The Ragged Edge of Night

by Olivia Hawker

He is growing up too fast for a boy his age, but that is the way of children raised among suffering. Like seedlings sprouted in a dark corner, they shoot up thin and spindly, grasping and pale. Who can grow strong roots when the very earth is unsafe, when we are starved for light?

And aren’t we all to blame? What has brought us here, if not heedlessness or willful neglect? We have forgotten some crucial lesson our forefathers learned long ago, but ignorance is no excuse; the price must be paid. How did we err, and how did we sin, to allow the Reich so much power?

Whatever sins have brought us here still reside in our blood, even to the third and fourth generation. Yet You said, in your boundless love and wisdom, Weeping may endure for a night—joy comes with the morning. I cannot help but know it. Against all sense, I believe. Somewhere, beyond the ragged edge of night, light bleeds into this world.

Music eases every pain we don’t know we carry. It banishes the fear that is so commonplace now, we have grown inured to its shadow and chill.

Nothing is so unworthy of a civilized nation as allowing itself to be governed, without opposition, by an irresponsible clique that has yielded to base instinct. It is certain that today, every honest German is ashamed of his government. Who among us has any conception of the dimensions of shame that will befall us and our children when one day the veil has fallen from our eyes and the most horrible crimes—crimes that infinitely outdistance every human measure—reach the light of day?

The miles we might have marched in protest, the votes we might have cast. The mercy we might have shown but withheld, fearful of what our neighbors would think. There is nothing left for any of us but to stand firm on what little ground remains. To say to the Party, You have gone far enough already. Now you will go no further.

There is only so much one person may give before it exhausts your shallow well of courage and leaves you damned and dry. Before outrage becomes commonplace, and you grow used to the horrors of this life. They count on it, the Nazis—and other villains, too.

I didn’t yet feel enough drive to tell Opa’s story—the story of an ordinary person who fought back against some of the worst impulses of the human heart. It wasn’t until the 2016 election that I knew the time had come.

We are fools to think the past remains in the past. History is our guilty conscience; it will not let us rest.

Because I have seen, I believe—I know—that darkness cannot last forever. And beyond night’s edge, there is light.