Chapter 1

I woke up to rain this morning. A warm NE fall Saturday morning, the heavy drops doing their best to take the leaves off the trees in the yard as the world slowly fills with gray light. I've already brewed my morning pot of coffee and I'm sitting here wondering about the cycles of nature.

There is something special about the flow of the seasons during the year. There is comfort to be found in change; sounds odd, doesn't it? Most people hate change, fight tooth and nail against it, and set in their ways. I embrace change like a child does a new toy. I hold it aloft and stare at it in ten different directions, twisting and turning it, finding joy in its newness.

I dunno, sometimes I just feel like I am in this rut, and that if things don't change I will drown in a sea of wasteful stagnation. Change. Things change, it is inevitable. It seems counter productive to me to rail against it or despise it, but I guess that is just me. I guess that is just what keeps me going on some level, something new, a new toy.

The rain today reminds me of when I was in Germany. One rainy morning we went to visit Dachau. Our family fled Germany for America in the 1800's, although; there were those of us who were left there. Our branch of the family converted from Judaism, though those who remained there did not convert. Stories, that we were unable to confirm, told us that we lost more than a few members to the conditions at Dachau, and I wanted to see it with my own eyes.

As I said, it was raining that morning when the car rode up and we paid to take the tour. I swear the minute that I stepped out of the car coldness gripped me so tight I lost my breath momentarily. They ushered us into a movie theater and showed us video of former prisoners. It was, to say the least, depressing. Frail men, and boys, eyes dulled by the conditions, all hope almost lost, they were images of broken people. It made me sad to be sitting there looking at all those people. I guess I don't understand; I just don't get how people could do that to other people.

After the movie, they ushered us around the grounds. We saw the living quarters, and how the more crowded it got, the less room the men, and boys, had in their wooden bunk at night. What started out as three-foot wide boxes was down to a foot and a half near the end of the war. I am still trying to understand, but perhaps I never will. None of that makes any sense to me, and it does not make me feel good. Some rainy days though, like today, I will remember that morning. I remember crying on the grounds as a twelve-year-old boy in the rainy Bavarian morning feeling deep sorrow for all of those people who suffered there. My emotions almost crippled me, but I fought them outwardly, I did not want to worry the others that it had made me so sad to be there.