Black Earth

My teenager often ponders her career path these days. She wants a salary (likely because neither of her parents, being self-employed, ever managed that little detail). She wants to love what she does.

My younger daughter listed the various what-I-want-to-be desires she’s cycled through: a pop star, a race car driver, a jeweler in Boston. Then she thought for a moment and said, I’m happy doing what I’m doing now. I’m a really good fifth grader.

I interrupted their conversation to pull over on the road’s shoulder at the mini-storage, and we stood on a strip of frost-bitten grass staring up at a confluence of turkey vultures, circling around and around in the air currents.

Back in the car, my older daughter in her pragmatic way told her sister, Do fifth grade while you’re there, and then worry about the rest of your life.

If these rescuers (of Jews in WWII) had anything in common… it was self-knowledge. When you know yourself there is little to say. This is worth brooding upon as we consider how we, who know ourselves so poorly and have so much to say about ourselves, will respond to challenges to come.

— Timothy Snyder, Black Earth

Hardwick, Vermont

Here’s a story from Timothy Snyder’s recent book Black Earth. During World War II, a young Lithuanian woman tumbled into a pit of corpses during a mass execution. When the killing was finished, earth was thrown over the grave. Somehow, buried beneath the dead, she managed to survive. Naked, shot in the hand, covered in her own blood and the blood of others, she managed to claw herself free of the pestilent trench. Terrified beyond what is imaginable, she sought help at a cottage. She was turned away. She found a second cottage, and was turned away again. At a third cottage, she again pleaded for help and was refused. At the fourth cottage, she was given succor, and she survived.

Snyder writers,

Who lives in the fourth cottage?…. When the outside world offered threats but no promises, the few people who acted to rescue Jews often did so because they could imagine how their own lives might be different. The risk to self was compensated by a vision of love, of marriage, of children, of enduring the war into peace and into some more tranquil time.

As a writer, I keep thinking of that fourth cottage, its habitants long-lost in the horrifically bloodied past. And yet: whose hand opened the door in the fourth cottage? And who dwelled in cottages one, two, and three?

East Calais, Vermont/Photo by Molly S.

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