I am generally a very optimistic person. Cancer survivorship has its benefits. It equips you to be able to re-evaluate the remainder of your life in a mainly positive context. If you start off with how lucky you are to still be here, very little else will get past you after that. But even I am finding it hard to see anything good about 2020. It was the year when a pandemic, the like of which we had not seen in many lifetimes, decimated every inch of our entire planet. The year when life, as we had always known it to be, suddenly came to a halt in March and we entered a new world of facial masks, social distancing, commercial shutdown, and, worst of all, the death of over one and a half million of our people.  

2020 also was the year when America tore itself apart for the first time since the civil war in 1865. Only this time, instead of rifles and gunpowder, the weapons were political insults, fake news, racial tension and accusations and mistrust on all sides.

2020 was also the year we lost Kobe Bryant, Eddie Van Halen, Sean Connery, and Diego Maradona. For just about all of us, December 31^st can’t come quick enough.

I thought the fact that I survived one of the worst cancers ever would buffer me from anything the world could throw at me thereafter. And generally, it does on a personal level. But when it comes to global catastrophe, I tend to fall back on another personal experience to give me the resilience I am looking for.

3 years ago I visited Auschwitz. On arrival, I was apprehensive that I would be worthy of my visit. Would my empathy sufficiently match the abomination of the place I was now in. This was, after all, the most horrific location on our entire planet in demonstrating what man is capable of doing to man since time began.

What surprised me about my visit was the overall impact of Auschwitz didn’t hit me as hard as I was expecting it to. Perhaps we are all already so familiar with the story. We all knew in advance about the six million, the gas chambers, the wire fences, and lookout towers and the rooms filled with shoes and spectacles.

The unexpected part of Auschwitz that really caught me happened at the end of the tour. We ended up in a long room with framed photographs of many of the prisoners on the walls. When our guide finished speaking I began to look at each one individually. Suddenly it wasn’t about the six million. It had come right down to a Josef Haas or an Irene Schwarz and I was looking directly into their eyes. I realized I could have been looking at myself, or my brother, or my mother, or my daughter. They must have said to themselves how unlucky were we to be born Jewish in Prague or Dresden or Warsaw in 1905 when we could have been born anywhere else in the world, at any other time. I felt both guilty and haunted for every single one of them.