There's a storage box in my living room. Most of the time, I forget it's there.
Inside the box, normally used for photos and documents you think might be important some day, are affidavits. They were put together by my grandmother in the 1930's as she tried to get Jews out of Austria to the safety of the United States. I don't know if they made it out of Austria, to be frank.
It's a reminder that the past is never really totally past. As is the photo of distant cousins with a note that says they were killed in the Holocaust.
It's also a reminder that the questions we don't think, don't even know to ask can echo through a future we couldn't imagine. Who would have thought "war in Europe" would be a phrase we learned to use again?
Who could have imagined another huge flood of refugees, scenes of smoldering buildings, features on the cold-blooded murder of the elderly, kids, young couples, fighters on both sides?
Who can take in the total senselessness of this conflict? We sit aghast in front of our televisions, thousands of miles away, our senses barraged by the horrors unfolding in front of us - and helpless to do anything to stop them.
Today I heard a story on NPR about rabbis trying to care for Kyiv residents as the bombs fall on their beautiful city. The history of Jews in places like Poland and Ukraine is complex and often tragic. Many of them were killed in waves of anti-Semitism. Many of them died in the Holocaust.
Now Ukraine appears to be one of the least anti-Semitic countries in Eastern Europe.
What would my grandma have thought? Did she imagine, after helping refugees to get out, the devastation that would overwhelm Europe, and the murder of millions?
What did she and other Americans do, aside from working in factories, on behalf of refugees during World War Two?
How on earth did she not surrender to hopelessness?
How did she make sense of America's own equivocal stance towards refugees? After all, Roosevelt sent Jews on a ship away before the war, and they weren't the only ones who didn't find a safe haven here.
Could she ever wonder if it would happen again? Did she ever wonder, whether she said it or not, if hate would win?
Of course, she depended on radio broadcasts and newspapers for information about what was going on in Europe and the Pacific. For those of us who are glued to news notifications, it's hard to escape - and it's a valid question to ask whether we should want to, when the people of Ukraine cannot.
The woman I knew as a child and young adult, was long past her work on behalf of refugees from Germany. She never stopped advocating for justice, but she didn't seem haunted by the ghosts of the past, either.
Maybe doing the next right thing, whether it was organizing merchant seaman or campaigning against nuclear weapons, was balm for her soul. Maybe she knew that there is always a new fight, another cause, evil that needs to be addressed.
It's possible that she, and my parent's generation, was stamped indelibly by the evil they witnessed, even second-hand.
I'm ashamed to say - I never thought to ask.
What do you do when the next right thing, the donating and the praying and the renouncing, is in no way equal to the magnitude of the depravity we are watching innocents suffer?
There's no answer on the horizon - but at least we can honor the dead of Ukraine by living with the question - and doing what we can. Now.
