This last Saturday, we staged a long-overdue cleaning of Carrie’s closet.
We have lived in our home for nearly 38 years, and over time things accumulate. Almost nothing in that closet is just clothing. They are memories as much as material. And memories are hard to throw away. There is a sense of finality to it. Over years, carefully preserved, the closet became almost impenetrable.
The work was hard, physically and emotionally. Nearly five decades of marriage had produced a bewildering quantity of shoes, each tied to a time in our lives. Hard to discard. Still, they had to go.
More than 100 boxes were pulled out and assessed. What to keep. What to donate. What was too worn. In the end, about 25 pairs went to donation. Roughly 30 others, used beyond saving, had to be discarded.
I smashed the boxes for recycling, gathered the loose shoes, carried them outside, lifted the trash bin lid, and dumped them in.
They did not land neatly, as they had lived for decades in Carrie’s carefully ordered closet.
Heels caught sideways. Soles faced upward. Laces tangled. Mismatched. Random. Unpaired.
And there they were. So many shoes. So much living consumed. Now lifeless, piled in the trash.
Staring down into that bin, my stomach dropped with reflex memory.
If you have ever seen the photographs, stood in the museums, or absorbed the history, you know exactly what a pile of shoes summons. Jewish shoes from the pogroms. Shoes taken before executions. Shoes piled after lives were stripped away, stacked, burned, buried, erased.
Shoes left behind at massacre sites.
Shoes removed before bullets.
Shoes that survived when people did not.
The images came instantly. Black-and-white photographs from Eastern Europe. Auschwitz-Birkenau. Treblinka. Sobibor. Belzec. Shoes heaped against brick walls. Shoes filling rooms. Shoes cataloged and stored because even in industrial murder nothing was wasted. Leather had value. Lives did not.
I thought of Babi Yar, outside Kyiv, where tens of thousands of Jews were marched to the edge of a ravine, ordered to undress, and shot. Bodies fell in layers. Earth was shoveled over them. Clothing and shoes were left behind, gathered, trampled, looted, forgotten. Mute proof that people had stood there only moments earlier, breathing.
I thought of shoes buried under bombed apartment buildings. Shoes burned inside cities reduced to ash. Shoes belonging to children who never outgrew them. Shoes belonging to elders who never walked home again.
This is where the mind goes when you are aware of our horrific, not-so-distant past. Not because you want it to. Because history put it there.
I stood longer than necessary, unsettled by how easily ordinary life can recreate the visual language of atrocity.
That same week, Carrie and I were also building jigsaw puzzles.
We are at the age when preserving cognitive ability is no longer theoretical. So out come the puzzles. Countless pieces spread across the table. At first, it is pure chaos. Random fragments of color. False leads everywhere.
Slowly, after hours and days of effort, order emerges. Borders form. Images reveal themselves. Something constructive appears from all that randomness, organized by patience and care.
It took days to build those puzzles.
Clearing the table took seconds.
It takes far longer to build something meaningful than to destroy it.
That is not just a puzzle lesson. It is history.
After World War II, the world lay in ruins. Sixty million people dead. Cities flattened. Families erased. Europe would take decades to recover. Preserving peace required immense effort and constant vigilance.
The leaders who built the postwar world did not act out of optimism. They acted out of memory.
They had seen the shoes pile up.
The United Nations was built by people who remembered mass graves. NATO was built by people who remembered burned cities and piled belongings. These institutions were not dreams. They were safeguards, assembled deliberately by leaders who understood how fragile order is and how easily it can be undone.
They were complex international puzzles built by survivors. Enormous effort to assemble. Always vulnerable to neglect.
Now, two or three generations later, that memory has faded for too many people.
Our own American administration treats these institutions as inconveniences or bargaining chips, openly questioning alliance commitments and reducing shared security to a transactional exercise. History is waved away. Restraint is mocked.
We are playing with fire fueled by historical amnesia. What was once grounded in shared memory of sacrifice is reframed as a might-makes-right, zero-sum world.
Anyone who thinks we’re safely beyond history should look at Ukraine, or Gaza, or anywhere war once again reduces civilian life to rubble and remnants. The names change. The images do not.
Shoes piled in a trash bin are what forgetting looks like.
Complex puzzles wiped clean in seconds are what impatience looks like.
Adults who remember better have a responsibility to say so, clearly and without apology. NATO and the United Nations must be honored and strengthened, not because they are perfect, but because the alternatives are already known.
We have seen what that looks like.
It looks like piles of shoes, silent and random, asking where the people went and how everything went so wrong again.
Gary Horton is chairman of the College of the Canyons Foundation board. His “Full Speed to Port!” has appeared in The Signal since 2006. The opinions expressed in his column do not necessarily reflect the opinions of The Signal or its editorial board.
