what is it about me sitting in my little corner of the Internet and saying “I actually don’t hate myself as an adult now and I want to be nice to people and that’s my entire thing” that makes these anons start foaming at the mouth
I’ll be perfectly honest, I’ve spent the better part of a decade wishing I weren’t fucking alive and beating depression off with a caveman’s wooden club. If I get to a point in my adult life after all that shit where I can finally say “I don’t want to see myself dead anymore, I like who I am” and you have the gall to tell me I have too much self confidence now, I’m gonna take the club I killed my depression with and I’m gonna start beating you with it
Do you know what this is? This is The Heart from Auschwitz.
An act of defiance. A statement of hope. A crime punishable by death.
On December 12, 1944, locked inside Auschwitz, Polish teenager Fania turned twenty. After spending a year in a concentration camp, Fania didn’t expect her birthday to even be remembered - but her best friend, Zlatka, risked everything to make her a birthday present, a paper heart.
Simply making the heart - or carrying it - could get either of them killed.
The heart was signed by many of their friends, bearing notes in Polish, German, French, and Hebrew that announced "When you get old, put your glasses on your nose, take this album in your hand and read my signature again,“ and “Freedom! Freedom! Freedom!” It was an act of great sacrifice and love for a friend.
Less than 40 days later, they began the Death March from Auschwitz to Ravensbruck, and from Ravensbruck to freedom. Fania carried the heart under her arm the whole time. And survived.
Fania donated the heart to the Montreal Holocaust Memorial Center in 1988, where it is a featured piece of their exhibit. You can read more about the story of Fania and Zlatka
Meg Wiviott’s Paper Hearts, coming September 2015.
God. Even in great darkness there is such love.
the 75th aniversary of the liberation of auschwitz is in a couple of days (jan 27 2020) so I feel this is a good thing to have on your dash. Remember that every single victim and survivor of the holocaust was a person with so much love in their heart and so many storiees and interpersonal relationships like this.
