I am in Ukraine, in a village where there was once a great Hassidic community that was entirely destroyed during World War I. One hundred sixty-fix Jewish children are coming here for a summer camp, children who are fleeing from all over Ukraine for two weeks of quiet and a semblance of normal life. We will sing “Hava Nagila” to the melody they used at Sadagora (in Ukrainian, Sadhor), a short distance from here.
Children are growing up and being educated in a reality in which nothing at all is “normal.” How will I manage to deal with all the complexity, the difficulty, and the suffering of this reality? Walking around on the streets of Chernivtsi, I came upon a statue of a girl, Selma Meerbaum-Eisinger. She was only 18 when she perished in a labor camp in Transnistria to which she had been taken by the Nazis. She left behind a notebook of poems she’d written to her beloved. In German …
I want to live.
I want to laugh.
I want to fight, know love, know hate.
I want to hold sky in my hands.
I want to be breathe and free and sing songs.
I do not want to die. No! No!
When I am at camp, I will concentrate on those simple desires shared by every child there — and by me as well.
