Last Wednesday, YHC had its annual Ragsdale Lecture which is a lecture series focused on historical and political issues. This year they decided to bring a Holocaust survivor by the name of Ben Walker to campus. Mr. Walker survived the Holocaust in the Ukraine which is an often overlooked part in the vast history of the Holocaust in itself.
As he was lecturing he talked about the Einsatzgruppen, mobile killing units used by the Nazis in the East to have mass executions of Jews at one single time. He talked about how his little two-year-old sister didn't survive. He told us about how one day while in the ghetto he went to wake his father up only to find his father had died in the night. He said his mother knew she might not survive so she dropped him off at an orphanage to be taken care of in case she didn't and promised to come get him if she did. He told of how his family farm had been sold and how when he and his mother returned they found it occupied by someone they had never met.
At the end f the lecture there was a bit of time for questions and answers. I'm not a huge fan of public speaking myself so I sat in the front row debating whether or not I should mention something that had caught my intrigue. I decided it was now or never and I took the microphone and said I appreciated how he had included in the definition he had given of the Holocaust that the disabled German community had been targeted as 'blood impurities' by the Nazis and how as a disabled 21st Century American I thought that the persecution of the disabled during the Holocaust was forgotten too often that it almost becomes an invisible footnote.
Then something unexpected happened. He came over and put his hand on my shoulder and whispered to me that he himself was familiar with the struggles of the disabled and that someone close to him has a disability.And the he kissed my cheek and I sat there more moved than I ever recalled being by an acknowledgment of the struggles that people with any disability continue to face.
Some people like to call me an inspiration and my first reaction to that claim is to debunk it because in reality that isn't quite true. It's the people like my new friend Mr. Ben who should be held up as beacons of inspiration, not someone like me. I didn't endure a quarter of what he did and when people stop me and tell me I'm an inspiration due to the fact I meerly exist I have to correct them and sometimes point out the types of people who are truly inspirational.
I am not, but there are so many that are.
