Shaken Up

So I didn't realize how shaken up remembering the Holocaust made me feel until I hit my dorm last night...and then I literally felt weak, shaky, and traumatized.  Fortunately, I have some wonderful friends right in my dorm.  "Joey" lives directly above me, and "Charlie" (not to be confused with "Charlotte"!) has the room next to mine.  I went to both of them, and got hugs and listening ears.  Shout out to the two of them! I even threw away my sticker in "Joey's" room rather than mine, because I just didn't want to deal with the presence of the thing.

The Holocaust is a hard thing to stomach.  It was unbelievable in the worst sense of the word, that a civilized nation could turn on members of its own society, round them up like cattle and mass murder them.  And no matter how much I say--and I do say it, a lot--that we should remember the Holocaust on Yom HaShoah and then move on, going back to being Jewish for better  reasons and celebrating that, the Holocaust happened every day, day in and day out, for years upon years.  It's difficult to move on, as perhaps it should be.

So I am still a bit shaken up from yesterday, especially from reading names.  (I helped the 24-hour name reading vigil twice, reading a total of three pages.  They were reading from a database of child victims, so not one of them was over ten.  Basically, if you were deported to a concentration camp and you were under age ten, the Nazis killed you immediately.  Also, it's a good thing I'm good with languages; some of the most foreign sounding names--the ones I'm guessing were Polish and Czechoslovakian--were really tough.)