Sadness and The Teacher

Early one morning last Summer I visited the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam.

As I walked from room to room, examining testimony, gazing at artifacts and watching film of witnesses and participants to the horror and history that this poignant memorial portrays, the overwhelming sense I felt was sadness. I felt sad for the world of the sisters, Anne and Margot Frank, trapped in innocence and powerless at the hand dealt them in a time and place in which louts terrorized unchecked. 

As I climbed steps and walked narrow hallways of the dark interiors that served as prison, brief haven and finally as a place of capture I thought of my own sisters and imagined them when they were young. 

How different my two younger sisters’ childhood had been. How, though at times they chafed in their dealings, they loved each other deeply and how freely they trusted that love. I was unable to imagine, had they been forced to endure what Margot and Anne had experienced, how my sisters would not have been destroyed. I shook at the prospect.

The magnitude of the Holocaust is beyond my ability to grasp--so inhumane that I can’t take it in and sort it other than with horror and disorientation. But thinking of Margot and Anne I am able to impose images of my sisters and a measure of the brutality experienced here takes faint form. And so my young sisters accompanied me on that day in July and the memory of them made it possible to feel, in my way, a tragedy that no one should be permitted to ignore or deny.

And yet, life proceeds even when we all are exposed to the horrors of our pasts. 

I sat beneath a tree near the entrance to the seminary I attended in Baltimore in 1959, reading a copy of “The Diary of Anne Frank”. I was filled with a sense of  sophistication at the thought that I was reading a book that was popular and dealt with meaningful issues that extended beyond parochial interests of my Catholic religion and the narrowness of a provincial Irish-Catholic life I knew growing up in my New York City neighborhood.

A priest, the President of the college I attended, approached me as I sat reading and asked that I hand him the book. As I gave it to him I felt a pride that I had taken the initiative to move beyond the few novels that made up my classroom requirements and had reached into the secular world for something of intellect beyond catechism.

“Who approved this reading?” he asked.

It had not occurred to me that anyone would need to approve anything I read since I wasn’t about to bring works that were  banned by the Church or on lists distributed by the Society for the Propagation of the Faith onto the campus of a Catholic seminary.

I stammered that I could not recall. Something I’m sure grew from my surprise at the question and my quick awareness that my reading preferences were clearly not mine to treat willy-nilly. My answer, as I think of it now, was more no answer at all.

“You don’t need to be reading this Jew propaganda,” the priest said. 

He held the book firmly—closed—in his hand, took a full draw on his cigarette and blowing smoke from his mouth and nose, he stared at me with clear objection. He took long deliberate strides  away from me--he was a little man with a massive head that made me think ‘dwarf’ whenever I wasn’t otherwise terrified of him--and toward the priests and seminarians walking in small groups along the school’s circular driveway. 

What I remember most of that exchange was the immediate conviction that settled inside me: I would not be stopped from reading that book or any other that I saw fit to read. I don;t know where the knowledge came from but I was startled at the  awareness. I had never held a rebellious thought toward my religion, toward a member of the clergy or to any statement by any member of the clergy, until that moment. 

Since then I have held thousands—perhaps tens of thousands—of such thoughts. That priest's boorish act set me free: he showed me an interior path of examination that opened me to truths and understandings I cannot imagine would have happened had he not behaved as he had. In that sense, I suppose, he was my teacher.