...I need a hard candy shell...

We walked through the "Jewish Quarter" of Berlin on Friday during Thorsten's class. The weather kept threatening us, yet we pushed on and stayed 45-minutes later than class was supposed to run. The walking tours that we do on Friday are pretty amazing, but I found it hard to get through our latest one. It wasn't because of boredom or lack of interest. Quite the opposite is true. The problem is that there were a few times on Friday when I could not turn off my sensitivity and therefore I felt close to losing it.

The "stumbling blocks" and the workshop for the blind specifically caused that very specific twinge of pain in my throat to happen, the one that results from fighting back a few tears.

I have never in my life been confronted with a room in which people hid out from the Nazis, and yet there was one in the workshop for the blind. It was a small, sad room in to which I looked and imagined what it could have possibly been like to play a life-or-death game of "hide and seek." I always do this. I have an over-active imagination that sometimes messes with my emotional triggers.

I say that this particular course of study plays upon my sympathy, and I am careful to choose that word. Normally, I would describe myself as being empathetic. However, I feel that it is impossible to feel empathy regarding the events of the Holocaust. How can any one person who did not live through it, did not survive it, and cannot even begin to imagine the horrors of it pretend to even play at the idea of "empathy?" We cannot know their experiences because we do not have anything vaguely close to the same sort of reference point, and I think that similar reference points are important in developing empathetic attachments to people.

We can feel a great sadness. We can sit in silence and contemplate the importance of specific events. We can be sensitive to the stories and feel sorry for the fact that there was a specific moment in recent human history in which many millions of people were murdered for their religious beliefs, ethnic traits, political beliefs, and sexual preferences. But we cannot begin to pretend to understand the feelings of people who lived through the Holocaust. That is what I believe at least.