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nature is healing

Cecil F. S. Newman

- Straßenszene Berlin

I'm lucky: My son is a very easygoing kid. But I remember the first tantrum he threw for me. He was standing by our front door and asked to go outside. So I opened the door and grabbed his shoes. But as soon as he stepped onto the porch, he pointed back into the house.

"Inside," he said.

"Okay," I said. I picked him up and brought him inside.

But as soon as I shut the front door, he pointed outside.

"Outside!" he said.

You know where this is going. We went back and forth, inside and outside, again and again. He got more frustrated. And I got more frustrated. Eventually he wound up straddling the threshold of our house, sobbing. When I tried to comfort him, he screamed at me. "You go wherever you want!" I said. He just got madder. I felt trapped, convinced he’d concocted the whole episode as a pretext to unleash his rage at me. It was ridiculous. I consoled myself with the thought that he was just being a toddler.

But later I kept thinking about him wailing at our front door, one foot inside, one foot outside. His misery wasn't unreasonable, or trivial, or silly. My son was experiencing the agony of wanting two things that were impossible to have at the same time. What a fundamentally human sorrow! My son wasn't being a toddler; he was being a person. Adults may not walk around howling, but that same pain rages within us. In that moment, as a father, I was powerless to solve my son's problem. I told him he could go wherever he wanted, but of course I was wrong. To be where he wanted was impossible.

In the final weeks of World War II, as Allied forces advanced deep into Germany, the SS frantically evacuated concentration camps to hide evidence of their atrocities. Between April 6 and 10, 1945, three trains carrying roughly 2,500 Jewish prisoners each were sent away from the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. Their intended destination was the Theresienstadt ghetto in occupied Czechoslovakia.

Many passengers on this specific train belonged to Bergen-Belsen’s “exchange” section. They were prisoners holding foreign papers or citizenship with neutral countries, kept alive by the SS as potential bargaining chips for German prisoners of war. Because of this status, they wore civilian clothes rather than striped camp uniforms.

After a grueling six-day journey with little food, water, or sanitation, the train became trapped between advancing front lines near Magdeburg. Fearing the approaching American military, the Nazi SS guards abandoned the train and fled into the night.

On Friday, April 13, 1945, a scouting mission consisting of two American tanks from the 743rd Tank Battalion and troops from the 30th Infantry Division encountered the stalled train.

The photograph, taken by US Army photographer Major Clarence L. Benjamin, captures the raw, overwhelming rush of emotions as the prisoners realized they were finally safe. In the foreground, a 35-year-old Jewish mother from Makó, Hungary, clutches the hand of her 5-year-old daughter. Her face portrays a powerful, complex mixture of relief, joy, and the lingering trauma of what they had endured. Behind them, other survivors stream up the embankment away from the train cars, smiling and weeping as they run toward their liberators.