HOPE
“Pani Amber, we must be optimistic.” Andrii Pechenizkyi, Masha’s grandfather
Every day at Sichów is a potential diary entry, but this one came out of the blue, sent on the wings of an angel.
Masha, one of our resident teenagers who is also a budding filmmaker. She sent me the following link to her new video, filmed here, outside under the trees. It’s called “Going Home.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lLTiTzB1gpI
The lyrics read:
When I will come home
War won’t end in you
We will create something new
Famous and great
So that it does not come to the city again
You and me will be us again
Flowers that have not been plucked
Suns that in winter weren’t afraid
People in the city who loved
You and me will be us again
Flowers that have not been plucked
Suns that in winter weren’t afraid
People in the city which loved
When you will come home
I will put in new glass lanterns
you will smile at them, native and so alien
You’ll say that it’s most difficult to be
To be people at war
You and me will be us again
Flowers that have not been plucked
Suns that in winter weren’t afraid
People in the city who loved
You and me will be us again
Flowers that have not been plucked
Suns that in winter weren’t afraid
People in the city which loved
All of us are here together in hope while we work, create, give of ourselves, despair, irritable at times and question the future. What touches me so about Masha’s “Going Home” is that in spite of all of her dreams dashed at sixteen, she still goes outside to make a short film. Of course, Masha’s dreams are not lost forever — we all know that; even so, they have been dramatically rearranged, and while she could choose to spend her time depressed and inactive, she decides rather to make a short film about homesickness. She wakes up with hope and she creates.
In her film — No Toys. We catch a glimpse of her world in Ukraine before the war destroyed it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2GkN_6pVTeo
Fr. Thomas Keating writes, “…to have no hope is to be inhuman. To be able to survive with any degree of endurance requires some ray of hope.”
In Elie Wiesel’s Nobel Prize winning speech on December 11, 1986, he tells a Hasidic legend. It’s certainly worth looking up to re-read. But for purposes of this entry, I have chosen the following:
“…the importance of friendship is in man’s ability to transcend his condition. I love it most of all because it emphasizes the mystical power of memory. Without memory, our existence would be barren and opaque, like a prison cell into which no light penetrates; like a tomb which rejects the living. Memory saved the Besht[1], and if anything can, it is memory that will save humanity. For me, hope without memory is like memory without hope. Just as man cannot live without dreams, he cannot live without hope. If dreams reflect the past, hope summons the future. Does this mean that our future can be built on a rejection of the past? Surely such a choice is not necessary. The two are not incompatible. The opposite of the past is not the future but the absence of future; the opposite of the future is not the past but the absence of past. The loss of one is equivalent to the sacrifice of the other. A recollection. The time: After the war. The place: Paris. A young man struggles to readjust to life. His mother, his father, his small sister are gone. He is alone. On the verge of despair. And yet he does not give up. On the contrary, he strives to find a place among the living. He acquires a new language. He makes a few friends who, like himself, believe that the memory of evil will serve as a shield against evil; that the memory of death will serve as a shield against death. This he must believe in order to go on.”
On Wednesday, we will receive another five people — two mothers and their children — and while we only have one room left, which is not big enough for all of them, the residents in the room next door offered to share their space. They are coming from Zaporizhzhia, where the war is getting worse. The shelling in Kharkiv is also relentless from what our guests say. Unfortunately, it’s less reported by the mainstream media, where a war weariness has set in.
[1]Besht concerns a legendary Jewish tradition passed down orally.
