On the morning of October 18, 2000 I walked into a
five hundred year old cathedral in Zagreb. I had
no business being there because I am a Jew, but I
needed to talk with God. Other than the presence
of a few women, the old cathedral was empty, and
by the time I left my fear had lessened and I
sensed that I was about to enter a state of prayer
in action.
I was in
Zagreb with Ilona, the daughter of a member of the
Waffen SS, Gottfried, who was once with the Hitler
Youth movement, and Susan whose father survived
progrom atrocities in the Ukraine. My mother is
an Auschwitz survivor, which is a misnomer,
because liberation did not bring her freedom from
the horrors she suffered. The four of us
represented a group who, for the past seven years,
has been involved in attempts to heal Holocaust
history through dialogue with the other side.
Having suffered on both sides from the
consequences of "ethnic cleansing" we felt a
sacred obligation to extend ourselves to others.
We left
Zagreb that morning to travel to Sanski Most, a
small town in Bosnia ravaged by ethnic cleansing,
a euphemism for mass murder. We were asked to
join a dedicated group of people who worked in
these regions for three years to help Bosnians
overcome their war trauma. Paula Green, from
the Karuna Center for Peace Building, and Ann
Hoenig, from the Foundation for Community
Encouragement in Detroit, asked us to come to
Bosnia because they hoped that our presence would
send the Bosnians several messages; that it is
possible to dialogue with the "other side;" that
one can maintain one's dignity and still express
feelings publicly; that it is possible for a
second generation German to hold himself/herself
accountable; that a collective experience is
better healed in a group setting; and that there
is the possibility of healing in telling one's
story and having it witnessed by others.
As the
carriers of guilt and shame on the German side and
horrendous wounds on the Jewish side we can tell
Bosnians what might happen to their children if
they don't deal with their own trauma.
As our van
makes its way to Sanski Most, four hours from
Zagreb, I remember that when I was growing up in
Communist Romania, Yugoslavia was a symbol of
freedom.
We are
threatened with suffering from three
directions:
From our own body, which is doomed to decay
and dissolution
and which cannot even do without pain
and anxiety as
warning signals: from the external
world, which
may rage against us with overwhelming and
merciless
forces of destruction; and finally, from
relations to
other men. The suffering which comes from
this last
source is perhaps more painful to us than any
other.
(“Civilization and Its Discontents,” Freud)
As we approach
the region of Prijedor and Sanski Most there are
bullet-ridden empty houses and desolate yards.
Sanski Most is a small town dominated by a Muslim
Mosque with two minarets and a graceful bridge
over a river. As our van driver parks, someone in
the van tells us that "the man who just parked
his car next to us is looking for human bones."
Suddenly filled with fear, I want to run. Is this
is still possible fifty years after Auschwitz?
Sanski Most is thirty kilometers from the former
rape camps, and we learn that the town has no
books, movies, colleges, cars or jobs. We check
into the only hotel in town which is in serious
state of disrepair but to me familiar, communist
fare. Our driver offers to take us on a tour of
the neighboring villages, and on the way to
Prijedor he points to a structure and tells us
that people have been living in this school for
five years. Again I am struck by the force of the
polarities; the beauty of the countryside which
doesn't mask the horrors still whispering their
stories from the abandoned, destroyed houses. I
am overcome by my old distrust of the world and a
fleeting desire to escape it. But how, as a Jew,
can I argue about Anti-Semitism if I am not
prepared to help other minorities who are being
ethnically cleansed? I look around me and feel
demoralized and doubtful. Can I really matter
in the face of so much pain? Can I really help?
Can our tears and stories turn the Holocaust into
a three dimensional reality half a century later?
Ilona, Gottfried and Susan are all struck with the
same doubts and sense of helplessness.
The next
morning we find ourselves sitting around the room
with a group of Bosnian educators from the
region. The women are all well dressed and
dignified, and we learn that most of them are
Serbs while the men in the room are all Muslim.
Are we sitting across the room from wives of
perpetrators and the men who have escaped ethnic
cleansing? How can I tell the guilty from the
guiltless?
The two
facilitators have worked with this group of
educators for three years to train them in
conflict resolution. I look around the room and
wonder "what happened here?" Is it too obscene or
too recent to give it a voice? I am struck by the
appearance of normalcy covering the aftermath of
genocide. There is a feeling of woundedness in
the room and I register a shock to my system. Time
rolls backwards and I see my mother five years
after the war. The Bosnians on the other hand are
looking at their children fifty years after the
war. Can we transcend time and language barriers
to reach each other in our mutual grief? We are
two generations of genocide facing each other, and
we will all be changed by the encounter. Can my
spirit survive intact from this new onslaught?
The ghosts in
the room are louder than the living and I feel
overwhelmed in the face of so much unexpressed
anguish. They sit in silence and the room is
riddled with images. Nobody sheds a tear, frozen
by the brutality of their recent pain.
I feel
paralyzed with doubts. How do we make amends to
these people? After all, aren't we part of the
world who has abandoned them, who stood by and
watched their war on television? What can I say
to these people... That after Auschwitz we have
all become morally disabled?
After all, the
day of reckoning has never come for most Germans.
And oblivion has not come for my mother to offer
freedom from the persecution of her memories.
Time has not been the great healer for the
survivors of Nazi death camps.
They have written
and read volumes, made movies, told the stories,
yet the wounds are still there. Where is the
respite?
As for us, the
second generation, we are branded with our trauma
just as our parents live with numbers on their
arms. I felt emotionally homeless most of my
adult life and it was descending into my pain
rather than avoiding it that brought some measure
of healing. Can Ilona and Gottfried carry the
message for the Germans that the sins of the
parents are visited on the children? And their
children's children?
It is now
accepted wisdom that for victims of trauma
the way to
catharsis is through telling their story.
(Hoffman,
1994)
It is no small
matter to be a witness to another
person's life
story. By listening with compassion we
validate each
others' lives, make suffering meaningful
and help the
process of forgiving and healing take
place.
“Crossing to Avalon” (Bolen,1994)
I tell my
story, starting with my mother's deportation to
Auschwitz in a cattle train, losing her mother to
the gas chamber minutes after they arrive in
Auschwitz. I try to convey in words her futile
struggle to gain freedom from her trauma and my
own years lost to the task of healing. I talk
about my meeting the second generation Germans and
the miracle that healed my heart when I heard one
German say "I am so sorry for what our people did
to your people." I talk about my gratitude for
the extraordinary courage of a few Germans to
carry the collective legacy of shame and guilt.
When I talk
about my mother's travel to Auschwitz in a cattle
train without food or water, Gottfried walks out
of the room. Upon his return, he crumples into
his seat and his body is wracked with sobs. "I
am so ashamed, it is so difficult for me to listen
to these stories," he mutters when he can finally
talk. His tears and genuine pain add a new salve
to my wounds. Perhaps part of this voyage is a
continuation of the dialogue we started with each
other.
When Gottfried
tells his story, I learn that he was an
enthusiastic Hitler Youth. When at the end of the
war his commander announced "Hitler is dead, you
can go home now," Gottfried was only 15 years
old. The youths were instructed to remove any
sign that their clothes had been a Nazi
uniform.
Gottfried, this
courageous German, started reckoning with his own
conscience in his late sixties, five decades after
the war, surrounded by a nation of people who
prefer their legacy of silence and suppression.
And thus Gottfried, the former Hitler Youth,
modeled for the Bosnians how to deal with
responsibility by saying "I was there, I was part
of this, it was wrong, I am ashamed and I am
sorry."
Later on, one
of the women in the audience, called Nada, (I
learned later that she was Serb), said "I wish I
could remove all signs from my life that there had
been a war." I wonder what is it that she wants
to remove?
A young Muslim
girl, Yasmina, leaves in an ambulance because of a
heart problem. The strain of dealing with these
events is such that she becomes ill.
Before I left
California I attended a slide presentation on
Bosnia where the Air Force captain talked about
landmines planted at random in the countryside
with no maps to enable their removal. Triggered
by our stories, Yasmina's reaction to her internal
landmines is a metaphor for the country's
landmines. And yet, the deepest wounding, and
healing, only happen at personal level and the
Bosnian victims and perpetrators will have to deal
with their psychological landmines, lest they are
passed on to future generations.
Vahidim a young
Muslim, who has lost 36 relatives in the recent
massacre, and who lives in a village where nobody
is younger than sixty, approaches me to ask how
long have I been crying for my mother. I tell him
that I don't remember and he replies that he is
becoming afraid for the fate of his future
children.
When Ilona
tells her story I find out that there was no
mention of the Holocaust in her school in
Germany. She learned about it in her teens and
it created an abyss between her father and her.
She carried a sense of guilt until she met with
second generation survivors. That is when she
realized that she was not guilty for what happened
in the Holocaust but that she had a responsibility
to be a different kind of German than her father
had been.
Susan's father
was witness to progrom atrocities which killed his
siblings before his eyes, and by the time Susan
knew him "he was a sad, old man" burdened with
what he has seen. Vesna, our interpreter, tells
us that she had such a shock to her system from
our stories that she almost couldn't go on.
That evening we
tell our stories again to an audience in Sanski
Most, sitting around tables in a very large
restaurant. The room is so filled with smoke, it
is hard to breathe. Yet, after a few minutes, I
watch in astonishment as everyone stops smoking
and listens to us.
One man raises
his hand and asks, "At the end of World War II the
German criminals were brought to justice by an
International tribune. Why are our criminals
walking around free?" Why indeed? The four of us
look at each other feeling helpless. I remember
that the criminals of the Third Reich were not all
brought to justice. Most lived comfortable lives
while my mother had to bear her agonies every day
of her life. How are these people supposed to
heal seeing their perpetrators go about life as
though nothing happened?
That night I
try to sleep and my mind wanders back to the
journey which brought me here, when two years
earlier I traveled to Berlin to talk with
descendants of those responsible for my mother's
broken life.
With me in the
room were six other adult children of
concentration camp survivors and seven descendants
of the Nazi Regime. That they showed up and
willing to listen to us was miraculous enough.
But when a few people on the German side said "I
am sorry," that was the beginning of a new life
for me. No longer paralyzed by my trauma, I was
changing my identity as a victim and the German
identity as a perpetrator. The German willingness
to talk about their history, to listen to us, to
promise never to do it again, to support that
promise with bearing witness in public and
commitment to good deeds, liberated me to find my
own life.
Yet life in
Sanski Most insists on intruding into my
consciousness as people celebrate being alive with
rock and roll blasted until two in the morning
through a megaphone for the whole village to
hear. When I finally fall asleep, I dream of
Vahidim the young Muslim, and in my dream he is my
brother. At 6 am we are awakened by the same
megaphone but this time by Mufti prayers.
For the next
three days, whenever we go out to eat or buy fresh
fruit, the same question intrudes itself in my
mind with every man I pass in the street: are you
Muslim or Serb? Are you a rapist? Do you go to
church on Sunday and murder your neighbor on
Monday? Have we been divided into beasts,
bystanders and victims? What infernal impulses
are unleashed in a man when he feels justified to
slaughter his neighbor and betray his
humanity?
On Sunday,
Sanski Most shuts off the water and electricity.
Our circle widens to accommodate more men and
women from the surrounding villages. One man
begins to talk tentatively at first, and we learn
about the doctor who said to his mother "I have no
medicine for this pain." And his mother cried, "I
don't want to live anymore."
One teacher
talks about a little boy in her class who asked
her if they will find his daddy. She is wracked
with guilt because the day came when he said, "
you were right, we have found my daddy in a
grave."
Beautiful and
stylish Senka had lost her husband 8 years ago to
torture. To this day she has not seen him and
refuses to believe that he is dead, even though
torture and death were the fate of most Muslim
men. She doesn't know how to tell her children or
herself that her husband is dead.
The things that
have the most powerful effect upon
children do not
come from the conscious state of the
parents but
from the unconscious background.
C.G.Jung,
“Introduction to The Inner World of
Childhood”
(Wickes,1929)
How do we
tell her that everything suppressed by one
generation gets passed on to the next, that she
can only take care of her children by dealing with
her own trauma, that her children are better off
knowing the truth no matter what that truth is?
How do we convey to these people the silent sound
track of trauma of second generation that is the
biochemical and psychological inheritance from our
survivor parents, which become part of our cells
and which we live with every day and which will be
passed on to six generations?
Senka's being
radiates tragedy and hers are the only tears in
the room. I pray that her children will have an
easier time than I had.
What cannot be
talked about cannot also be put to
rest: and if it
is not, the wounds continue to fester
from generation
to generation. (Bettelheim)
The next
evening we tell our stories to the Prijedor
community. This is the former site of the worst
concentration camps of the recent war, and we
learn that 50,000 Muslims out of a population of
100,000 were exiled or murdered. These people
were neighbors one day, even married each other,
and overnight became enemies.
How can our
stories of dialogue with "the other side" make a
dent in the face of the enormity of this
devastation? I have never been faced with the
aftermath of war before. I have only see the
extinguished light in my mother's eyes, fifty
years later. One woman in the audience tells us
that her parents were killed in their own home and
she only recently returned to her community. It
was only when her Serb friend said to her "I am
sorry" that it was possible for her to be in the
room with her fellow Serbs again. One very
agitated man in the audience wanted the
international community to know that the Serbs
were "only defending themselves." From what?
The innocent babies who were murdered and women
who were raped?
A 15 year old
girl told us that she is tired of war. She
envisions a dreary future and she doesn't want to
hear any more war stories.
Nada, who could
be the wife of a camp commander, asks our panel
"how long before we can push it out?" I don't
know if she means pain, or guilt and shame. I
tell her that the trauma becomes so deeply lodged
that one cannot push it out, but one can work to
transform it inside oneself into something
meaningful and less destructive. I wonder if she
understands. Some of the educators, after
listening to our stories, vowed to start talking
to the children.
By the third
day my eyes are burning and almost shut from too
many tears. I cannot stop crying for the people
in the room, for my mother whom nobody helped five
years after Auschwitz. And because I feel sick to
my soul and betrayed in my humanity.
We leave
Sanski Most after three days to drive to
Sarajevo. The countryside is eerily peaceful and
the hills before we enter the city are littered
with new graves marked by white stones. Like
images from a recurring nightmare from which one
cannot awaken, there are signs of the recent war
everywhere.
In Sarajevo
once again we have clean rooms and hot water. In
the evening we tell our stories to another
audience. A journalist asks us to comment on the
possibility of their people speaking to each other
like the Germans and Jews have done. I tell her
that perhaps the fact that we were sitting in a
circle with their people less than a week ago
offers some hope for that possibility. My mother
will never hear "I am sorry" from one of the
German perpetrators, but I hold hope for the Serbs
and Muslims.
When we leave
there I feel despair for Bosnia, yet I am filled
with hope that we sat together with survivors of
genocide only five years after the war, which
would not have been possible in 1950.
A woman
from the Jewish Community Center tells Ilona that
she was very moved by the fact that we not only
work together but obviously love each other.
Sarajevo weaves
its romantic web with a City Hall of Moorish
architecture, the Turkish bazaar with Mosques and
Minarets and Eastern European medieval buildings.
Yet, only a few stones remain of a couple of
graceful bridges and a medieval stairway leading
up into the hills. Sarajevo reminds you at every
step that people were killing each other only five
years earlier. When we pass by a high school we
are jarred again into the reality of Bosnia. The
golden plaques outside the school's wall are a
grim reminder that Muslim teachers were murdered
in 1992 or 1993.
What is it
that Jung said about being attuned to the soul of
the city, its beauty and the ruthlessness? Only a
mere blink in the eye of time, five years ago,
people were forced to live like rats, scavenging
for food, living in fear that they might not be
alive the next day. They witnessed the slaughter
of Srebenica where 8,000 innocents were killed
under the protection of United Nations. Over
10,000 individuals including children were killed
in Sarajevo alone. Why did I assume that because
of Auschwitz this would never happen again? What
happens to the human spirit when it lapses into
such brutality? What is the use of striving to be
spiritual when we failed so miserably at being
human?
Three days
after we left Sanski Most, we learned that the
group of educators were able to speak about their
suffering and to acknowledge their people's part
in the genocide. Project Djakom had the first
major breakthrough in three years, and it seems
the four of us acted as a catalyst to give the
participants courage. Perhaps we were the drop in
the ocean necessary to help it spill over. I pray
that these people will awaken and realize that war
makes us all losers so that their unhealed sins
and sorrows will not be visited upon their
children. I hope these people who sat around that
room for three days will use their wounds not only
to heal but also to become a guiding light for
their community.
As Croatia Air
lifts in the air and we leave Sarajevo, I remember
what Gandhi said when he was asked what he thought
of Western Civilization: "I think it would be a
great idea." I wonder what happened to that
specie, extinct before it ever begun, Civilized
Man? I wonder what is it really that makes us
human? Because based on five thousand years
evidence, it isn't our biological status. Nor is
it our intelligence, accomplishments or degrees,
or affluence, titles or sophistication. What is
it then? What makes us human if it isn't that we
treat each other with kindness and love? And
perhaps a reverence for life.
And if we know
trees by their fruit, do we not judge our fellow
human beings by their actions? Has World War ll
raised our threshold of tolerance to evil? Has
Nazi Germany bequeathed us a readier acceptance of
mass murder? Has the Holocaust not taught us that
when we trespass against another we diminish and
injure our own humanity?
I came to
Bosnia partially to find answers to what happened
to my mother, to look genocide in the face. I am
leaving with more questions and still no answers.
Being faced with the second generation Germans
was difficult, but the boundaries were clear.
Their parents and grandparents were perpetrators
and ours were almost destroyed. As difficult as
our dialogue had been, I left Germany with a sense
of hope. Leaving Bosnia was different, because
Bosnia meant that history, in spite of our
assumptions and hopes, repeated itself. How do I
avoid annihilation by cynicism?
Perhaps the
groups who desire to live in an "ethnically
cleansed" world should try virtual reality? What
would that look like? A universe populated by
Germans? Serbs? Perhaps a nightmare where the
world would have one flower, one type of dog, and
all humans were blond and blue-eyed.
I remember a
poem of an ancient legend according to which once
in a millennium a mortal is given the power of the
gods to release or keep confined the spirits of
evil that live imprisoned in the darkness of the
ocean's depth.
A sapient
legend from the Orient
Tells us that
the spirits of evil power
lie imprisoned
in the ocean's night,
sealed in by
the hand of an anxious god
till once in a
millennium luck might grant
the decision to
a single fisherman
who could set
free those bounds if he did not
promptly fling
back his find into the sea
That fate had
been decreed for my father
It once lay
within the strength of his will
to plunge the
daemon back into its durance
But my father
broke away the seal,
he did not see
the rising breath of evil
he let the
daemon soar into the world"
Moabit Sonnets
(Haushofer,1978)
If Auschwitz
was the twilight, the dark night of humanity's
soul, and has unleashed evil into the world, how
do we return it to a place where it can lie
imprisoned for eternity?
In “Playing for
Time” Arthur Miller wrote "we have learned
nothing new about human nature and the news is not
good." Had I not gone to Sanski Most and
Prijedor, I could have still maintained some of my
innocence. But I was there and I cannot unknow
what I know that genocide is still possible fifty
years after Auschwitz, and the Holocaust is over
only if each of us has learned its lessons. There
is a great risk in our ignoring what is happening
and allowing the evil of genocide to seep even
deeper into our souls. In a world plagued by
people who are willing to set aside their humanity
and slaughter their neighbor, we are all being
called to action. That is our only hope to
fulfill the promise survivors made to a
vacationing God the day they left Auschwitz:
Never again!
In his book,
"The Passion of the Western Mind," Richard Tarnas
suggests that the history of Western Civilization
is a tragic story of a fall from unity between
human, nature and a spiritual dimension and he
goes on to predict: "the highest truth, Nietzsche
prophesied, was being born within man through the
self-creating power of the will.... But to achieve
this birth man would have to grow beyond himself
so fundamentally that his present limited self
would be destroyed: "What is great in man is that
he is a bridge and not a goal...Man is something
that must be overcome."
In a talk he
gave in Kansas City in 1998, Tarnas comments: " I
think that it will take a fundamental moment of
remorse - and this is absolutely essential to the
death-rebirth experience - a long moment of
remorse, a sustained weeping and grief. It will
be a grief of the masculine for the feminine; of
men for women; of adults for what has happened to
children; of the West for what has happened to
every other part of the world; of Christianity for
Jews; of whites for people of color; of the
wealthy for the poor; of human beings for animals
and all other forms of life. It will take a
fundamental metanoia, a self-overcoming, a radical
sacrifice to make this transition..... And in the
end it will also require grace."
REFERENCES
Shinoda Bolen,
J. (1994) Crossing to Avalon, New York, Harper
Collins.
Freud, S.
(1929), Civilization and its Discontents, In J.
Strachey (Ed), The standard edition of the
complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud,
London: Hogarth.
Haushofer, A.
(1978) Moabit Sonnets, New York: Norton.
Hoffman, E.
(1994) The New York Times, Book Review.
Rothschild, M.
(2000) Transforming our Legacies: Heroic Journeys
for Children of Holocaust Survivors and Nazi
Perpetrators: Journal of Humanistic Psychology, 40
(3) p.43.
Tarnas, R.
(1991) The Passion of the Western Mind, Ballantine,
New York.
Wickes, F.
(1927) The Inner World of Childhood, Introduction
by C.G. Jung, New York: Appleton-Century.
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