Human Imagination Can Change the World
Throughout history, creative thinking has helped humans in trying times
Here’s a story about how imagination changes the world, even in the worst possible circumstances. It involves the French surrealist poet Robert Desnos.
Desnos was Jewish. During World War II, he went underground to fight for the Resistance. He was captured and sent to the concentration camps.
One day, along with many other men, Desnos is crowded onto the bed of one of the trucks that transports prisoners from the barracks. The men fully understand where they are going. The trucks always leave the barracks full and return empty. Their destination is the gas chambers and the ovens. No one in the truck bed speaks. The mood is resigned, stricken. Eyes lowered. Faces grim.
When the truck arrives, the prisoners slowly and silently descend, as if in a dream. The guards, normally full of jokes and banter, fall silent, unable to avoid catching the prisoners’ mood. But this almost religious silence is abruptly interrupted. One of the men in the line of prisoners suddenly, with great animation, jumps up, pivots, grabs the hand of the man behind him. Astonishingly, his nose almost touching the man’s hand, his body coiled tight with energy, he begins to read the man’s palm.
