Identity….
Inquiry …
pedagogy….
teaching as a moral act ….
To write, to feel, to think…
Connection ….
Fear ….
Forgiveness …
silence….
Tikkun olam
Read the words. Again.
Re-Reading the text with two heads and hearts.
Again.
My, our, lenses have been altered
in the last few years.
Since we last shared this text. In what ways have Sondra’s head
and heart
also shifted in the last 20 years?
Lingering words:
“I realize that years ago a complicated dynamic entered. My inner life: revulsion for the Jew-haters alternated with revulsion for the Jews (25).”
“I do not know who I would have been sixty years ago. I can’t say that I would have been a heroine and would have helped your people survive (45).”
“An anomaly is the beginning of inquiry….the things that bother us are the places to start (47).”
“Suddenly I am visited by Hannah Arendt’s insight that the banality of evil can be understood as the absence of thought (104).”
“…I realize how troubled Austria is by her past, how much damage has been done by sweeping it under the carpet, and how difficult it will be in the future to confront it. There is a profound sense of self-hatred here, and it seems to eat away at people in different ways (120-121).”
“Once again, I realized that if I ever teach a course on the Holocaust, I would need to muster both strength and compassion, and I would want my students to focus on questions for today: How do we live in the aftermath of the Holocaust? What is to be learned here (145)?”
“How was it for you, Herr Fessler (164)?”
“It is about the ways in which the classroom can become a ground for the exploration of self, set within historical awareness (175).”
“Tikkun olam…Might repairing the world, I muse, first require that we repair ourselves (191)?”
We each carry stories,
told and untold,
realized or not.
(This part of) Sondra’s story,
shared with us a readers,
as educators,
as humans on the planet,
as those who are living in a still-broken world,
offers us pause to consider
“What would I do? How would I be? Who will I be? Who am I?”
Well, in today’s world, we have that chance.
Tikkun olam….
Erica Kaufman 
Gatsinzi Basaninyenzi 
lthompson 
SueFletcher 
Klaudia Neufeld 
Lori Menning