Happy new year everybody!!! Sorry for the delay but I was busy with work :)
(This post is last year's which I never published. Just something to salvage by but a profound book and movie nevertheless.)
Viktor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning chronicles his journey through various Nazi concentration camps. The journey reading the 100 pages were memorable; each page for me was a celebration of being alive; even when you have lost everything; even when every ounce of what humanity is, was taken from you.
After more than 65 years of the testament of the brutality of mankind, Erin Gruwell asked her class, if anyone of them has heard about the holocaust. Many of these students had grown up in rough neighborhoods of Long Beach; a mix of African-American, Latino, Cambodian, Vietnamese, and Caucasian students. Only one white hand is up in the air. She asked again if anyone of them had been shot; All, except the one white hand is up in the air.
There in that one instant I came to understand why Frankl says that pain is relative to every man. I could have been callous and unashamedly thank God that I was not the one tortured in the many concentrations camps had I not seen All the hands raised who were shot at. They might not have heard or realized the tragedy of holocaust but their life has been their own holocaust. They have seen, felt and tasted pain.
To say, we just need real love to heal the world sounds feeble and unrealistic. But, if I am sure of anything is the fact that we do need real love to heal the world. Nothing else will work.
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3 comments:
imagine now a man who is deprived of everyone he loves, and at the same time of his house, his habits, his clothes, in short, of everything he possesses; he will be a hollow man, reduced to suffering and needs, forgetful of dignity and restraint, for he who loses all often easily loses himself- Levi.
the Holocaust stories are slipping into time and the need to resurrect these stories from dying another death becomes necessary, to find logic and meaning from the lives of these exemplary people, who have lived through this hell of man-made ideology.. and perhaps, just perhaps learn a lesson or two even as we fight the holocausts in our lives. Show some lovin hommies!
Off the record, i love that you have written about Frankl. Its simply beautiful.
Hugs.
Thanks love.
It's great to talk to you about these books and the 'rationale' also :)
Real love IS the only solution. The best and lasting solutions always sound a tad unrealistic. It is so easy to hate on the other hand...
Penny, you finally resurrected ur blog! :) Was waiting to see this!
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