{by Maggie from Okay, Fine, Dammit.}

They march into his home, the law on their sides, and rip him and his father from their family like scabs. It is November 9, 1938, Kristallnacht. The “Night of the Broken Glass,” the night of the breaking family tree branches, all crushed beneath the German soldiers’ boots. Obliterated.

At night he lies on an eight-foot plywood “bed” with seven other men and he thinks, This is the end. The crisp, frigid air is as merciless as his captors and so he gives his own underwear to his father to give him just one more layer of warmth. He watches men murdered in a manner too wretched, too unbelievable, to be written casually by a stranger here. He notes that the officers are hardest on the most devout of his people, the ones praying on broken knees each night for a saving that never comes.

Seventy years later he will stand, shaking, a 92-year-old Jewish great-grandfather, an honored guest in our tiny church, and in a thick accent he will tell the congregation that he left his faith behind in that concentration camp’s latrine. That he associates the idea of faith with certain death.

Ironically, his very presence will fill me with hope.

***

I grew up in the famed Driftless Area, a particularly beautiful patch of Wisconsin passed over by the glaciers and snatched up by blond haired, blue-eyed Scandinavians. My small town was 99% white, 105% Christian. I had dark hair and eyes, olive skin, and a nose not nearly as button-cute as those of my friends on the dairy farms. I knew my last name ended in –berg, but I had no context for what that meant and I didn’t think a thing of it. Every year we put up our Christmas tree. We wrapped gifts, hung stockings, told stories about the baby in the manger. I don’t remember when I figured out my dad was Jewish; he never went to temple. He eschewed all religion, hadn’t attended services since his Bar Mitzvah, fled New York at the age of 17, met my mother (a Wisconsin farmer’s daughter) at 19, and never looked back.

{Originally posted by writer Maggie over at okay. fine. dammit.}

I can’t explain to my family why I’m so sad today; there’s no way they would understand. The only people who will get it are you, you out there, and so I’ve come to this space to add my liquid prayer to your ocean of empathy, to set it a-sail, to hope it reaches its rightful owner.

I mean, what can I say to my husband? That a “friend’s” 17-month-old daughter died unexpectedly? Because we’re not really friends, right? I’ve never met the Spohr’s.

But I know their names as solidly as I know anyone’s in my “real life.” More than that, so much more than that, I know that sweet baby girl’s face. How many times have I scrolled over it in my Reader, my own daughters screaming, “Stop!” My four-year-old smacking her warm palm down on my mouse-hand, saying, “Wait! Go back! Show me dat cute giwl again. I know her! Who is that, mommy? I know her!”

Because they saw that face a time or two on this computer, and it was the kind of face you can’t forget. It was the kind of face that triggered on instant grin on my own. How many times did I lean across the couch to my husband, giggle, and show him that face? Watch his own smile break like a wave?

Still. I am here, on spring break, shuffling through the sand a bit slower, hanging back, healthy and blessed and happy and yet, not. Hugging my girls a bit tighter, answering their questions a beat or two late, distracted. Grief-stricken.

How do we explain to the rest of the world how well we have come to know each other, all of us here? So that if one of us suffers an unfathomable loss we feel it like our own gut-punch? Who is that, mommy? I know her!

I know her too, baby.

I’m shocked. I’m sad. And I’m so, so sorry.

May she light up heaven the way she lit up earth.