Memento Mori, Memento Vivere
Blog 250. Wow. It’s time for something sentimental and serious. I was looking at a wooden information board about the history of the Jewish community here on the outer edges of Warsaw. 70 percent of the locals were Jewish in my area before the war. Then, there’s a stone commemorating the Jews living here – the message in memoriam written in Polish and Hebrew. As you know, traces of Jewish history can be found all over the place in Poland – the buildings, people’s last names, even names (Estera, for example). Abandoned cemeteries. I also notice definite characterological similarities between Poles and Israelis.
We sometimes ask: are future generations going to remember us, especially after a major conflict breaks out, resulting in deaths of millions, burned down cities, and exclusion zones set up to keep people away from radiation? We already know the answer. We’ve been through this as a civilization many, many times. So many wars it’s hard to keep up with all the twists and turns.
The world that’s gone, the world that people at the time thought is never going to vanish, was wiped off the face of the Earth by two regimes. The Nazi and the Soviet regimes. If we’d gone back in time to, say, Warsaw in May 1939, we would’ve heard happy people tell us, ”No, Hitler won’t do anything, it’s just scaremongering, come on, he’s not suicidal. If he tries anything, we’ll grind him into the ground.” Sounds hauntingly familiar, huh? People who were adamant nothing was going to happen, that it’s all just posturing, were dead soon after. Some died in bombings. Some were tortured to death in Mengele’s medical experiments. Some starved. Some were shot. Many were gassed as they screamed in ways most of us can’t even imagine. People just like us who thought, ”Nah, it’s not going to be that bad, it can’t, the world won’t let it come to that.” On that note, please pray for all the victims of human trafficking and live organ harvesting. If you want to use the word – demonic – these things are as close to demonic as they get. In your own words, clutching that rosary, pray however you wish. From your lips to God’s ears. The scale of human trafficking is shocking and such things tend to be more out in the open during major conflicts (ISIS and Russia come to mind).
So I look at that stone again. At the wooden board behind it. Who knows how many such stones and boards are all over Europe, even the world? We barely notice them because they’ve kind of always been there. And that’s what’s going to happen to us one day – when monuments are built to commemorate what’s going on now, we’ll be remembered, yes, but we’ll be just another world that’s gone, devoured by the fire of war. Some kid is going to be annoyed to learn about us, ”Duh, what’s the point?” just as some kids are annoyed to learn about the Second World War today. ”Duh, it’s ancient history, who cares?”
And so the cycle goes on. Maybe some of us are going to incarnate into this world again, incarnate with our memories intact this time, to experience that new world that’s going to rise from the ashes of the global conflagration. Or maybe we’ll choose some other dimension where no such atrocities have taken place, only to appreciate a world where relative peace and stability are the norm. Maybe that’s God’s idea? To teach us not to take freedom and peace for granted when (if) we continue our lives elsewhere in the endless existence.
