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The Prize Doesn’t Always Go To The Most Deserving
Irena Sendler
1910-2008
A 98 year-old German woman named Irena Sendler recently died. During WWII, Irena worked in the Warsaw Ghetto as a plumbing/sewer specialist. Irena smuggled Jewish children out; infants in the bottom of the tool box she carried and older children in a burlap sack she carried in the back of her truck. She also had a dog in the back that she trained to bark when the Nazi soldiers let her in and out of the ghetto. The soldiers wanted nothing to do with the dog, and the barking covered the kids’ and infants’ noises. Irena managed to smuggle out and save 2500 children. She eventually was caught, and the Nazis broke both her legs, arms and beat her severely. Irena kept a record of the names of all the kids she smuggled out and kept them in a glass jar buried under a tree in her backyard. After the war, she tried to locate any parents that may have survived and reunited some of the families. Most had been killed. She helped those children get placement into foster family homes or adopted.
Last year Irena was up for the Nobel Peace Prize. She was not selected. Al Gore won - for a slide show on Global Warming.(via myquarterlifecrisis)
golden-apple-fiction-flavored-firecracker summer heat storms, how does every day pass faster than the last? Walk from the bank to the train station and over the bridge, over dark water and iron rails into darker underbrush and back again, it feels good and better to be alive as long as I am. I meant it when I said we should burn everything to the ground and start again, hell, half the shoes don’t even fit me and these books are too heavy to box up, I am tired of doing just-enough to get by and not-enough to feel it.
Yesterday we go for a walk in the woods just before winter falls again, watch the paths for signs of life and quantify everything we find, count deers in the distance and debate future dates with the same interest tempered with apathy. She gives me a beautiful sundress.. I love it, I will wear it until the stitches fall apart because I am old enough to know that everything old is new again. Every time I feel this way I am sure I am not going to find my way back to the beginning ever again and still wake up uncertain, soon it’s welcome to winter and seasonal sadness.
I don’t really write because nothing changes, I am living the same life I did this summer, last year, every day since eighteen-ever-after. I am circling familiar paths until they aren’t even routes just ruts underfoot, deer trails in the forest so used to the footprints the undergrowth has given up. I don’t mind, I try not to think too hard about it or anything at all. There is always someone outside your door to tell you how pretty you are, how interesting, to listen to your voice when you’ve made yourself sick off the sound of it. The past isn’t fixed, just the future from another perspective. If you’re making the same choices, life is a mobius strip of the mundane and preordained, manic depressive and back again before you click your heels three times: one week, three years, three months, everything old is new again? I will never be surprised to hear your voice at the other end of telephone wires too many times, hours or years after it’s too late to call.
