Our Lives Can Turn on a Dime — Just Look at History

The Boston Globe

You'd think, having lived a long life, that I would know some things. And I do. I know facts. Lots of them. But not nearly enough. And I understand so few of the "why's" behind what I know.

For example: I have been reading about the Second World War since I was a child, both fact and fiction, and still I don't understand the reasons for all that happened. Last month, I read yet another book, "The Holocaust — A New History," by British historian Laurence Rees. Rees has spent his life researching, writing, and making documentaries about the Holocaust, and his new book is full of facts and stories that landed on the cutting-room floor when he was editing his other works. It is a long and detailed explanation of why the Holocaust happened, of why Hitler was embraced by millions, of why what's thought of by many as an aberration wasn't an aberration at all but a result of all the history and politics and religion and prejudice that went on for centuries before.

The reasons for World War II are clear. Yet still I ask why.

Later, away from this book, I stood one day behind a woman and her small son as they were riding up an escalator going into Target. They were lost in their own world. The mother held her little boy's hand and chatted about the backpack and pencils they were going to buy for preschool. And in a child's sweet voice he asked, "Can I get gummy bears, too?" "Of course, you can," his mother told him, and he looked up at her with such love and trust that it made my heart hurt.

Because this is how everyone's childhood should be.

"Between Shades of Gray," by Ruta Sepetys, is a novel based on fact. It's about a 15-year-old girl who in 1941 is living a safe and happy life in Lithuania with her parents and brother. Until Germany gives her country to the Soviets. Based on truth — Germany also handed over Latvia and Estonia — it's a story (and a soon to be released movie under the title "Ashes in the Snow") of unremitting brutality, of families being rounded up in the middle of the night and forced into trucks and cattle cars, starved and beaten, shot at whim, the sickly survivors hauled across Russia and into Siberia and dumped there, without food or shelter, forced to work, until most of them died. The few who lived through these years of brutality and were sent home after the war were never really home because they were locked under Soviet rule behind the Iron Curtain for nearly 50 years, until 1990, unable to tell the world all that had happened to them.

Now, finally, they can speak. But who is listening?

I met a man this summer who grew up in Cuba before the revolution. He was the son of a wealthy businessman. He had a good life, friends, a college degree, a respected profession until one day Castro's soldiers barged into their house, lined up his parents, his brother, and him and slit their throats. Only he survived.

Life can turn on a dime. That's what I've culled from history.

In this country, our freedom feels like a guarantee. Freedom from fear, from want? The freedom to get up and go anywhere, any time? The freedom to be exactly who we are? Our ancestors may have fought and died for these freedoms, but most of us have only basked in them unaware that all the freedoms we enjoy are rare and precious, and so very, very fragile.

What I know for sure? It doesn't take a bomb to destroy a country. All it takes is a leader who says, "It's their fault. They are the reason you can't get a job. They are the reason you can't get into college. They are inferior. They are lazy. They are what's holding you back." All it takes is the belief that some people are better than others. All it takes to destroy a dynasty or a democracy are people to blame, and repetition, and time.