Following the heart thread to a new path

I felt like a loser. I was crying in public on a street in the oldest neighborhood in Boston. How dare I do this? A librarian at a Reggio Emilia school in Beacon Hill, I was on my break between the coffee shop and the school, two elegant Brownstones in the middle of the neighborhood.

Something was crushing my heart and I couldn’t hold in the tears. Maybe it was the stress of my schedule — I was one of the only teachers that didn’t have a co-teacher, and hosted every one of the kids in the library each week, teaching library and digital media classes while managing the library collection.

Later, I realized there was more to my crying. A soft knock on a door in my heart, waiting to be answered, wouldn’t quiet down. An unfolding understanding: My core passion wasn’t being answered in my job. I felt underutilized. There was a part of me that wasn’t unpacked, and I could feel it. I longed for work related to my passion for teaching the Holocaust, and the disconnect between my work and that longing had grown into a horrifying divide — a gap so vivid the tears burst out.

As a young reader I first became intrigued and gripped by books set during the Holocaust. I was awed by the foundation of strength the inhabitants of the Warsaw Ghetto must have possessed to live within those walls and how people could step into the bravery of helping another person even at risk to their own lives. So many stories swirled with courage, fear, resilience, love and grief. I read “The Hiding Place” as a twelve year old about how a Christian Dutch family sheltered

Jews, then were discovered and sent to Auschwitz for their rescue efforts. I was astonished by the way Betsy Ten Boom remained within a space of peace and love, even in a concentration camp. How can a person be empowered to extend grace and forgiveness to people behaving in truly evil ways? This was one of many stories that shook me to the core.

My life in Boston became a catalytic point strengthening and silvering the thread pulling me towards a different vision of work. I arranged to visit and share a lesson plan with the 6th graders at my school. I vividly remember one student asking me a question about the fate of a Jewish family and when I responded, an expression of pain swept across his features. I recognized his sense of injustice that humans would do such things to other humans — even those who had lived decades before.

It was during that lesson with that group of kids that I realized: remaining a school librarian was not in the cards for me — it was inevitable that I would shift and pursue a path towards this passion.

I eventually packed up and started my drive across the country back to Northern California, but one of my stops was New York City so I could visit an exhibit on the rescue efforts of Le Chambon Sur Lignon in France where around 3,000 Jewish lives were saved. Those villagers had been offered a call to action by their pastors after the Vichy government began pushing legislation to discriminate against the Jewish people. Every single villager responded to the call — there was not one who decided that wasn’t the right thing to do.

The next summer I would drive with one of my best friends across France to Le Chambon so I could visit the region myself. The mountain air was clear and invigorating — I don’t think I’ve ever slept so well in my life. The very atmosphere was tangibly and spiritually rich and I remember thinking: What the people here accomplished, being brave even when they were afraid, the way they welcomed and sheltered all those Jewish people, that way of serving and honoring and giving: That’s who I want to be. And could the way I share Holocaust Education also stir that same desire in others?

I would embark on a path to find out. What that path would resemble and how I would reach it was unclear and uncertain — and definitely not comfortable. Shifting careers never is — moving across the country never is — but when my heart radioed that it was time to move, it was time to move.