Ah yes. Finally. It’s here. Spring. How good it feels to open windows and release stale air, toss worn out scarves and random items found in the backs of drawers. Spring brings with it a rejuvenation and every year there’s no better feeling.
Last week I was on Cape Cod. I woke early to birds singing and the sun streaming through the blinds in my old bedroom. Temps hovered around 50. Outside the air was crisp, but not too cold. In the backyard shed, I removed all eight deck chairs, still stacked as neatly as I’d left them last fall. Pounding off the stale air and dirt from a long winter’s hibernation felt good, the action filled with the promise of a new season ahead. Once the chairs were back around the glass porch table, I pictured family and friends, the aroma from the grill, and the sound of laughter. As much as I have become a New Yorker, the Cape Codder in me remains strong. My license plate may beg to differ, but my car knows where her home is.
That afternoon I headed to Orleans for the first of two talks, having been invited to speak about my grandparents’ experiences in the Holocaust on what was the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. The first was to 200 eighth graders at Nauset Middle School, the second that evening to another large crowd from the Nauset Interfaith Association. During each talk it occurred to me how fitting that the war had ended during springtime.
“Survivors were, yes, happy to be free,” I said to both audiences. “But happy may not be the right word. Maybe relieved is more accurate. Yet that relief was quickly replaced with the harsh reality that for many, they were the only one in their family to have survived. For them, the spring of 1945 was, quite literally, a rebirth, a time to start again.”
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