39 people were killed in the terrorist attacks on the Moscow metro yesterday (March 29, 2010). As some of you might know, I was born in Moscow and have spent a great amount of time there. Also, most of my family still live there. Luckily none of them were harmed by the attacks. But over a hundred people were.
It’s just numbers, when you don’t know the place. It’s just numbers, when it’s a hundred thousand here, ten thousand there, then seven in yet another place. But if you know the place, know the people, have been there so many times, when the news shows dead people who could have been your folks, numbers stop being numbers.
I’ve written two versions of a poem, one in English, the other in German, which you can see below (“It could have been you” and “falscher Ort, falsche Zeit”) to address the topic. They are somewhat similar but not just mere translations of one another.
I would like to dedicate them to the 39 people who died in the attacks, to all who were harmed and to their families.
These people are just a few, compared to the many who have died and still die in wars and their side-effects like terrorist attacks, and the number is even littler when you take into consideration all the people who starve or die from diseases that could be cured and many more reasons that needn’t be there.
Let us take this incident as a reason to be with them and their families in our minds and to think of how lucky we are that we weren’t there this time.
