Humanity is going through a difficult period. It is as if everything has darkened, and we are searching for at least a glimmer of a ray of light in the darkness that surrounds us.
But darkness is only a moment in the story of our history. It is not the final essence, because then things would end and we would no longer exist. But we are still living. Humanity continues forward in small steps, creating a space that is not closed, because it has not yet said its last word. In the entire story of human existence, there has never been a single moment followed by zero, emptiness, and silence. It is the stubborn persistence of life that saves us.
Two years ago, when I visited Auschwitz-Birkenau, I looked at the long grey barracks where people endured unimaginable suffering and hardship during the Holocaust. They fought for their lives in inhumane conditions. They were stripped of all human dignity, reduced to mere numbers without hair, without clothes, even without their own bodies—turned into goods for industrial processing. Yet they still wanted to live. Eighty years after the end of Nazi madness, in places where the air once carried the stench of burning human bodies, where the filthy ground was saturated with blood and tears and where an ominous silence was broken by screams, gunfire, and weeping, grass and flowers began to grow again. Everything came back to life, as if the horrors of the Holocaust had never existed and the past were only a phantom of bad dreams and nightmares. In the place of suffering, life rose again. It was not bound by hatred or the ideology of the people and the world that caused it. Only a trace and shadow of suffering remained in the memory of life itself, while life continued to sprout with full force.
Bitterness, sadness, and tears always turn into grass and flowers. Deathly grey transforms into the colours of life. Life prevails—in every moment, in every personal and collective darkness. This is not my naïve optimism, but the reality of life itself. Life fights for life. It does not give up, and it takes up arms against evil through its small steps. And there is nothing that can stop it. Life is indifferent to our hopelessness or disbelief. It continues on its own way—it breathes again, breathes, grows, and blossoms.
Why must darkness exist, who knows. But in it, light becomes more apparent, clearer, and more visible. In darkness you can see the light, but in light, lights are invisible.
Our light in Talent is creation. We have nothing else—only the simple joy of being together and creating. When we forget the outside world and the circumstances that burden and torment us. When we write, speak, and improvise. We are with ourselves and with others, in our own world of play and creation, with inner images that we form. In this we can exist, because we have a point of light—a point of ourselves, our imagination and stories, our inner being. Each step we take together, and the path we walk, is part of that. That is our hope. And perhaps it is not so little.
Erika Merjavá
