A Revelation Born of Sorrow

As I stood in the middle of a raging storm, I could not tell which drops on my face were rain and which were tears. The hundreds of gravestones surrounding me began to blur as I fully realized the horrors that had occurred nearby on an ordinary beach in France. However, my heavyhearted melancholy did not begin there. It truly started a few days prior, very soon after I had arrived in Germany for a school trip. Exhausted from my 14 hour flight and feeling the cold nip of snow around me, I was not prepared for what I was about to see and feel. Shivering from the frozen air, I took in the sight of the rigid steel gate with a terrible lie forged into it: ARBEIT MACHT FREI, work makes you free. The Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp, the very first stop on my trip to Europe to study World War II, was one of the first camps built in Germany during the war, and was mostly used for political prisoners. I was unable to speak as the tour guide took us around the camp turned memorial and explained the suffering of its prisoners. Snow gently drifted down onto the massive and ugly remains of the crematorium, and, as I looked upon the mountain of ashes that was all that remained of the murdered, I realized that my emotions were just as numb from shock as my hands were from the cold. A few days later, my group arrived at the Normandy American Cemetery and Memorial in the midst of powerful wind and pounding rain. I could not believe how many graves there were. I could not believe how many people had died because of just one campaign of many in the war. How many sons, brothers, husbands, fathers, friends, war buddies never got to see their loved ones again. My mind was an infinite loop of “You were a person. A person who had family and friends. Family and friends who never got to say a final goodbye.” I felt like my heart was being torn into pieces, especially when I saw how many of the stones had only the inscription “Here rests in honored glory a comrade in arms known but to God.” My emotions churned as wildly as the storm around me. 

I have always been the one who listens to peoples’ problems in order to try to make them feel better in any way possible. I absolutely love being able to put myself into another person’s shoes to help him or her carry the burden of his or her troubles. If necessary, I will make myself look foolish or feel intense anguish, or whatever it takes to help another person. Although I will not ever meet the people who were directly affected by these specific atrocities, I felt in these moments a gut-wrenching desire to give each and every one of them a hug. Every victim of hate and murder. Every widow. Every fatherless child. Every sonless mother. Every war comrade who lived to watch his friend die. Every single one of them I wanted to comfort and help in any way that I could, even though the occasion had long since passed. In those moments of absolute despair, I realized that what I want to do with my life is keep as many people from suffering as I possibly can. I do not know exactly how I will do it, but I know that my path in life is to bring happiness to those who need it most.