We agree that we are all human beings. So why do many groups of people seem to need to target another group as their enemies?

In Iraq, the Yazidi were the chosen victims. In Ethiopia, fellow Ethiopians, the Eritreans, directed their hatred at the rest of the Ethiopians. The Chinese chose their Muslim citizens which included the Uighurs and other Muslims. The Burmese, who we always think of as peaceful people, targeted the Rohingya. Some Pakistanis murdered a group of Hazaras because of the difference in their cultures. And in India the Hindus went after the Christian Indians.

And so it goes. An endless circle of tears and grief.

When I became a teenager I wanted to be free like a bird. My mother also cared about birds, but she was interested in falcons, birds that can be trained to come back to her when she called. Her falcon was me. You can see the conflict here.

This difference caused serious conflicts between her and me. In short, my mother and I did not get along. When I now think about this situation, I see it in a different light.

My mother was the youngest of four children. Her mother, all her siblings, all her nieces and nephews were slaughtered by the Nazis. My mother, accustomed to being surrounded by a loving family, was lonely. She survived only because she, my father and I had moved to France. Besides her husband, I was her closest relative. My desire to be more independent was a threat to one of the two close relationships in her life. Although other parents may view their children’s growth with nostalgia and a little bit of sadness, for my mother my growing independence was a heart rending event.

As I was walking and dragging my walker across the room, I thought this isn’t easy. This is a hard life. This takes guts. For many chores I need help and help isn’t always available.

Of course I can do much myself

The first part of the day I have no problem. But later I get too tired to keep getting and down from my chair. If I am sitting in the living room and I want another cookie which is in the kitchen – forget about it. It takes too much effort.

Throughout the day I take little pauses before I get up. How many minutes, or even houses do I waste on these pauses

As I said before, this is not an easy life. Fellow cripples of the world, I salute you for persisting, for carrying on.

We are all attending a masquerade ball. It’s not a snobbish party. The whole world has been invited. But the dancing has gone on for too long. My feet are getting tired.

I was rifling through my files and I came across an unmarked envelope. I opened it of course, and was shocked to find a very old orange note book. It had travelled with me from Vichy, to Paris, to Brooklyn, to Hackensack, NJ to Amherst, MA.

When one moves one does not look at every item being transported. I know that in Brooklyn I had seen the envelope among my books. I was then a teenager. After then I guess it was just swept up with the books every time I moved and then landed in the file cabinet I acquired in Hackensack.

Sometime in 1940, or possibly 41 there was a scare that the Germans were invading Paris. Some people escaped to Vichy. My parents did and so did the parents of Rose Baum. We were both 8 years old and we met in a park. When our parents decided to leave Vichy, Rose gave me the orange note book with two poems inside. One is beautifully written in her hand, but it is not written by her. It is by Henri de Regnier. This is what is says.

“In the morning I get up and I go out of the City

The sidewalk of the street echoes the sound of my steps

And the early sun heats the old tiles

And in the narrow gardens lilac grows.

Along the wall covered in moss that the branches overtake

An echo that we follow precedes our walk,

And the sharp paving stones lead to the white road

That begins in the suburbs and leads to the fields

And here I am soon on the high side

Where we see the sun at one’s feet,

Calm, small, poor, isolated, dull,

The home town with its familiar roofs.”

At the end of the poem Rose drew a moss covered wall overhung with lilacs.

In the folder there was another poem, this one typed.

Titled “The Song of Goodbyes”. I believe it was written by Rose.

“ Must we part without hope

Without hope of returning?

Must we part without hope

Of seeing each other again one day?

It is not a goodbye, my sisters,

It is only a parting:

Yes, we will see each other again, my sisters,

It is only a parting.

Let us form with our entwined hands

At the end of the day

Let us form with our entwined hands

A chain of love.

Because God who sees us all together

And who wants to bless us

Because God who sees us all together

and who wants to bless us

Will know how to reunite us.”

Rose, an 8-year-old, who already appreciated poetry and who was already a poet herself.

Did she and her family survive World War II?

What happened to her. What sort of life did she have.

Somehow, 8-year-old me felt the need to keep her little notebook and that need has stayed with me until now

How many generations are going to be buried wearing masks?

But she is a mass murderer. She’s gorgeous. Take a look on Google. Who would believe such a lovely creature is a serial killer. Where did she come from? No one knows. Why did she come? That too is a mystery.

So far she has murdered 4.5 million people world- wide and close to 700,00 in the U.S . The numbers rise every day. And she is very fertile mother, shooting offspring in every direction. When will she get tired and stop? Again no one knows. All we can do is hope and pray.

What does it mean to be widowed.

To me it means absence, absence of the foot

that used to touch yours in bed.

The other day I watched a TV show and turned

toward the other in the room to comment.

But there was no other sitting there.

Most mornings, I get up thinking my husband

is already in the bathroom. He always got up

slightly before me.

And so it goes on. His absence is always with me.

But the man is not.

But most of all it means the absence of a voice

calling Sue, Sue, Sue like an echo.

It has been almost three years since I wrote my last blog entry. I stopped writing when my husband, artist Marius Sznajderman died on February 24, 2018. It takes a year to take care of all the business of becoming a widow or widower, changing names on back accounts, car ownership and so on. By now I can’t even remember all that was necessary, but I know it seemed endless. At any rate, here I am. I’m finally back.

Recently two long-time friends disappeared from my computer screen. No emails, no Facebook posts.

CaroLyn was my college roommate at the University of Michigan. I was an undergrad, she was a graduate student when we met, already engaged to marry. After graduating and marrying she moved to Texas City. There she and her husband raised four children and she taught linguistics at the community college.  We started corresponding very early, first writing letters and later by email. Whenever she or her husband came to the New York area, we saw each other. It was during one of these trips that we met her husband and became fond of him. I traveled to Houston only once and of course took the bus to Texas City to see her. However, although I learned quite a bit about her children from her letters, I never met them.

Monique, a noted pianist and piano teacher, became my husband’s friend in Venezuela, part of a circle of young French people, most of them artists, living and working there. When I married Marius and started traveling to Venezuela I met Monique. She was then already the mother of two girls, Ondine and Ariane. I cannot remember how old the girls were at the time but I have a memory of young teenagers. Monique, having divorced, eventually moved to Honk Kong with her new husband, a violinist with the Honk Kong Symphony.

Ondine and Ariane, came to the U.S to attend college and then moved to the New York area. It was at that time that Ondine lived with us for a while in our New Jersey home. We became good friends and exchanged letters when she moved on. Ondine led a peripatetic life. Her father lived in London, her mother in Honk Kong and she had grandparents in France. Eventually Ondine joined her mother and stepfather in Honk Kong where she became involved with a man and had a daughter of her own.

Again, the family moved. Monique got a job as a professor of piano at Oberlin College. Ondine followed and tried to create a life of her own in Ohio.

To get back to the beginning, when CaroLyn stopped writing for a while, I sent an email and got no answer.  Lately Monique had communicated mostly via Facebook. No Facebook posts or emails. She usually called once or twice a year. No calls. Our calls were not answered. What happened to our friends? Were they sick, did they move, did they die? We don’t know, but their children know.

This post is an appeal to adult children. I think children have an obligation to inform their parents’ close friends when a life-changing event occurs and the parents themselves are not able to communicate.

Although CaroLyn’s children do not know me personally, they must have heard something about me and my husband in the more than 50 years of our friendship with their parents. If they went through their parents’ possessions or address books they probably saw something of our long correspondence. If they checked their mother’s emails, they had to see something about me. Here we do run into a modern problem that a young woman that I discussed this issue with pointed out to me. She said “I have to be sure to get the password to my father’s email.” Thank you, Aprile, I did not think of that myself.

I remember quite clearly that when my grandmother in France died, although we already knew  this via phone calls, we nevertheless received in the mail an announcement informing us of her death. It was a French tradition to send such announcements, just like birth or marriage announcements. Wanting to know if this was still common in France I emailed one of my cousins. “Yes,” he told me” and “such announcements often include information about the religious or memorial service.” An old tradition worthy of copying, in my opinion. But what chance do I have of convincing anyone today when we get even marriage invitations via email.