Michael J. Mooney (thanks to Dixon for the link): As David Pomerantz tells the story, his grandfather was 6 years old at the beginning of World War II, when Pomerantz’s great-grandparents were killed by Nazis. The young boy was put on a train bound for a concentration camp. He was riding in the last car—it was packed so tightly with people that he could barely breathe—when a pin fell out of a coupler, dropping his car from the rest of the train. The boy walked to a nearby town, only to find that its residents were being herded into the square to be cut down with machine guns. When the shooting started, the boy fell to the ground and pretended to be dead. There, the story goes, Pomerantz’s grandfather hid for three days under the bloody corpses of strangers. When the coast was clear, the boy got up and walked for miles, until he came across a refugee camp in the woods. He lived there for eight years, in squalor and pain and anguish, before he could immigrate to America, where he eventually married and had two children, Pomerantz’s mother and his aunt. This is what Pomerantz thinks about when he is on the street, parked in front of an abortion clinic five days a week. As he tries to convince a woman to keep her child, he thinks of all those different lineages, the bloodlines that were saved when the train car detached. “I picture myself as that pin,” he says. “I don’t just see a baby. I see a line of humanity we’re saving that could exist for eternity.”
Leave a comment