For you are a holy people, who belong to the LORD your God. Of all the people on earth, the LORD your God has chosen you to be his own special treasure. Deuteronomy 7:6
As a child I grew up in an area of the Twin Cities that had the highest concentration of Jewish Holocaust survivors. I remember through my parents of a lady who was married to one. I remembered that he was disabled and had the concentration camp number on him; the number that all who were sent to those camps received. Across the street was another Jewish family. They were much younger than the other family who had two boys and a daughter. I remember the oldest boy being picked on presumably because they Jew's. Our families had little in common for we attended the Lutheran church and they did not. I remember watching from my parents kitchen window whenever the Talmud Tora school bus would pick up them up to bring them for their Hebrew studies.
As I read the book by Helen Epstein, Children of the Holocaust, conversations with sons and daughters of survivors I began to see these Jewish neighbors through the lens of what it must have been like to be in a new country while grieving who families who perished n World war 11.
The stories that were shared with this author illustrated for me that no one can ever run from their trauma simply by moving the images, the pain, into the subconscious mind. This story are reminders for all of us of the importance of working through whatever pain we are having by talking to someone about it.
In the first chapter she shares her experiences of growing up in a family who experienced the atrocities under Hitler.
"Sometimes I thought I carried a terrible bomb. I had caught a glimpse of destruction. In school, when I had finished a test before time was up or was daydreaming on my way home, the safe world fell away and I saw things I know no little girl should see. Blood and shattered glass, piles of skeletons and blackened barb wire with bits flesh stuck to it the way flies stick to walls after they are swatted dead. Hills of suitcases, mountains of children's shoes. Whips,. pistols,boots, knives and needles. At night when my parents went out and my younger brother and I sat watching television, our room, our very lives seemed unsafe and unguarded. Burglars and murderers might enter our apartment at any time and catch us unprepared."
Helen went on and described her family tree, " Our family tree had been burnt to a stump. Whole branches, great networks of leaves had disappeared into the sky and ground....all that was left were the fading photographs that my father kept in a yellow envelop underneath his desk."
How many times has anyone of us who survive personal tragedy will look at our family tree and see the cut off branch of a loved one who once occupied it and wonder why this had to happen?
I wondered as I read these stories,"If I were living in Poland around the time of the Nazi invasion where would I be sent? Would SS Dr. Josef Mengele see me as weak and point me to the left and certain death, or to the right because of some unique skill I possessed?
The facts of the holocaust were clear. Just before the outbreak of World war 2 there were nearly 9 million Jews living in country villages and large metropolitan areas of Europe but 7 years later 90% of them had disappeared. The victims of the Nazi regime included: 5 million were political prisoners, dissidents, anti-Fascists of various nationalities, homosexuals, and gypsies, and those who were physically and emotionally impaired who became victims of Hitler's attempt to create the 'perfect race'.
Helen described this unresolved pain from her past as "the box that became a vault, collecting in darkness, always collecting pictures,words , my parents glances, becoming loaded with weight. It sank deeper as I grew older, so packed with undigested things that finally it became impossible to ignore. I knew the iron box would become impossible to ignore. I knew the iron box would some day have to be dredged up into the light, opened, its contents sorted out, but I had built such fortifications that it had become inaccessible."
How many of us when tragic events occur that are so painful try to bury those memories in a little box and push it deeper into our subconscious hoping it would be forgotten?
Before she embarked on the journey of interviewing Holocaust survivors she admitted, " I did not like talking about my parents or the war, because talk meant accepting that the war had happened and more than anything else in the world, I wished it had not.....the idea that my mother and father had been forced out of their homes and made to live like animals---worse than animals---was too shameful to admit."
Before her journey a friend of hers, another child of survivor over the years,had tried to talk her out of her plan to write about others like them, had told her that she was engaged in "stirring up shit to no purpose."
That response seems to be the universal idea that we have when processing the significant grief in out lives.
In one family she discovered that they did not believe in talking to the children about the war. Some of the kids in that family still don't know anything about it and their parents feel this is a good thing. They say, why should they find out? It has nothing to do with them.
Their children grew up feeling unloved by their parents because their father spent 16 hours every day working. just has he did when he was in the concentration camp. One older Jewish father said he worked hard and long hours so that he didn't have any time to dwell on the images from those concentration camp years, or the family he lost.
One holocaust survivor was described by the son has someone who still doesn't talk about the war...then he added 'he gets jumpy, very edgy, when my mother starts talking about it.'
One person she interviewed had questions about how a merciful, beneficent God could allow millions of innocent men, woman and children to perish. That was the question that never came up in the religious high school she attended. It was taboo. In Yeshiva, the religious high school she attended where the emphasis was on the rabbinic texts. If you spend all of your waking hours absorbed in them, you don't have any energy left worrying about troublesome questions.
"We never touched upon the Holocaust in yeshiva. No one was competent;everyone was afraid it could lead you into dangerous territory"
Despite the resistance she got from those around her she believed that she always wanted to talk about it with someone. "Talking about your experiences legitimizes it in a way. It lets you know that you are normal"
For all of us who experience tragedy don't we all want to be normal?
When the first plans for the rehabilitation of Europe's surviving Jews were outlined, the psychiatric aspect of the problem was overlooked entirely..".everyone engaged in directing the relief work thought solely in terms of material assistance, wrote Paul Friedman in the American journal of Psychiatry in 1949. It was thought that whatever problems existed were of a transitory nature that would resolve themselves once the Jewish people were resettled.
Isn't that what we do with modern day tragedies? We set up fundraising arms thinking that material is all they need to get back on their feet while neglecting the things of the soul? One only needs to look back to September 11, 2001 and the outpouring of monetary gifts that went to those most directly impacted by that date.
The inability for people to recover on a emotional level sets the stage for fear/flight/response to be forever ingrained in that person so that there is one continuous adrenaline rush whenever a perceived threat appears.
"One common problem in the survivors of the Holocaust", noted Israel psychiatrist Hillel Klein, " is a profound fear of getting to love someone. Having lost most, if not all of their early love objects, they now fear that to love anyone means to lose them and go through the pain all over again." He then noted, " since they have not been able to work through their losses, such a situation threatens with overwhelming depression."
What these researchers found was that as the survivors began to raise families, their problems did not work themselves out. On the contrary, as the children of survivors began to reach their teens coming closer to the age at which their parents were imprisoned, new problems appeared.
" We now see increasing numbers of children of survivors suffering from problems of depression and inhibition of their own function" reported Dr. Henry Krystal in Detroit. "This is a clear example of social pathology being transmitted to the next generation.
One person Helen Epstein interviewed was a Vietnam war veteran who was a child of Jewish Holocaust survivors. He said that he never knew his father like his friends knew theirs:
"I barely remember my father being alive.The only reason I remembered him because I use to have to beg him to play ball with me. Just to toss the ball back and forth!. He paused before continuing, " He used to just sit there and fall out. He'd sit there like a fixture,staring at nothing. He read the paper-he read The Forward in Yiddish-and then he's go to sleep. I use to yell at him, 'You're not my father! You never act like a father to me!'.
Secrets long kept sealed in our metal vaults buried deep within us have a tendency to come out in all kinds of ways. Only when we get the courage of unlocking those metal vaults buried deep and talking about the pain of those losses does true healing begin. I was reminded in our recent Life group of such a significant loss and the impact it had on this person many years later.
As I read this book I remembered the holocaust survivors from my old neighborhood and for the first time began began to see these people through the lens of trauma. The disability of the older gentlemen might had been the result of the constant beatings he received from the concentration camp guards and the sadness the result of memories long since buried.
Two thing are for certain after reading this book: (1) none of us will escape this life without tragedy at some point in our lives, (2) and all of us have this metal box where we place the stuff to painful to talk about. We have a choice. We can learn to bury our sorrow, lock and throw away the key to our losses, as they occur, or we can trust God that he knows how to help us to slowly bring the contents of our losses to the surface asking God to reveal to us a trusted listener to help us process those losses as they occur.
Every person Helen Epstein interviewed were better off sharing their story which resulted in true healing. Our stories were meant to be told. Lessons that God wants to use to help others new to he grief process.
Every immigrant group new to this country go through the grief process. Everything is new to them. Nothing is familiar; yet one thing Helen Epstein highlighted was the love for the outdoors her parents had with other holocaust survivors. It was the times when they would get in the car and drive to a scenic park somewhere in upstate New York where they would gather with other Jewish families when she would notice her father being filled with laughter, happiness and joy because the forest would remind him of home. She was most happiest when she saw new life in her parents. Sometimes we need to get out and enjoy the nature that God has given to us to help us breath in new life in the midst of grieving
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