No answers needed, thankfully

    

Two times last week, we were still out on the road when the kiddos started napping. Instead of biking frantically and yelling things like "no sleeping on the road!" and "Nils, poke Liv for me!", I gave up on making it home. We live very close to Frankfurt's largest cemetery, and I decided to pull over and just sort of hang out for awhile.

The cemetery is something of a notable place. Lots of old graves - Schopenhauer's being the best known - and big trees. The kids and I bike through it all the time, and if you don't count the time we saw a bulldozer ripping out gravestones of those whose families no longer pay for upkeep, it's a calming place. 

(I know, right? There is something so deliciously (horrifyingly?) "Germany" about bulldozing graves. Story for another day.)

My favorite spot is the section dedicated to the Second World War. It's right on our bike route, and there is never another soul there. 

This statue, too. The first time I saw it, before I ever looked at a grave and saw "1944", I knew. The slumping shoulders, the grief and guilt and total defeat... this couldn't be about anything else.

There are signs that I could read, but I've never stopped to read them. I like leaving it all a bit of a mystery, and piecing things together as I pass through again and again. The section of Russian and Eastern European names, for example. Was there a battle of Frankfurt? There must have been, why have I never heard of it?

And who leaves the flowers and candles? There is always something when I pass through, and I wonder who remembers who, and who still feels what. What about Elise Zeh? She died at 60 in 1944... who planted the flowers at her grave? No one else has those... is someone still mourning her loss?

I like the fact that I can't come to easy conclusions here. As Nils and Liv napped last Friday, I wandered back and forth in a section of graves for civilians who must have died in an Allied bombing raid. My mind kept wanting to assign labels like "innocent victim" and "evil fascist," but I couldn't. The young couple buried together, he with military honors and she a month after he passed... who were they? Ardent nazis or scared young people with no choices? The 5 year old boy... okay, it's pretty easy to label him "innocent victim". The 80 year old woman: innocent? Informant? Okay, and say she was a racist, fascist, all those terrible things. Do I get to say it was "correct" that she died when her city was bombed? 

Hmm... guessing that one's a bit above my pay grade.

There is a family grave, too. Father, mother and daughter all gone in one day. When I look at it I can't help but remember a trio of memorial stones I saw for a Jewish family.

This is a complicated place, and I am a pretty simple person. I'm going to sigh with relief that it's not my place to decide who deserves what then, and just keep biking through. I think I should also leave some flowers. I could put them at the feet of that statue.