One morning this semester in "The Holocaust and the Arts," a course I've written about several times this year, I asked the students to spend a few minutes repeating internally, with their eyes closed, a phrase I adapted from Ruth Kluger's book Still Alive: A Holocaust Girlhood Remembered. The phrase: "my memories, our memories."

Born in Vienna at an unfortunate moment--on the eve of Germany's annexation of Austria--Still Alive tells the story of Kluger's life from the 1930s to the 2000s. At one point in the book, Kluger, who survived Theresienstadt, Auschwitz, and Christianstadt and after the war settled in the United States where she eventually became a professor of German, recounts an evening in the 1990s when, visiting with friends in Germany, the conversation turned to the subject of claustrophobia.

They talked about the Chunnel, the rail connection between Britain and France which at that time wasn't finished, wondering whether "the average person would be able to stand the confinement or freak out"; one man recalled getting stuck in an elevator; many "remembered the air-raid shelters of their childhood."

Kluger's story, were she to tell it: deportation to Auschwitz, nights and days in a cattle car, and one particularly unpleasant incident involving her mother and another woman who had grown mad during the transport.

Had she told it, her story of claustrophobia, writes Kluger, "would have effectively shut up the rest of the company. They would have been bothered, troubled, sympathetic, and thoroughly uncomfortable.... They would have resented me as a spoilsport. It had been an occasion for reminiscing, but there are limits. And so my childhood falls into a black hole."

Despite all that she and her German friends have in common--a common language, a common culture, "an old war that had destroyed much of both"--the difference between her experience of claustrophobia and theirs is what Kluger felt most acutely that night.

She observes: "the bridges had been blown up; we squat on piers that don't connect anything, though our houses are postwar and the equipment is state-of-the-art. But if there is no bridge between my memories and yours [the reader's] and theirs, if we can never say 'our memories,' then what's the good of writing any of this?"

What's the good of writing-a Holocaust testimony or anything-if the writing doesn't create a bridge that connects one person to another, one culture to another, history to the present? What's the good of reading and requiring a group of students to read a text, any text, if the text is squatting on one pier and the reader on another far down the coastline?

What if Ruth Kluger's story will do nothing more than merely inform its readers, so they can say, if they are ever stopped on the street by the Jay Leno show or suddenly chosen as a vice presidential candidate, yes, I know about the Holocaust, I know what is was like for women in the Holocaust?

Is that enough? Can we bridge the gap between informative and transformative?

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Journey of a Lifetime: Lessons on Mindfulness and Life from Following in the Footsteps of the Buddha

by Patricia C. Foley

Gallaudet University, Washington, DC

Pilgrimage to India

A few months ago I had the privilege to go on a pilgrimage to India called "In the Footsteps of the Buddha," a three-week tour to the major sites of the Buddha's life and other important historical sites in India. Having long studied Hatha yoga and mindfulness meditation, and because India is the birthplace of both yoga and Buddhism, I hoped the pilgrimage would not only inspire my own practice, but also provide connection to the sources for the contemplative practices I planned to integrate into the communication studies courses at the university where I teach. Visits to the sites, along with daily meditation and dharma talks by noted Buddhist scholar Dr. John Peacock, did indeed provide what I had hoped, but not in the ways I expected. Descriptions of three particularly meaningful experiences tell why.

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