A friend of mine sent me a song he was working on to get my opinion on the direction it was taking. The song he wrote was about a young girl named Zoya who, at 19 years old, was a partisan in Russia during World War II. She was captured while burning down the stables in her village under orders to destroy anything the Nazi army might find useful. She was tortured and then hung. At her death she cried out "There are two hundred million of us! They cannot kill us all!" I was terribly moved by this story of a young girl's bravery and stoicism in the face of her own death. Last month, I read the book "Night" by Elie Wiesel. This was his first person account of his time in the death camps in Poland. He also describes moments of great bravery and something else - moments of intense fear which caused some to make choices they otherwise would not have considered. Last week, there was a news item on the local news here in Wisconsin of a 89 year old man who had been living out his last days on a farm in the northern part of the state. He was captured and convicted of crimes against humanity for atrocities he perpetrated as a Nazi soldier when he was 18 years old.
All of this made me think about the choices we sometimes face. And it made me ask myself "what would I do?" if faced with these choices of life or death, right or wrong. I'd like to think that I would find my own inner heroine and show the bravery of Zoya. But I know that I have done things in life that I may not have always agreed with because I was told to do them - by a boss, by a teacher, or some other authority. My fear is that I would be more like the 18 year old Nazi, living in tumultuous times, afraid, hoping that what I was doing was the right thing but, inside, knowing it was not. What would I be willing to do to survive? What would you be willing to do?
Today, I was reading about the atrocities being committed in Darfur. I listened to first hand accounts of survivors who managed to make it to refugee camps while their entire families, entire village was murdered. Hundreds of thousands of people - gone forever. It's hard to know what to do about it, sitting here in Wisconsin, feeling very small. But I did sign a petition to get U.N. Peacekeepers sent to Darfur. And I told some other people about it and got them to do the same. And I wrote this blog. So, maybe, in some tiny way, this is my inner "Zoya" reaching out. And, maybe, the tiny ripple that I started will grow. And, maybe, that can make a difference.
All of this made me think about the choices we sometimes face. And it made me ask myself "what would I do?" if faced with these choices of life or death, right or wrong. I'd like to think that I would find my own inner heroine and show the bravery of Zoya. But I know that I have done things in life that I may not have always agreed with because I was told to do them - by a boss, by a teacher, or some other authority. My fear is that I would be more like the 18 year old Nazi, living in tumultuous times, afraid, hoping that what I was doing was the right thing but, inside, knowing it was not. What would I be willing to do to survive? What would you be willing to do?
Today, I was reading about the atrocities being committed in Darfur. I listened to first hand accounts of survivors who managed to make it to refugee camps while their entire families, entire village was murdered. Hundreds of thousands of people - gone forever. It's hard to know what to do about it, sitting here in Wisconsin, feeling very small. But I did sign a petition to get U.N. Peacekeepers sent to Darfur. And I told some other people about it and got them to do the same. And I wrote this blog. So, maybe, in some tiny way, this is my inner "Zoya" reaching out. And, maybe, the tiny ripple that I started will grow. And, maybe, that can make a difference.
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