On a trip to Romania, from which his then-impoverished Jewish family immigrated two generations ago, American writer Andrew Solomon had an epiphany:

One of the graves had an inscription memorializing the Solomons who had died “at the hands of Hitler”; many of those dead had names that occur elsewhere in our family. A memorial at the center of the burial ground commemorates the five thousand Jews who were taken from the area, never to return. I heard Aunt Rose’s voice saying, “We were lucky to get out of there.” I had hoped she might not be entirely right, that this European source of the family would be at least picturesque, that I’d have a surprising sense of identification with the place. I didn’t know how despondent it would make me to imagine being trapped in that life. I’ve reported from war zones and deprived societies for decades, but they have always been profoundly other, and this felt shockingly accessible—I could have been born here, and lived and died like this.

As we left, we stumbled on five black-cherry trees, tall at the edge of the cemetery, and we rushed over to pick the ripe fruit. As the red juice stained my hands, I wondered who in my family might have stood underneath these trees and relished the same taste, so sharp and so sweet. I thought how my own children would have scarfed down those cherries if they had been with me. And I suddenly had the revelation that my forebears had been children, too, in their day—that this place had been visited not only by old men with beards but by boys and girls who would have climbed the fruit trees to reap the plenty of their upper branches.

On the way out of town, I looked at the local peasants and thought that, if their forefathers had not burned down the houses of mine, mine wouldn’t have left. And I looked at what had happened to us in two generations, and looked at what hadn’t happened to them in two or three, and instead of feeling outraged by their history of aggression I felt privileged by it. Oppression sometimes benefits its victims more than its perpetrators. While those who are ravaging their neighbors’ lives exhaust their energy on that destruction, those whose lives are being shattered must expend their vigor on solutions—some of which can be exquisite. Hatred drove my family to the United States and its previously unimaginable freedoms.

This reminded me of Keith B. Richburg’s epiphany in the 1990s, covering the Rwanda genocide for the Washington Post. He wrote a 1998 memoir about how the horrifying reality of Africa shook him to the core, especially his identity as an African-American, and what he thought he knew about the world. In the prelude of the book, Richburg begins by recounting standing by a river in Tanzania, watching hacked-up bodies of Rwandans float by. He writes that as ashamed as he is to admit it, noticing how much the dead looked like him, his thought was: There but for the grace of God go I. 

More:

Sometime, maybe four hundred years ago, one of my ancestors was taken from his village, probably by a local chieftain.

He was shackled in leg irons, kept in a holding pen or a dark pit, possibly at Goree Island off the coast of Senegal. And then he was put in the crowded, filthy, hold of a ship for the long and treacherous voyage across the Atlantic to the New World.

Many slaves died on that voyage. But not my ancestor. Maybe it was because he was strong, maybe just stubborn, or maybe he had an irrepressible will to live. But he survived, and ended up in forced slavery working on plantations in the Caribbean.

Generations on down the line, one of his descendants was taken to South Carolina. Finally, a more recent descendant, my father, moved to Detroit to find a job in an auto plant during the Second World War.

And so it was that I came to be born in Detroit and that 35 years later, a black man born in white America, I was in Africa, birthplace of my ancestors, standing at the edge of a river not as an African but as an American journalist — a mere spectator — watching the bloated bodies of black Africans cascading over a waterfall. And that’s when I thought about how, if things had been different, I might have been one of them — or might have met some similarly anonymous fate in one of the countless ongoing civil wars or tribal clashes on this brutal continent. And so I thank God my ancestor survived that voyage.

…   Thank God my ancestor got out, because, now, I am not one of them.

In short, thank God that I am an American.

What he’s saying, unavoidably, is thank God my ancestor was stolen from Africa and enslaved, because if that hadn’t happened, I would be stuck in the unrelenting misery of Africa. And Solomon gives thanks for the poverty and anti-Semitic oppression that drove his ancestors from Romania, else he would still be there — or may never have existed at all, given what Hitler did to Romanian Jews.

The ironies of history can be extraordinarily painful to confront, and to contemplate. Solomon doesn’t celebrate anti-Semitism, nor does Richburg endorse the slave trade. But both have the moral courage to admit that because of those evils, they and their families not only survived, but prosper.