The two little girls in this photograph are Eva Kor and her twin sister Miriam. The picture was taken by Russian journalists after the liberation of Auschwitz, where Eva and Miriam were subjected to inhumane conditions, as well as Dr. Joseph Mengele's horrific experiments on identical twins.
Eva survived the camps. She moved to Israel with her sister, where they served in the military and went to trade school. Her sister Miriam became a nurse. They both married, had children and later immigrated to the United States. In 1995, Eva opened the CANDLES Holocaust Museum and Education Center, dedicated to those who survived, and those who didn't. In her mid-seventies, Eva still tells her story twice a week at the museum.
On January 3, I drove my four daughters and one of my nieces to the museum, about an hour from our home in Indianapolis. Having visited the museum several times, I found myself wondering if I would get bored or if I might yet learn some new detail of Eva's story. On previous visits, Eva told of the injections and examinations they underwent daily. She talked of beging torn from her mother and having almost no food, of the bitter cold and the rats that crawled on the floor. I had heard Eva tell how the Nazis fled the camp leaving Eva and Miriam and the other survivors to fend for themselves. Hungry and cold, groups of survivors raided the kitchens for potatoes and bread to eat, which is why the girls look plump and healthy in this photograph, a picture that the journalists staged for effect. I had heard all this before. What I learned this time was that Eva cut pieces of barbed wire from the fence, fashioning them into needles. Another survivor taught her to knit, and Eva used an old sweater she found to make the caps that she and Miriam are wearing in the photograph.
Clearly there are huge gaps between my worries and those of women whose lives are truly in peril.
I knit too, usually by the fire in my living room. I might be working on a soft blue scarf for my father, a thirteen year survivor of stomach cancer. I might be using varigated alpaca yarn that I bought at the local knitting store, where women sit at the big center table, working and talking, often laughing those big throaty laughs that some women have, myself included. My daughter might be sitting beside me, her own beautiful yarn unspooling from withing the expensive knitting bag I bought for her at a boutique in London, with its separate case to protect needles of varying sizes.
When Eva talks about her survival, she tells us that on her first night, she went to use the latrine and had to step over the bodies of dead children. This is what she tells herself:
My own complaints, as an artist, as a mother, as a woman, cannot compete with her struggle. Who am I to want more than I already have? Eva, dressed in high-heeled black boots and a silky blouse, may not look that different from me, but she can pull up her sleeve and show you the number tattooed into her arm.
At least she survived. Her sister Miriam died of cancer in the 1980s. When the doctors performed surgery, they found her kidneys to be the size of a ten-year-old child's. And what about those who did not survive the camps? What about the women and children massacred by Boko Haram in Nigeria a week ago? What about the 243 Nigerian girls who were kidnapped so many months ago and are presumably now married off to rebels? How lucky I am to live where I do.
And yet I do want more, or perhaps I mean less. I want, I want, I want, the mantra of American teenagers. We want for things, but do we want for life?
How do we balance gratitude for what we have with the yearning for more? Eva didn't just hope to survive. She wanted to live. She wanted a life like the one she lost. She wanted to wear beautiful dresses and eat good food and have a family. To live, we must yearn, seek, desire. This is the human spirit at its best. I am lucky. I live in a country where women are not persecuted. In order to do my creative work, I do not have to carve pencils from pieces of scrap wood or bits of charcoal. But if that were necessary, then I that is what I would have to do.
Yet, a sense of lack is often our excuse for not creating. I don't have enough time, I might say, between the kids activities and the housework and my aging parents and my job. In any given situation, we can choose to be either victim or survivor. The choices vary from life-theatening to self-actualizing, but in every case, we have a choice. And that choice can change from day to day, moment to moment. And so today, with my extra pack of paper ready to go, I must choose to write, because the other option is to give up. If I choose that, I might as well lay down on the floor and die.
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