Back to Life, Back to Sense

The past month has been a whirlwind of travel from Poland to the US, from the US to Germany, from Germany back to Poland, and now...stillness.

It's so interesting how we (at least I) don't appreciate stillness, the sensation that the ground is solid under my feet until after I've been living like I don't belong anywhere. I've read of customs from various cultures that seem to obsess over ensuring that a body and soul BELONG somewhere. I have read of tribes where the umbilical chord is tied in a bag and worn around the neck for the entirety of one's days on earth. Losing this talisman is catastrophic. It's a loss of self, a loss of heritage, a loss of belonging. Similarly, and perhaps more familiarly, I have read of mirrors being covered when a person dies to ensure the soul moves on and does not remain trapped in a place where s/he doesn't belong.

It's so interesting to consider the associations we have between calmness and comfort. For the first time in a month, I feel entirely calm. I have nothing looming, no major travel, no obligations beyond the ordinary. It is a stillness that I treasure entirely. I am not the kind of person who needs covered mirrors or leather sacks full of discarded body parts to feel a sense of belonging. I crave only stillness, the luxury of a moment to write, the prospect of scribbling a poem or sketching something in thick black ink. It's an assurance of selfhood and it's entirely wonderful.

I've spent the past few weeks readjusting to cold and dark. I don't think I'll ever fully trust a 4:30 sky that's full of stars (more accurately, a 4:30 sky that would be full of stars without a smog of black clouds that seem especially grim against a night sky). The cold hasn't truly been that terrible. Every person I've met here has dismissed complaints of the weather with a swipe of the hand and an anecdote about winters past where there was REAL cold and one could not ensure that his/her hot water would work 24 hours a day. This may be true. I may be the benefactor of a meteorological oddity that has kept temperatures hovering slightly above freezing and warding off serious snow. However, regardless of my fortune, I'll enjoy the return of warm rays of sunshine and I can't help it if I think so.

As for other updates, I've returned to an especially haunting image that captivated my attention one of my first days in Poland. I was walking down the street and passed a bakery which contained two gigantic loaves of (artificial) bread. Seriously. These were the size of layer cakes. However, some unfortunate little bird was hoodwinked by them, wandered inside, and became trapped behind a layer of glass. He flailed and flailed against it, growing visibly more panicked, and shedding feathers across the loaf. I recalled, at this point, the story of Solomon and the Queen of Sheba during one of their visits. The Queen decided to test Solomon's wisdom by placing a real flower in a room of artificial ones (paper? glass?) and challenging the king to find the actual flower. It honestly seems like a pointless test. I don't understand inconsistent mandates about the importance of proof in biblical contexts. The rules are confusing. Anyway, Solomon opened the window and bee flew in, going to the only real flower in the room. Realistically, it was the bee that was talented, not Solomon. However, it pointed to some nonsensical "sixth sense" animals may have about knowing what's real from what's replication. This bird, however, received no such instinct and he continued to beat his wings against the glass. Eventually, he was shooed out but not before creating a truly spectacular image. I've struggled with how to recreate the image in writing and settled on a poem attached below.

I swear I never meant to be the kind of person who posts his/her poetry on a blog. It's like the guy at the party who brings his guitar despite no one asking him to do so. "Oh look. Jimmy brought a guitar...See that? He's here...with his guitar! OH! He's playing it now. I'm shocked he knows how to play Blackbird... on his guitar."

However, it was moment I couldn't get out of my head. It was a perfect personification of chaos against order, the turbulence of the natural world against our best attempts at...well, stillness.

"Ovens"
I read of the unwed sisters

who, I am told, would climb

onto the ovens as they cooked

bread, waiting to be filled

as soft brown loaves took

form beneath them.

In desperation, they recalled all

of their good deeds, remembering

the coins tossed to beggars,

the last bite of supper slipped

into the wet jaws of a stray.

I think again of these women,

with their ordinary wishes 

as I stare at cakes glazed like

frost on a window above

heartier loaves with nuts 

and seeds baked inside. 

At the window, a bird has

been fooled by subversive

bread, plastic and glued 

together to tempt the hungry.

I, too, have been tricked

by such a promise, I 

realize as I watch two hands 

fold around the erect wings of 

the bird as he smashes against

a pane of glass, hurt by the 

betrayal of what he loved

and what he need to survive. 

He is tossed on the streets 

and pauses for a moment, 

tilting his head as he regrets

his desire and his stupidity. 

Perhaps, I realize, there

 are those of us better suited

to perch on the ovens

rather than to flail against

what we cannot see.

The Lies Ill-Concealed

There was a woman, as I read, named Eleanore Baur who made it her mission each year at Christmas to visit the inmates at Dachau with cookies and cigarettes. She became known as Sister Pia. An especially devoted and early member of the National Socialist movement, Baur is the only woman involved in the Munich Beer Hall Putsch and was rewarded for her early loyalty to the Third Reich with a villa in Dachau and considerable influence in the camp, of which she was the appointed "welfare sister."

Here the story becomes more specific. Her visits were always marked by long, patriotic speeches in which she reprimanded prisoners for hurting the Fuehrer's heart by not being social, productive members of society. Furthermore, she exerted considerable influence in the camps. She could select "pets" and "favorites" who she would request work at her villa on projects that ranged from cleaning, cooking, renovations, to reported sexual abuse. While she never directly harmed anyone, her influence could be used to tremendous personal advantage or disadvantage. She survived the war, served a brief sentence, and then lived out her days in her villa, reinstated with her rank and pension.

I stumbled across this brief but disturbing biography while scouring Dachau's archives. A far cry from the rich, decorous splendor of Munich and it's garland-decked alleys and towering Christmas trees, the area around the Dachau concentration camp is flat, sterile, and cold. A mist hovered slightly in the air and the sun-less sky matched the greyness of the area.

I would also visit the Munich Stadtmuseum while in town and examine the exhibit specifically dedicated to the rise of the Nazis in Munich, examining propaganda, artifacts, and more information about the early momentum of National Socialism. Yet for the moment, the history of the location was almost tangible, an invisible exhibit that was none-the-less present and occupied a space more in the head than in the physical realm.

My goal was simple and complex at the same time. Dachau was designed for political and social prisoners such as communists, homosexuals, clergy, Soviet POWs,  politicians and resistance fighters. The turbulent history of Germany and Europe after 1945 left complicated legacies for these groups. Communists and homosexuals especially did not enjoy sudden popularity in West Germany (or East Germany for that matter) after the war. In fact, homosexuality's criminalization continued in Germany well into the 1970s, excluding homosexual prisoners from being involved with memorials dedicated to inmates' experiences at Dachau. My curiosity focused on how the persecution and brutality of these "political" groups was taught in Europe during a time where said groups still did not enjoy sympathy or popular opinion.

My initial examinations of books from the Dachau archives gave a chilling but comprehensive overview of Holocaust education shortly after the end of the war. Students described teachers staring at their shoes, sweating and panicked when talking about the NS period. There was tangible discomfort for both educators and the students who secretly wanted to know what their teachers had done during the war. However, political groups were somewhat excluded in from this dialogue. Homosexuals were not included in the 1968 camp memorial as homosexuality was still criminalized during that time. Some students protested the exclusion of former prisoners from now-communist nations from participation in the commemoration, an action which some western media outlets interpreted as Neo-Nazism.

In fact, many Soviets (who had been under strict instruction not to surrender) returned back to the USSR after the war to face accusations of collaboration and face even more prison time. Yet such information is uncommon in American Holocaust education. While the Jewish population of Europe suffered catastrophic losses, many other groups are ignored when discussing Nazi brutality.

I left the archives with answered questions, unanswered questions, and plethora of new, more complicated questions that buzzed around my head like frozen rain. I walked into the mist of late-afternoon, thinking of Sister Pia, and lines of prisoners, each with a narrative that may perhaps be lost in the recesses of time.

Smoke! Smoke!

Mid-December at the Salzburg Christmas Market.

I am greeted instantly by the sharp, illicit smoke of frankincense, resting, smoldering like stolen jewels in bronze platters. It is a stubborn scent, the scent of festivity and atonement (or was myrrh meant to symbolize sorrow?) that hovers almost toxic in the crisp cool of mountain air. It contrasts with what the sweet musk of dry hay in the plastic manger, the caramelized decay of roasted nuts, the lingering sour of hot wine. I think of easter, of those Episcopal services where I would hold my nose not to breathe in the incense swung throughout the sanctuary like a wrecking ball.  “Some things,” I would tell my self, “are best left uncleaned.” 

Here too, I gaze around the mustard-yellow walls of old money fallen from power, a house left like a gutted palace to remind all of lost opulence, discarded with the same casual approach as an other loss that went unnoticed until it was too late. The shutters are open, lined on the inside with the sheen of synthetic metal paper, dominated by black numbers, marking the day of the month. The sky fades from an almost chemical blue to the dark of early evening and, for a moment, there is the syzygy of primary color, the fire-hot red ornaments tossed on trees and illuminated by melting candles, the lemon-ripe house, and the cold blue of a dying day’s sky. “This is such a thing,” I realize,”that needs no purification. The fumes are a waste of fire.”

I am told, however, that it is truly only the blend of myrrh and frankincense that can cleanse. One on its own yields no reaction. Yet this fact seems lost. The flow of bank notes continues without interruption as the shoppers tuck away their goods and inhale strong, deep breaths of burning frankincense, hoping it will keep them absolved for another year. 

Don't Tell Mama

Simply put, I fell in love with Prague. It's nobody's fault. I was born this way. We are in love and are getting married.

An exaggeration? Perhaps. But not by much. I spent a weekend in Prague on a whim and picked exactly the right time to be there. Between Christmas decorations, the wonderfully seductive smell of hot wine and cooking smoke, and the overall surrealist vibe, there was little not to love. I spent the better part of the weekend walking through the mazes of the old town. It was almost reminiscent of the fabled labyrinth. Despite my best attempts, I never seemed to follow the same route twice to get places. The streets twist and turn in a maze of Goliathan buildings that ooze age and good taste. Yet, it seemed delightful surprises rather than a malevolent bull-man figure was lurking behind every corner. I'm perhaps too comfortable with just showing pictures. However, I have no choice here. Describing the wonderful and invigorating time I had would be insufficient. I spent a few hours watching Jan Svankmajer films on loop in the modern art museum then went to see the Christmas market officially open. I wandered through the Old Jewish Cemetery and examined buildings of historical significance in both Prague Spring and the Velvet Revolution all in the same weekend. It happened in such a blur that I'm quite happy that I took so many pictures.

Frankly, I distrust memory.

Mein damen und herren, madames et messieurs, ladies and gentlemen...I am pleased to present you with...Prague, a city in pictures (and comments from me).

So this building stood out to me as something to photograph. It reminded me of what a building might look like if Edward Gorey converted to Christianity and started sketching on buildings. 

This is the building where the Golem is supposedly hidden. There's no way to get into the attic (where the Golem allegedly is) but previous expeditions into the attic (including a Nazi who supposedly climbed in and never came out) have not yielded any proof that there's really a Golem hidden there. It's a pity. Who couldn't use a big, strong Jewish man lying around the house?

Kafka statue. You'll notice it's sitting on top of a mosaic of the infamous "monstrous vermin."

Death and a Turk on the Astronomical clock. Apparently white Christians could not be associated with sin in the Middle Ages. Go figure. 

Giant faceless babies at the modern art museum. 

Old Jewish Cemetery. The graves are 12 layers deep and over 150,000 bodies are buried here.

The World Won't End

This month has been something of a whirlwind. I could go into a long, overly detailed explanation...so I will. I spent the first part of the month traveling to Warsaw, Berlin and Norway (you can read more about this in my previous post. Two days after I returned from Berlin (on a Wednesday), I was in Krakow with a few other of my darling Fulbright family visiting Auschwitz. The general consensus seemed to be that we all knew it was a place that needed to be visited and none of us wanted to visit it alone. So we bundled in our coats against a wet November chill and rode in the comfort of a minibus to the site synonymous with unimaginable atrocity. To be quite candid, I'm not sure how I felt. I expected to feel more than I did. There was something simultaneous sickening and numbing about the entire experience. The two emotions were unsettlingly able to exist inside me for a few hours without dulling the other. There were some rooms which evoked remarkable disgust (such as a room full of human hair, a separate one filled with artificial limbs stolen from murdered inmates, and countless others). The impact was jarring. It was like looking at the lives of people you don't know in individual pieces, as if the material objects that represent their existence were organized and compartmentalized behind glass. The absurdity of the Holocaust, the lack of logic behind it, was evident. This is where the numbing came in. It was like looking at a surgery on screen. There was something quite real about it but also a comfortable barrier of historical distance that allows it to exist simultaneously as something existing in the same state of reality in which history dwells. This post will be shorter. It's almost like the monument to Loss mentioned in Memoirs of a Geisha. An artist builds a monument to loss with one word on it. However, the word is scratched off because when one experiences loss, it cannot be read, only felt. There's not much I can do to explain the complexities that I'm still feeling from this particular visit. Words are painfully inadequate.
 

Maybe This Time

"Closure. She's looking for closure."

One especially astute young student made that comment when my class was discussing "Forgiving Dr. Mengele" (a documentary discussing the decision of one Eva Mozes Kor to forgive the demented experiments to which she was subjected as a Mengele twin during the Holocaust). This moment seemed to encapsulate the entire topic of Holocaust literature that I had just covered with my sophomore English students. Wasn't Vladek Spiegelman looking for some sort of closure when he burned Anya's diaries? Wasn't Art himself seeking closure for the life he experienced in the shadows of his parents' mutual trauma and mixed ability to cope with the prospect of survival? Perhaps Simon Wiesenthal too was seeking some form of closure when he asked his reader if they would forgive a dying Nazi. As I learned this previous week, Jan Karski was unable to find closure as a Righteous Gentile. He spent his life torn between his invaluable services towards exposing the brutality of racism in the National Socialist regime and the gnawing sensation that he could have done more.

Times are marginally different. The number of Holocaust survivors dwindles. There are monuments to the Holocaust that simple read out the names of the deceased. Picture a room made of mirrors reflecting the light of a single candle that, in the labyrinth of obsidian panels, multiplies to millions and is entirely silent except for the listing of names of murdered children. The names become almost anonymous, as indistinguishable as the candles staring back in the cosmos of a single space. We have the luxury of memory rather than witnessing. Yet perhaps this luxury has done more damage than it has provided closure.

As an educator, I feel it is my duty to ensure that young people are educated about the past (chiefly as it is expressed through literature). However, these people are the heirs to a planet that has seen war and hatred manifest as genocide countless times in its history. We remember what has happened but are gutless, neutered to any actual response until after the damage is done. Armenia, Rwanda, Bosnia, Serbia, Cambodia. The deceased are then added to the list of names that increasingly lose their meaning. We seek closure but this, like a candle in a mirror, is a reflection. It cannot be touched, let alone achieved.

It is this philosophy which motivates me to study how the world teaches the next generation about what previous generations have done. The past week, while certainly filled with happy, memorable moments with my fellow Fulbrighters, also was designed to help me expand, reflect upon, and conceptualize my understanding of an education that espouses social justice and the earnest belief that the world can be repaired with the proper tools. It is the search for these tools that took me to three distinct locations, each offering its own unique methodology for preserving memory, confronting the present, and paving the path to improvement for the future.

1. Warsaw, Jan Karski Conference.

For those of you who do not know, Jan Karski is (arguably) Poland's most famous Righteous Gentile (an honor bestowed by Yad Vashem in Jerusalem for those who took personal risks to help Jews in the Holocaust without seeking any sort of monetary compensation or religious conversion in return). This was a man who spent his entire life after the Second World War haunted largely by his belief that he had not done enough. Responsibility was a vital component of his character and it was this sense of civic duty which motivated his life. While there were many Righteous Among the Nations as well as countless others who acted with compassion during an amoral time, there is something especially compelling about the question of ethics in moments where ethics seem unimportant at best and a weakness at worst. Visitors to the conference included colleagues of Karski's from Georgetown University, artists, historians, government officials, and a survivor of the Rwandan genocide. Questions flew, many of them about who we blame for the Holocaust in Poland. Finally, one especially disgruntled speaker stated plainly, "Who do we blame? The ones who did the killing."

I coupled this conference with a visit to Warsaw's Jewish Museum. As I walked through the exhibits which traced the history of the Jewish people from the middle ages to the contemporary time, there were several questions which rooted rapidly in my mind. Primarily, how can I as an educator ensure that questions of ethics and morality are not sideswiped for the sake of time or convenience? I think back to discussions about ethics and capitalism in Brecht or dialogue about gang violence in Romeo and Juliet. Is there something missing in American education when it comes to ethics? Too often we like to handle children with the care and sensitivity of an Easter egg. We refrain from posing difficult or challenging questions out of concern for "sensitivity" or the fear that students might say things we just don't want to hear. Flatly, if this is the course that American education continues to take, it is doing its children a disservice. It seems that a proper education would indeed instill a fundamental criticism for historical ethics and include substantial dialogue about how we can foster our own sense of ethical existence. This, in turn, would produce some sense of responsibility, a trait modeled by the countless Righteous Among the Nations who proved that ethics are not meant to hide during turbulent times.

2. Norway

Norway's history during the Second World War is somewhat less devastating and complex than Poland's. Norway, like Poland, fought fiercely against Nazi occupation. Both hosted bold and dedicated resistance movements. However, unlike Poland, significantly more of Norway's Jewish population survived. There are a plethora of historical reasons for this. Neutral and Allied territories (such as Sweden and the UK) were much closer to Norway. Despite this, however, many Jews were killed in Norway as part of the Holocaust.

What is perhaps more noteworthy of my time in Norway is the focus on Norway's place as one of the world's most tolerant nations. This tolerance was largely the purpose of my visit. After making contacts with and establishing an interview with the Rafto Foundation (a  Norwegian human rights advocacy group in Bergen), my questions as they related to education were informed by the Foundation's educational workshops on Democracy, Discrimination, and War/Dehumanization. The group advocates a dialogue-based approach to learning about these three components of human rights discussion.

Dialogue and discussion are indeed essential parts of learning about catastrophic events and finding solutions for situations of injustice. My time in Norway expanded my understanding of social justice education largely due to its focus on the future. While the events of the past do play a significant part of our understanding of the present and future, without a clearly defined concept of what must be prevented, a knowledge of the past does little good. Furthermore, this concept must be the result of democracy and dialogue. People must work together to act as a shield against human rights abuses as a coalition rather than courageous individuals.

3. Berlin

This was perhaps the hardest part of my project thus far. I am German. My heritage is firmly rooted in this nation that has been the cradle for culture, art, and science for thousands of years. I am enormously proud of this heritage. Dadaism, Beethoven, Hildegard, Goethe, Bach.... But I digress. It's no secret a shadow still hangs over Germany due to the events of the Second World War despite the fact that most of today's German population was not alive for these events, let alone collaborative in them. However, there seems to be an unspoken rule that people constantly view Germany with Nazism in the back of their minds. While I plan to visit Germany multiple times and experience the culture that walks hand in hand with my heritage, I must, regrettably, dedicate a large part of this post to Holocaust discussion since that was the focus of my trip and my Make it Happen project.

Few nations today can boast the tolerance and liberalism that Germany represents. I looked forward to visiting Berlin for weeks, despite the historical irony that a queer Jew would look at Berlin as a safe-haven. I thought about the vibrant Weimar LGBT underground scene including film, magazines and music that heralded Berlin as an LGBT Mecca in the 1920s. I spent my senior year researching this period and I craved something of this liberal, open environment as if it were something I could purchase in a shop as soon as I got there.

Berlin proved to be all I could want in terms of a diverse and open-minded city. Walking through Berlin was an almost electrifying experience. The streets were lined with illuminated orbs that symbolized the fallen Wall. People from all walks of life paraded the streets to commemorate the day that East and West Germany began the process of reunification. Some might say it is truly Germany's best age. The economy is booming, its education is free and of high quality, and it has become a beacon of open-mindedness. This stems from, in large part, the frankness of Germany's confrontation with its own past.

Germans today bear no responsibility for the events of the Second World War. Yet it is not an uncommon thought when one sees older Germans to silently wonder, "Where were you in 1933?" It However, Germany's cities (including the vibrant Berlin)  is saturated with monuments to the victims of the war (including Romani people, Communists, Jehova's Witnesses, LGBT people, and people with disabilities). One such monument is the compelling and humbling monument to Europe's murdered Jews. With a design based on Prague's Jewish cemetery, the monument seems to represent chaos and order existing simultaneously. The large concrete blocks feature uneven tops but perfectly gridded alleyways between them. While walking through this space, a tight and distressing claustrophobia seems to set in. One longs for the openness that exists outside of the guts of this sterile labyrinth. The effect of this was quite impactful. The experience lent itself to reflection about its purpose both as a historical commemoration and as a work of art.

Similarly impactful was the Berlin Jewish Museum. This featured a room where a robotic arm writes the Torah at the same pace as a human would. It is a jarring, almost disturbing image. The sterility of the mechanical arm as it writes the fluid, lively hebrew on a seemingly infinite scroll of paper took getting used to, to say the least. There was a room in this building (concrete, lacking in climate control or lighting, 26 meters high). This room is called the Holocaust tower and is designed to exemplify the void left in German Jewish life by the Holocaust. I had been battling an ear infection for several days before I entered this room. Looking up caused vertigo. To speak the truth, looking anywhere but straight ahead caused vertigo. However, as I looked up into the cold darkness of this tower, my head began to spin for medical reasons. I pinned myself in a corner and continued to look up as the room twisted in my vision like a tilt-a-whirl. The other two people in the room stared at me slightly and then left quickly. God only knows what they thought was happening. The void, however, was demonstrated perfectly despite my inability to get it to sit still.

The progress that Germany has made is undeniable. It's history has been broken down into pieces that you can purchase on the street (like the Young Pioneers friendship pin I purchased from a man for 4 euro or the remnants Berlin Wall that has been cracked and crushed into souvenirs by tourists. Its history seems to be a melting pot where nothing melts. Yet a vibrant nation and rich culture have endured. It is a nation honest with its history but also entirely active in ensuring that the atrocities of the World War are public and thoroughly depicted.

How many other nations can claim such a response to a previous inhumanity? Certainly not the United States. When I was taught Civil Rights, the pictures were always of Martin Luther King, Jr speaking in front of the Lincoln Monument. Occasionally one might see a photograph of a "whites only" sign. I certainly didn't see the pictures of teenagers being doused by fire hoses. Images of hot coffee being poured on students sitting at segregated lunch counters were censored from the mix. Indeed, America's own genocide against the First Nation people is glossed over or presented in the cheery false-balance of the Indian Wars or the First Thanksgiving.

It all blends together into an essential question of how we teach children responsibility to prevent injustice. Furthermore, how can we unite children across the world to partner together to advocate human rights?

It was in Berlin that I rounded off my reflections about where my plans for social justice education must go.

I won't share them here because they are still shapes held only in soft clay and perhaps it is best that they stay only somewhat formed for the time being. I'm not looking for closure just yet.

All my love.
K.

Halloween

The combination of smoke from chimneys and the farthest reaches of light pollution from the city gave the sky an austere tone as if it were toxic to breathe. The color was a smokey orange that seemed to produce its own light, more alien than human. In fact, it held an almost spot-on Halloween ambiance. Eldritch and mournful at the same time, it couldn’t have been better to see on All Hallow’s Eve.

Regrettably, this sky became a day late. This eerie sky was the backdrop for my first All Saints’ Day. 

Through the woods surrounding one of Citadel Park’s  military cemeteries (the perfect place, we had been advised, if you don’t have anyone to mourn), we could see the lights glowing with unyielding persistence. There was nothing cavorted or twinkling in them. Each flame sat behind colored glass and offered neither sentiment nor signs of neglect. What it did insinuate was something that neither picture nor words could adequately convey. 

The park itself was thrust into the history books in 1945 as the site of the last Nazi stronghold in the Battle of Poznan (an event which devastated the city and left much of it in piles of rubble). Today, it houses several museums and several military cemeteries. The graves are thus uniform for the most part and offer little explanation beyond birthdate, death date, and nationality. Each grave was fashioned with a small jar (some were red, some green, most clear) with a candle inside. The end result while stumbling through the hillside was a sea of light. The solid ground drifted away and what was left seemed almost cosmic, less tangible than soil, but offering boundaries only in the form of where light from the thousands of candles could reach.

I reflected on this holiday sporadically over the week. Naturally, I associated the end of October with Halloween. It is, without doubt, my favorite holiday because if offers a campy environment in which mirth and sorrow exist simultaneously. The philosophy or sanctity of the day has long since drained for most Americans. As one of my Polish students phrased it, “There’s no philosophy behind it. People just get in costumes and drink.” I can see what she meant. We hollow out pumpkins in the United States and illuminate them from the inside to keep away what we want to stay only in a memory. Jack O Lanterns are designed to send a message to the dead to stay put, to frighten things away. In contrast, the candles on All Saints' Day are designed to help the dead, to navigate a path in a vacuum of darkness.

In this cemetery, there was a certain peace, a silence appropriate to the circumstances. People meandered through the maze of illumination, pausing occasionally for their own reasons. Yet to someone looking in from the outside, there were just candles sitting on the graves visited largely by those who, as we were informed, had no one else to keep the path lit for them. 

Other photos from the week: