Unbroken Chains
Today I am grateful for my ears and the amazing variety of sounds they allow me to hear. Recently it has included meditation tracks, music, a fan, my own body moving as it exercises, and the morning quiet.
I am also grateful to be able to read, and that I enjoy it and how it expands my own heart and mind and opens new windows to the world. Over the weekend I read “An unbroken Chain: My Journey Through the Nazi Holocaust,” by Henry Oertelt. I try to do some of the reading that the students I work with are also being asked to read, and this is one on my list. It was a quick read, but captivating and profound. I hadn’t even made the connection that the author, when he immigrated to the United States in 1949, came to this very area. He and his family lived in St. Paul. Oertelt died in 2011, at the age of 90. That is amazing, considering how close he came to death so many times during WWII as a Jew in Germany. So many did not survive, including many of his own family and friends.
The book carries the reader through eighteen different links that comprised an unbroken chain of survival for him. Each one remained strong enough to keep him alive and on a safer path in some big or small way. They helped bring him to his date of liberation from the Flossenburg concentration camp in late April 1945. He spent time at a total of five different concentration camps, including Theresienstadt and Auschwitz/Birkenau. If any one of those links had been weaker or gone just a little bit differently, he would have joined millions of others who died so brutally. It really gave me pause to consider each chain, to consider the Universe’s role, to consider his mindset.
Most of us have nothing so very horrific, awful, devastating, and incomprehensible happen to us like he did, but we all have a life made up of chains that are linked together to bring us to this very moment. Let us each give ourselves a few moments to consider the most important links—people, places, things, circumstances, faith, hope, chance, our own abilities and shortcomings—that make up the life we have.
I think first of the unbroken chain of recovery from alcoholism that I have. Without it, my life’s chain would have likely broken decades ago. Caring people, my Higher Power, the support of other recovering alcoholics and addicts, and counseling/therapy, have all kept chains linked, even when they were nearly frayed.
Unbroken chains. What emotions are you feeling now? What actions are you inspired to take? We each have a part in our own unbroken chains, and also those of the people we encounter each day. Stay awake-in the true sense of the word-and notice that as you move through the next moments and hours.
