Understanding came along the way
I did not expect to find even this depth of forgiveness
not knowing till now
how
those lost shards of painful memory
had to be buried
by the victims
who lived on and committing their
emotional truth to silence
were not able to tell the tale
only gave voice
in invisible ways
through silence
or a misconstrued anguish
As a child
we do not know
the twisted painful reality of things
our fore-bearers lived
and so we rebel or protest with a ferocity
perhaps impossible for them to understand
But now, it seems to me
those reactions all make sense
almost as if through giving birth to us
the truth detectors
their cells carrying forgotten memories
can be retrieved
There is a truth that needs to be told
There is a sadness that spreads its invisible cloak
over the hearts of those we loved
the depth of whose soul suffering
we never fully understood
and only the journey of discovery
that leads along that painful path of broken glass *
finally ends
in both understanding
and forgiveness
(This poem is inspired by the book The Writing on the Wall : How one boy, my father, survived the Holocast, written by the Australian journalist Juliet Riede
Kristallnacht (Night of Broken Glass) took place on 9 an 10th of November 1938 and was the first of the violent pogroms against the Jews by the Nazis taking place in Germany and the recently annexed portions of Austria and Czechoslovakia )
