The Flower
Story★★★★Gerta Weissman was among the prisoners in a Nazi death camp. She recalled an episode one spring when she and her fellow inmates stood at roll call for hours on end, nearly collapsing with hunger and fatigue.
But they noticed in the corner of that bleak, horrid, gray place that the concrete had broken and a flower had poked its head through. And the thousands of women there took great pains to avoid stepping on it. It was the only spot of beauty in their ugly and heinous world, and they were thankful for it. Later in a radio interview, she added: “When people ask me, ‘Why did you go on?’ there is only one picture that comes to mind.
The moment was when once I stood at the window of the first camp I was in and asked myself if, by some miraculous power, one wish could be granted me, what would it be? And then, with almost crystal clarity, the picture that came to my mind was a picture at home-my father smoking his pipe, my mother working at her needlepoint, my brother and I doing our homework.
And I remember thinking, my goodness, it was just a boring 1 Personal interview with Dr. Robert Hill. evening at home. I had known countless evenings like that. And I knew that this picture would be, if I could help it, the driving force of my survival.”1 1 Dr.
Julius Segal, Winning Life’s Toughest Battles (New York: Ivy Books, 1896), 60, 69. 2 Mrs. Charles E. Cowman, Springs in the Valley (Los Angeles: Cowman Publications, Inc., 1939), 250.
The point
Gerta Weissman, imprisoned in a Nazi death camp, recalls her fellow inmates protecting a small flower breaking through concrete—their only beauty—and later reflects that this simple hope, the memory of her family, sustained her will to survive.