Griffin Our Secret

“Now that you have started reading this essay, you and I are now connected by a web of connections.” This is what Susan Griffin, author of “Our Secret”, a chapter taken from Griffin’s insightful book A Chorus of Stones, most likely would have declared. Griffin argues that, “all of us, especially all of us who read her essay - are part of a complex web of connections” (265). She implies that people are part of a “larger matrix” and have a “common past” (265). The “common past” between people that Griffin asserts can be proved by examining the unique paragraphs in the chapter. In “Our Secret”, Griffin recounts her own life story to the life stories of others, including Heinrich Himmler, Heinz, a painter, a friend, Holocaust survivors, a homosexual

Griffin had almost personally witnessed the murdering of a homosexual man in Maine, and Himmler’s orders had killed Heinz. Before the two men were murdered, they both were in anguish over their lovers. These two homosexual men also share the same pasts in a way because they had similar lives of being homosexual, losing a lover, and being murdered. Although it was Himmler’s command and notion to capture and kill thousands of Jews and homosexuals, he “did not like to watch the suffering of his own prisoners” (256). This juxtaposition is powerful because it meant that he did not wish to witness the consequences of his decisions and refused to accept responsibility for the deaths that he had caused. This is yet another similarity that Himmler has with Griffin as she had bullied another girl, however disowned her acts afterwards as if she had not done anything. Griffin accordingly proceeds to write about a Holocaust survivor who had watched and even joined in a circle of kids who beat her friend because he was Jewish. Griffin, Himmler, and the Holocaust survivor are part of a “web of connections”, connected to every other person in the world that have also tried to disown their actions. This confirms Griffin’s idea that people do indeed share a “common past”; in Griffin, Himmler, and survivor’s case, this would be bullying other