On Being a Decent Human Being

I am at a Religious Freedom training in Budapest. Normally, I don’t talk much about my work here but indulge me for a moment, will you?

Religious Freedom is one of the things I cover in Bulgaria. It is an important part of U.S. history and a key tenet of U.S. policy. Now, if you know me, you know that I am not exactly a religious person. But I don’t have to be because religious freedom is about protecting the rights of people to practice any religion or no religion at all.

I have had moments over the years when I have studied various faiths and I find many of them interesting but for whatever reason, no one religion has resonated with me in a big way. Perhaps it has to do with growing up under communism, the political system that beat religion out of many of us. Religion has made a comeback in Bulgaria and different faiths resonate with people.

I work with various religious groups and do my best to help them in their efforts to achieve religious freedom. Occasionally, I hear comments about “the infidels” as these “evil” people. I generally ignore those comments but they don’t sit right with me. Just because someone doesn’t follow a particular faith doesn’t automatically make them a bad person any more than going to a house of worship makes one automatically a good person. Also, just because I don’t believe in an organized religion doesn’t necessarily mean I don’t believe in anything. While I don’t think of myself as religious, I do see myself as spiritual and believe in being a decent human being. To some this may seem simplistic but it’s enough for me. My moral compass is in me, it’s part of me and I personally don’t need to go to a house of worship to feel connected with that fundamental belief (I like visiting temples but it’s mostly for their aesthetic, cultural and historical value). I don’t need someone else to tell me to be a good person. I have felt this way for a long time but today I heard someone else say something along those lines and it really resonated.

As part of our training, my colleagues and I met with Eva Fahidi. She was born in 1925 in Debrecen. Her family was deported to Auschvitz in 1944. Ms. Fahidi was 18 at the time and together with 1,000 other women was transferred from Auschvitz to a forced labor camp in Germany to work in a munitions factory. When she returned to Hungary after WWII, Ms. Fahidi realized that 49 of her relatives were killed in Auschvitz. She was the only person in her family to survive the Holocaust. Just digesting those facts was hard for me. She lived through all that but somehow found the strength to move on after the horrors of the Holocaust. If this doesn’t tell you something about the power of the human spirit, I don’t know what would.

Ms. Fahidi appealed to us to watch the news with open hearts and minds and then follow our hearts and minds. She said she is concerned about the rise of the Right in Germany and worried about the future. “Why can’t people understand they are so similar?!” she wondered, adding that some people in Hungary “get anti-Semitism through their mother’s milk.” She said one of her best friends was Roma. Her message to us was, “Try to be human. Decide to be a good person. Nothing else. It’s difficult but try. In the end it will be worth it.”

Ms. Fahidi has written two memoirs, which don’t seem to be available on amazon but hopefully soon. There are a lot of stories about her in various publications including the New York Times and the Washington Post but the most recent I could find was this piece from Deutche Welle, which talks about Ms. Fahidi’s love of dance and dancing in her 90s as a way to tell her story and promote Holocaust remembrance.

I just loved her attitude and faith in humanity despite the awful trauma she experienced at a young age.