What is Freedom?

    Today, I started a Winter Session class on Cross-Cultural Counseling.  In the afternoon, I traveled with my fellow NYU graduate students to the Museum of Jewish Heritage.  At the museum, I met two Holocaust Survivors who shared their stories of survival with us.  As I process and reflect on my experience at the museum, it is hard to put into words the visceral reactions that I had in my body, in my mind, and in my heart.  The stories that they shared were that of survival, of hope, and of the sheer will to live against all the odds.  

      The woman survivor described how she was taken to Auschwitz.  In a moment that I will never forget for the rest of my life, she raised her sleeve to show the number tattooed on her arm.  She described how her survival depended on split-second decisions that she made; the decision to run, to hide, to change from the line of death to that of life, to move to the sick ward with her sister, to split from her sister, to plead for her life, and to run again.  She ran back to freedom... but a freedom that orphaned her without parents, without a home, and without her sisters.  At the end of her story, she shared that she was unable to laugh for 25 years and still to this day has not been able to cry.

  

As I walked out of the museum, I saw the sun setting over the Statue of Liberty.
The symbol of freedom.

I thought "Will she ever experience again the freedom of a laugh or the freedom of a cry?"

For every sunset, there is a sunrise.

That is where hope is born--
                   my hope for her, my hope for humanity.


So, I ask: What is freedom?