Seeing The Light

Even when things look darkest, we have a choice

Family Photo

I haven’t known where to look the past couple weeks. People have been up in arms, literally and figuratively, and I, like many of us, found myself feeling conflicted. Murders, looters, protests - both peaceful and with bouts of violence - it has felt like the collective of frayed tempers I saw only two weeks before finally reached a tipping point.

How do I be a part of us coming together when there is so much anger and fear? How can needed change move forward if we are so focused on what scares us or causes suffering, that we are not hearing each other?

Listening to the despair expressed by so many in their words and actions and also knowing in my core that there is hope and light and good in the world, too, led me to another question. How do I continue to see the good and light and hope, every day? I know that doing this is key. We cannot lose sight of these things because they are our way to bring about healing and positive change. Our goodness and our capacity to come from that goodness in us, is there. It’s in us ALL the time, just as the sun is still in the sky during the storm.

I was thinking about this last Saturday when I received a call from my mother: my Aunt Ilse had passed away that morning. Family members were gathering on Zoom to remember her the next day. Even with Ilse being 95 years young, her death was still a surprise and a blow to us.

My Aunt Ilse was a light to everyone who knew her. She married my uncle when they were 68 and 76, respectively. They were both resilient, strong-willed, and independent. They both enjoyed happy marriages to spouses they deeply loved and lost years before they met each other. When I met Ilse, she would have been in her early 60’s. She could run circles around most people then, and she continued to outpace everyone for decades to come.

That same stamina also applied to her positivity and capacity to embrace others, just as they are. Everyone was welcome in her home and treated like someone special. You could see her delight engaging with children: including nieces like my sisters and me, her own grandchildren, cousins from every side of the family, and later the children and friends of all of the above. She lit up when she saw everyone, and we did when we saw her.

Ilse’s spirit and incredible heart are even more remarkable in light of the life she had lived long before meeting my uncle.

Born in 1925 Germany, Ilse saw her world change around 10 years of age, as the Nazi regime took over. She watched as friends were instructed not to play with her, and she was singled out and harassed at school, including having stones thrown at her.

Day by day, Ilse watched as her world and her beloved country became places that saw her as something despicable. After enduring years of slurs and acts of hatred, she went to school one Friday only to have the teacher throw her books away and tell her to go home - she was no longer allowed to attend school. Kristallnacht soon followed, and with it, smashed windows, stores decimated from looting, vandalized homes, and houses of worship burned to the ground. The acts of violence only escalated from there. Rather than coerce neighbors to commit violence against each other, people from other parts of Germany were brought into towns, including Ilse’s, for the express purpose of destroying the property and devastating citizens.

At 13, Ilse saw her father, a World War I veteran who had been wounded in battle, taken away by the Nazis. No sooner had she arrived home to tell her mother what happened, a group of Nazis came and wrecked their house. Then the town baker, who held a high position with the Nazis, came to the house with SS officers and said that if Ilse, her mother and sisters stayed in the house, nobody would be responsible for what happened to them. If they knew what was good for them, they had better leave.

Ilse’s mother was doing what she could already to hasten their plan for getting out of Germany. Her older sisters would leave on a ship to the USA in February. While Ilse’s mother was trying to get her husband released from Dachau, she arranged for Ilse to be one of the last children to make it out of Germany on the Kindertransport. At the time, neither of them knew to which country the train would go; every week the date and train changed. Finally, Ilse was to board a train sponsored by the Quakers of England in the winter of 1938. Two days before she left, her father was released from Dachau, thanks to friends, who were Christian and Nazis.

Ilse’s father came home in time for them to have two days together. He had become a skeleton of a man. He wouldn’t talk in the house about his experience, but they would take walks and he would recount what had been done to prisoners. Ilse saw how his incarceration had broken him. Too weak to join Ilse and her mother to see her off on the train, her father said goodbye to Ilse at home. Ilse said goodbye to her mother on the train. Her sisters left for the USA a short time later. None of the girls would ever see their parents alive again.

There is so much more to Ilse’s story than I can do justice here. Ilse finished her childhood in England, learning the language with the help of her incredible English benefactors, who, like many host families, were Christians. She was their nanny and continued her education, becoming a nurse and serving for three and a half years in England during the war, before coming to the USA where she and her sisters were reunited after seven years apart.

Ilse would have turned 96 this September. We had spoken just a couple weeks before she died and she was as optimistic, warm and loving as ever. We talked about making plans to visit as soon as travel restrictions were lifted and it was safe for me to come and see her.

A world without her is hard to imagine, and being able to see and hear stories of Ilse from family members far and wide turned out to bring me something unexpected.

It was a moment recounted by one of the family members, which spoke to the question I had been asking myself about maintaining the connection to positivity. In a conversation with Ilse years ago, she was asked how, after everything she has been through, she had maintained her outlook on life and humankind. Ilse answered simply, “I’ve seen humanity at its worst and I’ve seen humanity at its best. I choose to focus on the best.”

This is the key, isn’t it? The answer is not to close one’s eyes and not see what is happening, but rather to see it all and to choose to focus on the part that will raise us up so we can do our part to bring light to our world.

Thank you, Ilse. Though I miss you very much already, I can feel your light still shining.