Hiding Places

A conversation with friends the other day got me thinking about things we hide away. Some are treasures, things of value that we hide to protect them. And then there are things we hide away because we don’t want to think about them. Things that shatter our simple worldviews, that make us uncomfortable, that scare us.

We were talking about books and movies that offer especially thought-provoking insights into lives that are so different from our own that we get surprised by them. One woman had just seen a movie, “The Book Thief,” about a German family who hid Jews during the Holocaust. We talked about the odd realization that we never much thought about there being “good” Germans during WWII. Of course there were, we all knew, once we thought about it. But their lives are so hidden, buried under the reams and reels of stories about the “bad” ones.

That discussion brought to mind an older movie, “Sarah’s Key,” which told the story of a Jewish family in France who were rounded up by French collaborators and sent to concentration camps. The whole family, that is, except for one small boy, whom his sister, Sarah, hid in a closet, locking the door. She told him to keep silent until she came to let him out. She thought she’d be right back—the police hadn’t been taking girls and women. Instead, it was years before she returned. Her brother had followed her admonition to stay there and stay still. The French family who took over the apartment noticed the smell, but couldn’t locate it. She knew where to look, in his hiding place.

Our conversation about these two movies—one about Germans hiding Jews in the basement, the other about Jews hiding a child from his countrymen, both about lives largely hidden from our own awareness—were threaded through with this theme of hiding. It was this theme that brought to mind a pair of short books I read a few years ago that have clung to my consciousness ever since: The Buddha in the Attic and When the Emperor Was Divine, by Julie Otsaka. The first is about things left behind—like the Buddha hidden in the attic—when Japanese Americans were forcibly removed from their homes and sent off to detention camps during WWII. The second is about the places we hid those people, out of sight, and the invisible lives they led. I love this author’s writing style, which is unique and totally engrossing—you really have to read it to see what I mean. But more relevant to this discussion is her skill at laying out these devastating events for us to see without lecturing, without even commenting on the unspeakably cruel acts of our government against its own citizens. Just showing it, word by word and step by step.

Thinking about this later also reminded me of a play we saw recently, “Do You Know Who I Am?” This play was crafted from simple first-person accounts of “dreamers,” undocumented youths who are trying to make lives for themselves in this country. They’re daring to come out of hiding, to be public about their status in order to tell people—or rather, show people—who they are. There they were on the stage, proud, nervous kids (OK, maybe young adults, but to me they seem like kids) asking the audience, “Do you know who I am?” Good question.

Our discussion set me to reflecting on things that are hidden and how carefully—if unintentionally—we keep them that way. How often do we really think about Germans who risked their lives to save Jews, about French officials who collaborated with the Nazis, about the immense sorrow of Japanese Americans being marched away from their lives to remote camps, about undocumented kids who are our children’s and grandchildren’s friends, about the fact that we are walking on land stolen from the Indians? We all “know” that these stories exist, but we have the luxury of hiding them away when we want to. So the antidote is probably choosing not to hide them, at least from ourselves.

“Do You Know Who I Am?” was a production of Motus Theater, who also did a very powerful play last year called “Rocks, Karma, Arrows” (which I wrote about here). Our conversation the other day turned to that play and to the mistreatment of Indians—including massacres of whole communities by the US Army—and thence to Thanksgiving. I wrote last year about how uncomfortable I am about Thanksgiving. Basically, I find it really hard to celebrate genocide. I know that there are responses to that claim, but I just don’t find them persuasive, so I’m always a bit “off” on Thanksgiving.

The other day, as we were talking about some of these stories, my partner and I hatched a plan for next year at Thanksgiving. One of the most reprehensible massacres of Indians (if such things can be placed in a hierarchy of awfulness) occurred at Sand Creek in southern Colorado—the site is now a national historic site. It turns out that one of the Japanese internment camps, Amache, was in Colorado, very close to Sand Creek.

When we lived in New England, we used to go to the counter-Thanksgiving held by local Indian tribes at Plymouth Rock, the land of the “Pilgrims' pride.” That’s too far away now, so we decided to make our own counter-Thanksgiving by visiting Sand Creek and Amache, bearing witness to the stories that we don’t honor with holidays. Trying to avoid hiding them away. Again.