Fragility of Life.

I officially have somewhere between two and one and a half months left in Germany. For anyone who has been reading these blogs, you would know have been down, up, back down again, and finally found a happy medium. As my time begins to wind down, I am forced to realize how much I've changed, both willingly and unwillingly, where I have been, what I've done, and where I am going. 

I've seen so pretty amazing stuff here, castles, beautiful countryside, more thousand-year-old cathedrals than I can count. I've been to Cologne, Frankfurt, Nuremberg, and Krakow, among other famous cities. I have also seen some not so amazing places, the smokey interiors of bars and clubs, sketchy alleyways, and dark corners of Germany. However right now, I want to talk about the most memorable places I have been so far: the Auschwitz Concentration Camp, the sight of countless lives lost because of the brutal Nazi regime of World War II. 

Before, Auschwitz, and the Holocaust in general, held only academic, historical meaning to me. As a white, Catholic American, living four generations after my ancestors stepped of the boat, there was little to no personal meaning in it for me. Sure, I have Jewish friends (mostly from Israel) and I understood why it was important to them, but never was anything emotional for me. That has all changed, after seeing the camp and attempted  to grasp how one million people had died in the general vicinity of where I stood, it became terribly personal. I realized the horrific fact, that unless prevented, history repeats itself, and that it has with the Holocaust.  Countless genocides in Africa, the Middle East, and Europe have taken place then. Both subtle and blatant racism (one of the root causes of the Holocaust) still permeates culture in Europe and the Americas, and acts of terror take place all the time, everywhere from Syria and Afghanistan to the United States. 

Which brings me to what happened in Boston. 

The Boston Marathon was bombed, with three people dead and one hundred injured. the city was on lockdown for a week. I was shocked when I heard, I felt powerless because I was half a world away, unable to help in anyway. I couldn't donate money or send some sort of condolence, all I could, and can do, is pray. It's the worst I've felt in a long time. 

I can now fully appreciate how fragile Life really is.