View From a Prairie Home

I taught German in high school for 27 years. I developed my own curriculum based on how people learn their own language, which means at first, it was just oral. After I felt my students understood and could speak a little bit of the language, I introduced the written German. And by their third year of learning the language, I started to teach German history in German. 
I always had the naïve idea that learning a language promoted world peace, because if you speak a language different from your own, you also will understand different. 
To make learning German more meaningful, I also brought those of my students, who wanted to go with me, to Germany for two weeks. When it comes to learning a language, no educational tool surpasses immersion. Before our trip, my students had learned about the Nazi period of German history. And even more importantly, we had studied what led to the rise of Hitler.
While in Germany, we always visited Dachau Concentration Camp Museum by Munich. Admission to the museum is free because it is funded by the German government with the hope that something as vile and evil as the killing of minorities will never happen again. I was allowed to lead my group of students through the museum. It is open on Good Friday when most places in Germany are closed. A fitting day, I think, for pondering man’s cruelty to man. 
Once, after spending many hours at Dachau, my students asked if they could pray. We made a circle around a statue that says “Nie Wieder” (never again), held hands and led by several of my students, we said a prayer for world peace.
A few weeks ago, in our bible study, the topic was “stories”.  We read how a lady who came from Nigeria to study in the US was dismayed about the perception of her by her American friends. People presumed that coming from Africa meant that you were raised in a primitive society. We went on to study biblical women like Mary, the mother of Jesus, and Mary Magdalene, who was the first person to see the risen Christ. And we talked about how each biblical woman were perceived as one dimensional. How easily we define people without really knowing them.
Two weeks ago, I wrote about serendipitously finding a photo album my father made in 1944/45. It told me a story about him that I knew, but it included details that were new to me. And I found myself showing the album to Halvard, one of my grandsons. While looking at the pictures, we talked about them and looked up the locations listed. Halvard was fascinated. 
At 20, he is roughly the same age my father was while partaking in the battles in Northern Europe at the time. The story of his great-grandfather and thus me, his grandmother, has now more dimensions for him. Pondering this, I am reminded how many times I have heard people lament on how much is lost when a parent or other relative dies. How many stories now are gone.
Which leads me back to the Holocaust. In the Holocaust Museum in Washington DC, there is a three-story-high installation of photos documenting everyday prewar lives of the Jewish population of Eisiskes, a town located in present day Lithuania. 
In September 1941, Nazi mobile killing squads rounded up and massacred nearly the entire Jewish population of the town, roughly 3,500 people. The exhibit features more than 1,000 photograph reproductions, which try to capture the lives of the people killed: Family vacations, weddings, school pictures, sporting events.  The milestones that cannot be told any other way, of people gone, of life stories untold.
So, please: tell your stories, to you friends, but especially to your family. Tell them stories of who you were, who you are and how you want to be remembered.

Hege Herfindahl