I had come to really enjoy Rose's personality, and was happy to do that for her. She had so much charisma that she seemed bored at the nursing home, so our jaunts would give her a little change of pace. One day when I came to the nursing home, Rose asked me to help her go through her pictures. She wanted to divide them up for her children before her death and informed me that the project would take several days, since she wanted to annotate the photos, so the stories would not die with her. As we started going through photos, Rose began telling me stories about her life. I learned that she had been born in Germany, though I did not make the logical connections about a German-born Jewish woman of her age. It was not until I saw a picture of a pair of twins that I discovered that she had had a twin, and, as history reveals, twins were of special interest in the concentration camps. Rose was the control twin in the experiments, and her sister, Lillith, eventually died as the result of the concentration-camp experiments. Rose remembers knowing that her sister had died, though she was only six, because she was immediately moved from her privileged place to the general housing. She eventually located her mother and older brother, though her father died in the camps, and her grandparents died in transit. That photograph was the only picture she had of her sister, and she had no pictures of her father or any of her other relatives that died in the camps. The picture of her twin was actually one that was taken at a gentile friend's birthday party, which they offered...

For example, the woman who gave the photograph to her mother did not consider herself a racist or an anti-Semite. After all, her child had Jewish friends, and she was friendly with Jews. However, at some point in time that woman chose to ignore what was being done to Jews, because the majority of Germans experienced very positive changes in the early days of Hitler's regime. I came to understand that great tragedy begins with small acts of hatred, and that tolerating bigotry was probably even worse than having bigoted feelings. I heard first-hand tales from a concentration camp, and realized that the depictions I had seen in movies or television were insufficient to convey the horror of what occurred. Rose had me take her to a Holocaust memorial, and held me as I cried with the realization of what had occurred. After that day, our relationship changed. I was no longer a punk in her eyes, but her friend. We began to do more to enjoy our relationship, and I found myself looking forward to going to the movies with an elderly woman even more than hanging out with my friends. In fact, the most remarkable lesson that I learned from Rose is that, no matter how great the tragedy, the worst thing I could do is allow it to keep me from living her life. Though she had a tremendous amount of sorrow in her life, she was a happy and optimistic woman. I can only hope to have the type of positive ideals that she had.