“Hope is the thing with feathers, that perches in the soul.”-Emily Dickinson

We went to Yad Vashem at the end of long day of Pilgrimage. We were running late and missed part of our slot. We rushed to our place in line trailing dust from Megiddo in our wake, where we had stood and surveyed that ancient site, where the last great battle will purportedly one day be. But on that day, just a lovely green valley, viewed from the top of the world, or so it seemed. We were left with just an hour to tour Jerusalem’s Holocaust Museum. It was more than enough.

I drifted from room to room of the worst of mankind, the terror and dread and the poor people caught in it. Each room more terrible than the next. A testament to cruelty and hate. Until my heart felt as heavy as a stone.

I came out into the great Hall of Names, a large, round gallery room with an enormous atrium ceiling, completely covered in photographs. Baby pictures, school pictures, birthday parties, picnics, graduations, wedding pictures, pictures in the thousands of people, just people. I stood surrounded by the images of them, their smiling, hopeful faces with no idea the horrors that lay ahead, no way to warn them, nothing to be done, except remember.

I stumbled out into a gray afternoon, stunned and battered by the enormity of man’s inhumanity to man. And then I heard it. Somewhere to my left, a bird was singing, a beautiful song. It went on and on and I finally saw him up in the top of a small tree. A Eurasian Blackbird, singing his little heart out. He paused for a second to consider me, with an obsidian eye, and then resumed his full throated song. A song of life going on and hope in that very dark place.

And something so lovely and pure seen after such horror, began to restore my equilibrium. I turned to go and entered the Avenue of the Righteous Among the Nations, a lovely garden where trees are planted and memorials placed for all the people that didn’t turn away and risked their lives to help. A testament to courage. I made my way out surrounded by the memory of those who were lost, those who were saved and those who helped.