Paradox
The power of imagery can often be enhanced by the introduction of paradox. By juxtaposing two seemingly antithetical concepts, a synthesis is arrived at which in some cases lends the imagery exactly the feelings of surreal qualities of instability and ambiguity it is used to create:
“Gratefully, patiently, we crept through a silence full of sounds, a darkness full of shadows. For the first time since I had woken up that morning, I started to breathe easily. I still was alert to every rustle and kept probing the darkness for danger, but something inside me began to loosen up. It seemed to me that I was holding my fragile freedom cupped in my hands.”
And When the War Ends?
The end of a long, brutal devastating war should by all conventional logic produce relief and optimism about a better future. In a situation like World War II, however, which was not just devastating physically but in its revelation of unspeakable horror in the hearts of men, such simplicity was never really a viable expectation:
“And so ended that horrible long war that refuses to be forgotten. Life went on. It went on despite both the dead and the living, because this was a war that no one had quite survived. Something very important and precious had been killed by it or, perhaps, it had just died of horror, of starvation, or simply of disgust – who knows? We tried to bury it quickly, the earth settled over it, and we turned our backs on it impatiently. After all, our real life was now beginning and what to make of it was up to us.”
Never Again
Denial of the Holocaust and everything associated with Nazi inhumanity is an affront not just to those who died and survived, but to a world which remains every bit as subject to the same grotesque demonstration of the depths of human depravity. As long as there remain people who think such evil never occurred, there will be people who believe it can never occur. And therein lies the threat that such stories, as difficult as they may be to hear, live to tell:
“I told him how the trains would arrive from Polish villages bringing men with bloody heads and women wrapped in shawls and how, once the trains were gone, the women undid their wraps and pulled out their babies, some of them dead by suffocation but a few still alive, saved from German bayonets. I told him how, a few months later, the SS would arrive and throw those same babies into trucks and cart them off to the gas chambers.”
A Proud Praguer
Perhaps not officially, but a person from Prague is generally said to be a Praguer. And it is clear from the imagery which follows that the author is a very proud Praguer, indeed. The language is almost that which would describe a magic land in a fairy tale far away. Prague is most certainly not that, however:
“But what is unique about Prague is the relation between the city and its people. Prague is not an uncaring backdrop which stands impassive, ignoring happiness and suffering alike. Prague lives in the lives of her people and they repay her with the love we usually reserve for other human beings. Prague is not an aggregate of buildings where people are born, work, and die. She is alive, sad, and brave, and when she smiles with spring, her smile glistens like a tear.”
