Today when I left work I thought my head would explode. A few days ago I was given a Yiddish document to translate. Today I had a few minutes to review the four page document and realized it was a phonetic variation of Yiddish, and was truly a German record phoneticized into the Hebrew alphabet. Lest I bore you with driveling minutia, the contents of the document were the spectacular and heart-wrenching life events of a Holocaust survivor.
The difficulty of interpreting his phonetic letter combinations aside, the greatest challenge was the painful message those words carried. He told of his wife and two children going to visit his parents, and how he never saw them again because they were taken to Auschwitz and murdered. He tells of being hunted like an animal while hiding in the canal system, and how he and one other man managed to escape. I am not finished with the translation yet, but how powerful to unlock the words of this survivor to his family, masked in a pseudo-Yiddish.
Upon arriving home I thought I would take a few minutes to unravel my thoughts before attempting to dive into C++ Algorithms. Instead I just kept thinking about how this man's story replays somewhere in the world every day where heartless humans are driven by the belief that they are somehow better, somehow superior to another. It is so hard to think of the many people around the world who do not have the same freedoms we enjoy. It's so very hard when you feel so helpless to change that fact.
It's amazing that you can now tell this man's story for him! He is probably so happy in heaven.
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