Optimism In Birdsong By Ruth Cechova

The brightest hope manifests in the heart of darkness. When people must face hardship they use hope to endure, especially if they believe they have lost everything else. Having faith in something other than one’s self is necessary to survival in trying situations and resigning to a life without a greater purpose results in the loss of hope. If they don’t stand for anything, they risk losing everything, even if all that remains are their own lives.

For instance, faith in a better future can be essential motivation for survival. Ten-year-old Ruth Cechova, the author of “Birdsong,” a poem written in the “garrison town,” Terezin (“Theresienstadt: Establishment,” n.d.), conveys her feeling of optimism that a future of liberation will inevitably

exist for her fellow prisoners:
Hey, try to open up your heart
To beauty; go to the woods someday
And weave a wreath of memory there.
Then if the tears obscure your way
You'll know how wonderful it is
To be alive.

(11-16)

The future Cechova portrays is comparable to “greeting the dawning after night” (9), a metaphor that implies its inevitability, this acts as a motivating factor that enables her to cope with adversity. The belief that humanity would alter the course of the future played a key role in Cechova’s survival, while those who had a pessimistic view on their circumstances were more likely to perish because their lack of motivation lead them to perceive their future as bleak and despairing.

The belief that one must cope with adversity to either care for or see their loved ones again also motivates people to survive. In the Italian film Life is Beautiful, the protagonist, Guido, played by Roberto Benigni, prioritizes his son and wife’s welfare above his own life. Guido’s unconditional love was instrumental to his survival while working in the concentration camp’s anvil factory (Benigni). Although he wanted to give up, he recognized that his son’s survival was dependant on his own. Despite the fact that his sense of self-sacrifice seems to contradict the notion of self-preservation, Guido endured the atrocities of the concentration camp so he could find his wife and shield his son from the horrors of reality. If the circumstances had been different and Guido had no family to care for, he would have given into the overwhelming feeling of hopelessness and embraced death as an end to his

suffering.
Furthermore, the belief that through enduring difficult life circumstances one can ensure a better future for their children can play a vital role in survival.

Vietnamese refugee, Lan Nguyen, escaped in 1978 with her husband and six children following the capture of the capital, Saigon. In order to create the future they envisioned for their children, away from the limitations of living in a country in the aftermath of a war, Nguyen and her husband had to sacrifice their home and safety: “We left everything we knew behind to give our children a chance - to live to their fullest potential that we knew staying in Vietnam would not afford them” (Nguyen). A common theme of refugee stories is altruism, the selfless notion that their actions can better the lives of others. This is vital to preserving the belief that the adversity they face and sacrifices they make can have significant influence on the lives of their loved

ones.
However, the opposite also holds true, that those who lose their sense of faith in something greater than themselves are less likely to survive difficult situations, due to the close association between one’s faith and their will to live. In the novel Night, the character of Akiba Drummer, a formerly devout mystic, is a prime example of the notion that renouncing one’s faith is detrimental to his or her own survival: “Poor Akiba Drummer, if only he could have kept his faith in God, if only he could have considered this suffering a divine test... But as soon as he felt the first chinks in his faith, he lost all incentive to fight and opened the door to death. When the selection came, he was doomed from the start...” (Wiesel 77). Elie, despite his own waning belief in God, acknowledges that their faith is strongly associated with their sense of self-preservation. For Akiba Drummer, the loss of the only thing he had left, his faith, lead him to accept death in order to escape his suffering rather than facing the ongoing horrors of internment.
Consequently, a common theme appears when addressing those who have endured hardship, as well as an apparent difference in the first-person narratives of those who survived in contrast with the tales of those who did not. Those who survive will often mention the reason they were capable of enduring the adversity presented to them, such as unconditional love for their families or making a difference in the lives of others. Humans are innately predisposed to believe in something that brings meaning to life, to preserve the hope that eventually the night will end and the sun will rise through the darkness to greet a new dawn.