From Sand and Ash

by Amy Harmon

“God makes me strong. He gives me courage. He gives me peace. He gives me purpose.”

even as a twelve-year-old boy, painstakingly reading the politically charged La Stampa, he wondered if the papers represented Italy or just the government.

They can take our homes, our possessions. Our families. Our lives. They can drive us out, like they’ve driven us out before. They can humiliate us and dehumanize us. But they cannot take our thoughts. They cannot take our talents. They cannot take our knowledge, or our memories, or our minds. In music, there is no bondage.

A rejected infant will often die, even if its basic needs are met. A rejected child will spend his whole life trying to please everyone else, and never please himself. A rejected woman will often cheat, just to feel desirable. A rejected man will rarely try again, no matter how lonely he is. A rejected people will convince themselves they deserve it, if only to make sense of a senseless world.

“I’m really no different from so many others, I suppose. I have been hoping it would all right itself.” “What?” “The world,

Life is hell shot with just enough heaven to make the pains of hope all the sharper. Life is impossible. Ugly. Agonizing. Inexplicable. Torture.”

Sand and ash. The ingredients of glass. Such beauty created from nothing. It had been something Babbo had marveled about and something she’d never understood. From sand and ash, rebirth. From sand and ash, new life. With every song and with every prayer, with every small rebellion, Eva felt reborn, renewed, and she vowed to press on. She vowed to push back, to make glass from the ashes, and that courage was a victory in itself.

Our immortality comes through our children and their children. Through our roots and our branches. The family is immortality.

think I want to teach. I want to teach history so that the world doesn’t have to repeat her mistakes. Eva’s journey across Germany has me convinced that there are many good German people too. They are just as afraid and damaged as the rest of us. Italians have no room to judge. Italians fought for Hitler too. Maybe people had no choice, but I wonder sometimes what would have happened if everyone without a choice had made a choice anyway. If we all chose not to participate. Not to be bullied. Not to take up arms. Not to persecute. What would happen then?”