One Candle

Amidst the food and festivities of Hanukah adorning a comfortable modern holiday table, two elderly women - Grandma and Great Aunt Rose - begin to tell a story explaining their non-traditional choice for commemorative Hanukah menorahs (candles).  When these women were but girls - 12 years old - they were confined to a brutal Nazi concentration camp, Buchenwald.  Here, they worked in the kitchen.  Risking great danger, they carefully smuggled out some butter and a potato.  Though literally starving, they did not eat these items, but rather, used them along with a string from their skirt, to improvise a candle to commemorate Hanukkah.

Asked why they took this huge risk, grandmother replies,

"That Hanukkah candle lifted us.  It lifted us to the stars.  In our minds, sweetheart.  In our hearts."

As they retell this story year after year, lighting their potato candle, we readers are also lifted to the stars.  With these two small girls, Bunting gives a powerful story of defiant triumph over evil, of brave clinging to hope in the midst of despair.  Tellingly, Bunting ends her story with a repetition of those powerful lines,"And in that moment we are lifted to the stars."

Theme: Remember - renarrate - history's stories of defiant triumphs of unassuming weakness over evil, of brave clinging to hope in the midst of despair.

                               ______________________________________________

My extension: comparing Bunting's story to (an even more beautiful) story I heard once several years ago:

Perhaps Bunting borrowed this story from the real life story of Rabbi Hugo Gryn.  I researched it and could find no intentional connection.  

At any rate, when Hugo Gryn was a child in Auschwitz with his father, they saved their meager daily ration of margarine.  They were slowly starving to death and young Hugo argued with his father, demanding that they eat this, their only source of nourishment.  His father was already sick and weak, and a hungry young Hugo was appalled when he got the answer from his father.  They wouldn't eat the margarine.  They would make a Hanukah candle from it.

Hugo  just couldn’t comprehend his father's logic.  He told his father that it seemed foolish to do so, but his father melted the precious margarine ration to light a Hanukkah candle. Hugo protested. His father said, 

“My child, we know you can live three days without water. You can live three weeks without food. But you cannot live for three minutes without hope.” Live in hope. 

His father died when the liberation took place.  Not having enough physical food he starved to death.  But he starved to death living in hope.  He fed his spirit rather than his stomach, planting a seed of hope in his son who later became a world renown rabbi and advocate of peace and, despite the grave injustices that he had personally suffered, forgiveness.  


Links:
http://www.hugogryn.com/about-hugo-gryn/