Three Sisters

by Heather Morris

Humor will save you. Laugh, and if you can’t laugh, put a smile on your face.

And what can you tell me about the sword lily?” Yitzchak tests her. “They are a genus of the gladiolus family.” “And what is the meaning of the word ‘gladiolus’?” “It means strength of character, Grandfather. It means never giving up. And, it is part of the iris family, which signifies hope.” Magda, initially pleased she is able to roll the answers off her tongue, now looks away from Yitzchak, into the trees beyond. She is thinking about the word “hope.” “Strength and hope,” repeats her grandfather. “Our special, secret words. These are the finest qualities a person can have. Qualities I see in you, Magda, and in your sisters.”

“One day, the gold asked the iron, Why do you shout when you are beaten? I get hit too, but I keep quiet. The iron replied, I cry because the hammer is made from iron—it is my brother and that hurts me. You are hit by a stranger.”

As they near Brandenburg, the group is joined by hundreds of others heading in the same direction, toward safety. “We are all survivors,” Cibi tells her sisters. “We have all been beaten, starved and tortured, but look at us, we’re still moving, still alive.”

“Looking at these photos in this special light, we have remembered the past without grief. And if we can do that, we can also look ahead without fear.”

how do you embrace the future with an open heart when that same heart has been broken over and over again, the shards of it hammered into dust?

“We owe it to those who died to live our best lives, become our best selves, and here we can.”

“Exactly. That we shouldn’t look at each day as a series of tasks we have to get through, but to see each twenty-four hours as a gift from God and cherish individual moments.”

“Tell me, have you even forgotten one thing about the camps?” Ziggy shakes his head. “I remember every second of every day,” he says. “That’s a lot of memory, isn’t it? Unless we want to spend the rest of our lives trying to shut the door on something that nearly destroyed us, we’d better get used to the fact that the camps are as much a part of our lives as each other.”

A small act of kindness and that’s what binds these sisters now: small acts of kindness, of consideration.