No man is devoid of pain.  It’s part of being human.  Even the man whose mind can no longer bear judgement has known of it.  But what of men whose pain is so great that it holds them hostage to no more will of theirs? Where do their spirits go, those of whom whose lives were inflicted with offenses so inconceivably senseless? 

The silence was deafening as I walked through the path that led to a circular concrete arena of the Holocaust Memorial in Miami. Like a purgatory pit for ghosts of the oppressed, it haunted with cries and anguish I heard and saw through the still life of sculptural bronze that expressed its past.  Even in patina green finish, they appeared to me like real men, women and children, embalmed with their trapped souls, still making an impression–still communicating the lasting memory of their stories. 

No one in the pit dared to make a sound.  It was as solemn as solemn can be.  Our tongues were bridled and simply disciplined by the three dimensional remembrance of the obsequious genocide cleansing that happened in the 1940s, born of a mad man’s thinking. 

It was a cold pit.  The cold was forever frozen on a granite wall etched with names upon names of those who perished, while the ghosts of a man and a woman stood before it face to face.  Frail and naked, almost transparent in their lack of flesh if not for their green metal armor, they stood there eternally making sense of their comeuppance, consoling each other while holding hands in their binding love and grief.

I waited until I was on my own. I needed to feel comfortable while hearing the shutter release sound from my camera as I finally clicked away, conforming to the eerie response that was being demanded of me by the arena’s powerful art forms.  It was as if I was there to give more credence and voice to bronze sculptures who were silently screaming that no one wins in war and oppression.  

For what have they done and why?  As even their oppressors were already dead in their hearts, well before them.  Ignorance taken to extreme in sappy, whetted and disintegrating mush of brain self, a very dark history now has its memorial in shameful reminder of the choices people make by their own sordid and ugly pasts.  Yet was the pain justifiably shared with six million Jews to an overwhelming seventeen million counting those beyond their kind?  

Tragic is but a word best not uttered, for its nagging truth is almost unbearable in itself.  Mercy…mercy is the word.

I stayed long enough to see the sun with its golden promise against a dusky sky.  The outreach of a hand into the heavens for its rays made me feel both joy and sorrow.  Like a green mile of laboring souls on the outstretch, it was made clear that there is still hope in mankind, even in their lack of love and all else. It was a huge plea for mercy.  It moved but also reduced me to painful acceptance of realized defectiveness as a human being.  And how faulty are we truly, when we keep choosing to do what is clearly wrong? Yet who’s to say what’s wrong when minds have been long conditioned and bent to take over heart?  The irony of will.  How then do broken hearts mend?

There is no denying a memorial stands to reason. And reason it does and so well without words at the Holocaust Memorial of Miami.  By the metal work of man’s love, the hope is that we all eventually see, hear, feel and learn. 

All battles begin and end with pain.  The wisdom is in understanding our humanness and possible divinity in perseverance of love through forgiveness.

It’s all we have when there’s nothing else.  Why wait when there’s nothing left?

 “To err is human; to forgive, divine.” ~ Alexander Pope

* The Holocaust Memorial, Miami Beach is located at 1993 Meridian Avenue, Miami Beach, FL 33139, USA

February 5, 2019
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