hands, refusing to believe that the stories were that bad or, much like the children in my class, that humans could be so savage.
It was too late when the German army rolled into town. They took everything of value, and if someone refused, they shot them. Very quickly, Elie and the people of his village realize that not only are humans capable of being barbarians, but things are much worse than the rumors they heard.
Just when the kids are about to give up on humanity, I bring them back and remind them of this particular unit’s theme: Finding hope in despair.
I’ve written before about how disheartening it is to watch this generation float through what are supposed to be their most optimistic years under the weight of a twenty-four-hour news cycle reminding them of how awful things are. Just when they get a glimmer of hope, an iPhone notification pops up to rob them of it.
Holocaust survivor and psychiatrist Viktor Frankl once said, “Everything can be taken from a person but one thing: the last of the human freedoms - to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”
Elie Wiesel, Viktor Frankl, and countless others who experienced the Holocaust had a decision to make: either they accept their fate and spend the remaining days of their life in agony, suffering troubles both real and imagined, or they look for what hope they can find in the despair. I won’t spoil the book, but Wiesel attributes his survival to embracing the latter.
Whoa, is Joe writing about how we can overcome most of life’s obstacles if we change our perception? He’s literally never written about that before. Oh, wait, he literally only writes about that. Change the record.
Fair enough, but like I tell my students,
Don’t exist in a world where you think you’re immune to its troubles. Eventually, they will find you, and when they do, I want you to think about Elie Wiesel. They took his hair, his clothes, his dignity, his humanity, his family, and his name. They reduced him to a number tattooed on his arm but couldn’t take his mindset. In the epicenter of despair at that time in history, Elie Wiesel found hope. I know it hurts when I call you disgusting animals for passing gas in my classroom, but in your despair, find the hope to be less repulsive.
____________________________________________________________________________
Haha, that Joe certainly does have a way with words. You know, we like to have fun here at GNM, but if once a week just isn’t enough fun for you, I’ve recently started writing for a publication on Medium.com called The Haven.
The Haven is straight comedy, so there is none of this downer stuff about the Holocaust, space telescopes, or my cat. Nothing but pure comedy. If you want to pop over there and read mine and the other talented writers’ essays, you can check them out here:
To get the full experience, you might have to sign up to be a premium Medium member at five dollars a month, but you don’t have to if you don’t want to. My Medium handle is @joe-bee.
Until next time.