Losing People

People marching for Ukraine, Feb 27, Santa Monica CA

Once in a while, people lose family members.  A war comes or an earthquake or a famine, and people flee, losing track of where their parents or children or uncles and aunts and grandparents are.

This happened to Boris Furman's family during the Holocaust.  People were torn from each other and separated by geography, some separated by death without other family members knowing.

On Dec. 31, 2021, This American Life featured Boris's story as told to Dana Chivvis (Act 3 of Episode 757 "This Must Be the Place."

In Hebrew, tikkun means repair.  In Judaism tikkun is an important concept meaning the redemption of a tragic situation or even the repair of the world-- tikkun ha Olam.

Boris's family needed repair for being pulled apart during the Holocaust.  His mother lost her entire family as she fled to the US, where she met and married Boris's father, also a survivor with no family.

"When I grew up, I didn't have any extended family," says Boris. "I didn't have any. My kids have a gazillion cousins and aunts and uncles. I had one."

Years later as he married and his children grew up and left home, he began tracking where each person was every day and even calculating a "family average location."  

As he talks to Dana, she observes that his obsessive recording of each person's location and calculating an average location is actually kind of "a math prayer."

It's a way of saying, "We exist--we know where we are."  

"It's not to record where they are but that they are," she concludes.

Right now in Ukraine, people are fleeing, fighting, and losing touch with family members.  Sometimes there is no cell signal.  Phones are lost, or there's no electricity to charge them.  

People are dying: young Russian soldiers, Ukrainian citizens, visitors, students from other countries studying at Ukrainian universities.

May each family find tikkun... may our world in March 2022 be repaired.