We Promised Them Life

 By Harriet May Savitz

 
  I did not know who they were.  Not their faces.  Not their families.  They spoke a different language.  Lived in a different country.  I knew them as numbers.  Numbers spoken on the radio, written in newspapers, reported on television. They were destroyed in a school in Russia.  It could have been a school anywhere.  Because they were children, they belonged to the world.  They were our future.

  We promised them much, this civilization..  Their first step. Their first word.   Their first awareness.  Their first love.  Whether they were rich or poor,  we promised them the chance to live.  For much more than a few months.  For much more than a few years.  They might have offered us their talents, those children in that school in Russia.    Certainly potential scholars and scientists, physicians and teachers, athletes and  artists were among them.  But as children, they did not know  yet what they could become.  They were still looking at the world through a child’s eyes.  And through those eyes, the universe was filled with wonder and innocence and things just waiting to be discovered.  And they would discover them..  They were just like children anywhere.  Who sat around the kitchen table with their families.  Who ran outside to see a rainbow streak across the sky.  Who knew what it was like to dance, and sing though others might not hear the music, and run into the wind, and call to a friend to come and play on a rain-filled day.  Through their eyes it was  a world of adventure and possibilities and none of them ever thought it would end so violently on that school day in Russia..
 

  Their school.  A learning place.  A place to discover.  A place to share.  A place where there was hope.  Where there was teaching.  Where one could reach out for dreams and make them come true.  A safe place.
 

  On that day in Russia, the school became a battleground, the children hostages, and the world turned dark.   None of us could avoid what was happening.  For it happened to all of us that day.  It happened in our minds to all our schools, and it happened in our hearts to all the parents,  to anyone who loved a child.  The bullets, the explosions, the screams of anguish were heard around the world.  And perhaps somewhere out of it.
 

  We have felt the pain of parents who have lost their children in that school in Russia.  We know their lives too are destroyed.  There will never be a day when they do not remember nor a day when their torment lessens.  There will never be a day when they can understand or forgive.  Or forget.
 

 So what do we do now?.  Now that the promise has been broken.  What can our great civilization promise the others?  The children who are being born this moment.   The ones attending their first day of school. 
 

 Can we promise children everywhere we shall never forget?  Can we promise that this one act shall become our motivation to save the children?  All children.    And thereby save the best of us.  Can we promise that each child who perished in that Russian school, each child who suffered, shall be responsible for one loving act that we do each day?  One giving moment.  One act of kindness.  One reaching out.  One moment of caring.  One effort to bring light where there is darkness.  One belief that we can rise above our inhumanity.. One vow that each child born will have the chance to live.
       

            We could make this promise.  Each of us.

 And this time, not break it.