Lesson 34 of 100 Lessons

"When you're a child people's cruelty makes you cry.  When you're an adult it's their kindness."

Glen Duncan

A Day and a Night and a Day

I went on a field trip to the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C.,  a decade or so ago.  It was a shattering experience.  As I worked my way through the top floor (where the tour starts) I felt claustrophobic, and I slowed down to let the crowd of students move past me.  Horror piled upon horror.  The German who sat on his porch with a rifle and shot Jewish prisoners randomly.  The piles of shoes and hair.   I can't remember what order the displays were in, but I do remember that the last thing I saw on that floor was a picture of a little girl, naked and screaming, and the caption said something about how the Nazis didn't start by executing Jews, but with mentally retarded children.  I looked at that little girl and saw Q, and I was so filled with revulsion that I had to leave the museum.  I found a staircase and went outside and walked the streets for fifteen minutes.  Then I went back.  I worked my way through the rest of the museum, feeling dulled by all of the horrors, feeling them bore holes into me until all I could think was that human beings are detestable creatures, and that God's biggest mistake was that he had let Noah and his family build that ark (so to speak--since I am neither a Biblical literalist nor, for that matter, a Believer in any accepted sense of the word).  I finally made it to the bottom floor, and there was a wall bisecting the room.  A wall covered with names of people who had risked or sacrificed their lives to hide Jews or to help them to escape.  And for the first time during that visit, I didn't feel anger or hatred or revulsion or hopelessness.  And for the first time that day I cried.

Addendum 8/15/11
I'm almost finished reading my second Glen Duncan book, which is The Last Werewolf (highly recommended), and in Chapter 56 (of 61) I ran upon this:
"I read somewhere that when you're a kid it's people's cruelty that makes you cry, then when you're an adult it's their kindness."
Which could mean that Lula reads Glen Duncan, which is kind of cute, but I'm going to suppose that it means that this idea is central to Glen Duncan's thoughts.  In fact, in a way that's what The Last Werewolf is about:  the corruption of innocence, the struggle to maintain or rediscover innocence . . . and, maybe, the idea that innocence can be reclaimed.  Depends on how you see the love affair with Lula . . . and, of course, depends on what happens in the next five chapters.  I'll have to get back to you on that.