Tears of Amber

by Sofía Segovia

People need to see and hear the details of what is going on because their imagination is incapable of grasping general facts correctly. When a disaster consumes five million victims, this does not mean anything: the number is empty. However, if I show a single, individual man in his perfection, his faith, his hopes and his difficulties, if I show you how he dies, then you will remember this story forever. Erich Maria Remarque

The most shocking fact about war is that its victims and its instruments are individual human beings, and that these individual beings are condemned by the monstrous conventions of politics to murder or be murdered in quarrels not their own. Aldous Huxley

Hugo Stieglitz had read the list of banned books from the Deutsche Studentenschaft and purged all the named titles from the library their grandparents and parents had left them. His sister couldn’t understand where her brother’s pyromania had come from. Nor his fervor for National Socialism.

“Was it fear? I don’t know anymore: hate and fear are very alike and they’re great motivators, don’t you think? They should both be included among the great muses of destruction. I don’t want to speak badly of my brother, Herr Schipper, but that day, there was no dissuading him. It was as if he’d been convinced in an instant that the old authors our grandparents and parents read were to blame for Germany’s misfortune. He said: We have one of the biggest private libraries in the city; they’ll come for us and our books; you’ll see, Maria.”

Did you know that Heine wrote that where books are burned, it always ends in people being burned?”

The important thing was not where they were but that they were alive, and together. After years of relative peace in the war, in the blink of an eye, her life had been reduced to that: to understanding that the only treasure worth anything is life.