"Noble be man, merciful and good."— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, The Divine.
Photo by Catherine Chechun on Pexels
You can tell some things about a person by whether they ask you or tell you. It's such a small habit, most people never notice they're making it — and it keeps recurring, deciding more than anyone realizes at the time.
In May 1945, in the courtyard of an abandoned factory in Volary, Czechoslovakia, Gerda Weissmann — one day short of her twenty-first birthday — watched a car come down the hill, marked not with a swastika but a white star. "I've never seen a star brighter in my life," she'd say. Two soldiers jumped out. One of them ran straight toward her, past the other women too weak to stand at the hand pump nearby — and when he reached her, he didn't command her.
"May I see the other ladies?"
A question. The first one in six years that assumed her answer still mattered.
She led him — Kurt Klein — to the others. Then she stopped, turned, and recited Goethe from memory — Noble be man, merciful and good — not because it was a moment for poetry, but because it was the only proof left that she was still someone poetry could belong to.
They married the following year.
She spent the rest of her life turning that one sentence into proof
of what dignity, freely given,
can hand back to a person who's been told for years they don't deserve it.
Who in your life is still waiting to be asked instead of told — and what has it cost them, that you haven't?
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