70th Commemoration of the Invasion of Poland by the Nazi's and Start of World War II

I attended this event this evening at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum down on the Mall in Washington, D.C. I have been a charter member of this museum, and from time to time receive invitations to events. I rarely respond, the place is so holy and so powerfully charged with "presence" that it almost always exhausts me. Here's the information about the event that I received with the invitation:

70 YEARS LATER: REMEMBERING THE GERMAN INVASION OF POLAND

TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 15, 7 p.m.
Meyerhoff Theater
Introduction: Jacek Nowakowski, Senior Curator,
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

Raye Farr, Director of the Museum's Steven Spielberg Film and Video Archive, will introduce Siege, an Oscar-nominated short film directed by Julien Bryan, an American filmmaker, which captured Germany's ferocious siege of Warsaw and provided the American public with some of the first images of the start of World War II. Hear more about the Museum's efforts to rescue and preserve Bryan's invaluable film and photo collection.
Edwarda Powidzki was just 13 years old when she witnessed the Nazis invade her native Poland. In a conversation with Museum curator Susan Goldstein Snyder, Powidzki will share her recollections of the first days following the invasion and her subsequent arrest and imprisonment at Auschwitz-Birkenau.

And it was the idea of hearing first hand from a death camp survivor that inspired me to attend this event.

And now I don't know what to say. It was profound. It was pedestrian. It was incomprehensible. It was all too easy to imagine. The film was a gift of courage from a very courageous man. The memories were precious jewels, snippets polished with grace from a very courageous woman. And I don't feel exhausted. I feel affirmed.