today is our last day in the city of Paris, and, appropriately i believe, we visited Per Lechez Cemetery. the tall, Gothic monuments stretched on as far as the eye could see, and there was a sort of eerie peace in the air, like everything was waiting.
we first passed by the monuments to the millions who died in the Holocaust; there was monuments for Alcatraz, Ravensbruck, and many others. passing by the enormous statues of skeletons, torture victims, and general monuments; i had a chill run down my spine. i can only imagine the horrors that these people must have suffered in the labor camps...and i know that my imagination can never conjure up the real thing.
the next thing we saw was the back wall of the cemetery. it looked like an ordinary wall...except for the large gold plaque in the middle of it. see, this was the wall where the last fighters of the revolution were lined up and shot. the revolutionaries had barricaded themselves in the cemetery,fighting with everything they had against their enemy. finally,the revolutionaries ammo ran out, and this is where they were taken. many people still pay tribute to the wall, honoring the memories of those lost to the battle.
there are many, many graves in the cemetery, and only a few that i can remember. but there are three that stand out the most... Oscar Wilde, Isadora Duncan, and Jim Morrison, to name a few of the famous people who are buried there. i also learned that many of the tombs are family tombs, and that the family members, once dead, would be stacked on top of one another to save money. another interesting fact is that the trees there get an extra boost from all of the rotting corpses...and that boost makes them grow tall and strong enough to break apart the concrete tombstones.
if nothing else...the cemetery has taught me to enjoy being alive and to live my life to the fullest. I'll look like them soon enough... :-)
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