Pins and needles

I'm the opposite of a hoarder, almost to a fault.  Because clutter bothers me, I'm quick, sometimes far too quick, to purge, recycle, donate, trash, or otherwise dispose of things that don't appear useful at the moment.  This seldom gets me into trouble, but I do feel guilty (often) about having such a surfeit of stuff that it's necessary, or even possible, to get rid of things.  It's easy to forget that the world of plenty, in which an item broken or trashed can always be replaced, is not guaranteed to continue for any length of time.

My preoccupation with the gulag was preceded by a childhood preoccupation with the Holocaust (I was a sunny and upbeat child,for sure.)  In one of my favorite books, I Am Rosemarie, a Jewish female inmate at Westerbork is accused by an SS guard of having stolen three needles while sweeping the SS mess hall.  As punishment, he orders that the entire women's camp will go unfed for three days.  Another woman pleads with him: She will find and return three needles if he'll only allow them their very meager rations.


Three needles.  Big deal, right?  But even the barest necessities were in extremely short supply in wartime Europe, and the women of Westerbork have less than the barest necessities.  Stripped of almost all of their possessions, most of them have nothing but the clothes that cling in tatters to their bodies.  Maybe one woman, dragged from her bed at three in the morning, had the foresight to grab a needle and thread before she was thrown into the Gestapo wagon, but three?  Impossible.  And the commandant, knowing perfectly well that they'd have an easier time finding one needle in all of the haystacks in Europe than in the barracks at Westerbork, agrees, but he ups the ante: TEN needles.  If the women can find and bring him ten needles by the end of the day, he'll feed them.  If not, then the already dangerously malnourished camp will go without food for three days.

******

Just a few days ago, I found a needle with a little bit of thread on the floor.  I was vacuuming the family room, on the opposite end of the house from where I keep my sewing box.  I almost never sew.  An occasional ripped seam or missing button is about the limit of my skill and inclination to sew, and I didn't remember having done even that much within recent memory.  Still, there was the needle.

I have a whole box full of sewing stuff.  I also have a little travel sewing kit in my overnight bag.  If the Gestapo were to demand ten needles by the end of the day, I could give them 20 without even looking hard.  I was tempted to just throw this one away, rather than to walk ALL THE WAY TO THE OTHER SIDE OF THE HOUSE to put the stray needle back in my sewing box.   I kept the needle, though, returning it to its proper place in the box.  I also kept the safety pins that I found on my son's dresser, carefully distributing them among my various purses (see? so many purses that I need to spread the safety pin wealth around.)  Those safety pins could be urgently needed one day, and I'll be prepared. 

*******

Miraculously, the women  managed to find ten needles, and a tiny piece of paper to pin them to.  They paid the bounty and were spared from starvation for a few more days.  I Am Rosemarie is a novel, but it was based on Marietta Moskin's actual wartime experience, and the needle story might have been true.  Who knows when pins and needles might make the difference between life and death?