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"Someday,
after we have mastered the winds, the waves, the
tides, and gravity, we will harness for God the
energies of Love; and then, for the second time in
the history of the world, man will have discovered
fire." - Teilhard de Chardin
In 1944 Ana was twenty-three years old and lived
in a small town in Transylvania. Beautiful, her
dark hair framed white skin and blue eyes. During
the month of June, when fruit trees are in bloom
and fragrant, Ana, her parents and one brother
were taken at gun point to a cattle train.
Destination; Auschwitz. After a three day voyage
without toilet facilities, food or water, locked
in with a woman who had lost her mind from the
ordeal, they arrived in Auschwitz. What follows
are excerpts from Ana's diary:
The train
entered a forest and the siren emitted a piercing
sound which seemed interminable... Now we knew we
were in Poland in a place called Auschwitz.As soon
as the train stopped, German soldiers came to the
doors and yelled "out dirty swine." Then they
separated us into men and women, the ones who were
young and strong and the old, sick and children.
None of our prayers helped us, people were
separated
from those they loved and it was a pitiful
sight...
My mother was
only fifty years old but she wore a shawl which
made her seem much older. She asked a German
soldier to let her stay with me, but he yelled at
her to move and pushed her so hard she almost
fell.
... My mother
walked away looking back at me as long as she
could with tears in her eyes. That was the last
time I saw her...
To this day, Ana is still haunted by her mother's
eyes. After liberation she returned home and in
the rubble of her former life there was not one
picture of her mother. Ana is my mother. She lives
with the horrors of Auschwitz. She cannot unlearn
what she knows about human nature. She has spent
the rest of her life caring more about her dead
than the living.
I was born
shortly after Ana returned from deportation and I
am named after my grandmother. Unfortunately,
Auschwitz didn't just happen to my mother; it
happened to my brother and me and it is now passed
on to my niece.
I grew up with
concentration camp nightmares; torn between a
mother to whom my joy was too much stimulation and
had to be squelched, and the rest of the world to
whom the vast reservoir of my pain was too
discomforting.
In 1991 I set out
to translate my mother's diary; I was ready to
face the demons I had avoided for twenty years.
When I learned about my mother's separation from
my grandmother in Auschwitz, I heard the internal
voice that had run my life: "You don't deserve to
live."
I understood that
I had mastered skills of survival and knew little
about living. After a lifetime of building walls
around myself, I started the journey to reclaim my
life. After I joined the Shoah Foundation I heard
close to a thousand Holocaust stories. The horrors
became real in survivors eyes and their tears.
What was not said was expressed in their faces.
Mel Suhd, an American Jew who walked into Dachau
as a liberator in 1945, reports that to this day
he can still smell the stench of death. Colonel
Hayes who liberated Buchenwald and who later was
aide-de-camp to an officer in charge of Nazi
medical experiments documentation, had seen the
carnage of war and thought he knew all about it.
But nothing prepared him for the horrors he found
in the spring of 1945 in Buchenwald. What haunts
him to this day, the one aspect of the Holocaust
impossible to convey in books or movies, is the
smell of the dead and dying. Yet Germans who lived
in close vicinity to these camps claim they didn't
smell or see anything.
Judge Einhorn,
who prosecuted Nazi war criminals in the 70's for
OSI (Office of Special Investigations), has never
sat across the room from one Nazi war criminal who
showed any remorse for their actions. The deeper I
delved into various aspects of the Holocaust, the
more overwhelmed I became and the less I
understood the insanity of my world. In 1992 I
attended my first Jewish German Dialogue in Los
Angeles. What I knew about Germans previously was
this: "we didn't smell it, didn't see it, didn't
do it and perhaps it didn't happen." Oh yes, and
"My father was a good man." I showed up for my
first encounter with Germans and Austrians
inspired by archeologist' John Stokes' words:
"what you don't speak to, you don't understand,
what you don't understand you fear, and what you
fear you try to destroy." I was relieved to hear
the key speaker say
that we were there "not to forgive the
unforgivable but to address it." Over the years it
became easier to spend a few hours in the same
room with descendants of perpetrators. I was
particularly comfortable with Germans who were
willing to acknowledge that something terrible was
done by their people and who felt badly about it.
Guided by hope and encouraged by intimate
conversations with close German friends, I joined
the 1998, "One by One" dialogue conference in
Berlin. I sensed that such encounters are pivotal
points in the lives of people with visceral bonds
to the Holocaust.
Our group was
lodged in the Adam von Trott house, formerly the
property of a Jewish family. How did it become the
Adam von Trott Haus and what happened to the
Jewish Family? The house was in Wannsee - one mile
away from the Wansee Conference house where the
"Final Solution" was planned. Our dialogue started
on November 9, the anniversary of Kristallnacht -
the beginning of pillage, destruction and murder.
We sat around in a circle, seven descendants of
Holocaust survivors and seven descendants of
perpetrators. Among the children of survivors was
the Polish descendant of a concentration camp
survivor - a reminder that Hitler's insanity was
not aimed only at Jews. With us were two
facilitators on the perpetrators' side and two
facilitators on the survivors' side. I noticed
apprehension on the German faces. Here I was at
last. On German soil, face to face with the
descendants of my grandparents murderers. Can
these people ever live down their legacy? What
will it take?
Will they ever be
able to stand up and say "I am proud to be
German?" Or will they forever be branded with
shame as if they too had numbers tattooed on their
arms? This nation, which before the eyes of the
entire world has perpetrated the most evil
massacre, has only seven people to carry its
burden? And if they are innocent, whom do I hold
accountable for what happened to my mother?
Someone suggested that perhaps we don't yet have
an adequate language for the process we embarked
on:
making sense of our history and preventing it from
claiming our future. "I came to Germany to cry,"
was my answer to the question "Why are you here?"
That evening, after a few intense hours of
dialogue, we joined a group of Berliners marching
in commemoration of Kristallnacht. The cold and
the rain were eerily appropriate to the occasion.
"Imagine doing
this in several degrees below zero without shoes
or adequate clothing," said my friend John, son of
Hungarian survivors, when I commented on the
weather. After the march, we listened to a speaker
who asked us to remember the Jewish culture that
was destroyed and the voices who were
extinguished. Someone recited Kaddish, the Jewish
prayer for the dead, and I heard the names of
extermination camps mixed with the sacred words.
Tears overwhelmed
me at the realization that names of extermination
camps are permanently branded on our culture.
"In sacred space
an individual can suffer what he always needed to,
and lacked the courage." Carl G. Jung.
The second day,
seated in a circle, we told our personal stories.
I showed my mother's picture and read from her
journal. When I reached the place where my
grandmother walks to the gas chamber with tears in
her eyes, talking became impossible.
I wanted to
collapse on the floor and cry. A silent scream of
despair rang inside me and at that moment
something flew from me and invaded the room.
Rabbi Abraham
Heschel wrote that "the blood of the innocent
cries forever." Perhaps descendants of the Third
Reich will reclaim their dignity through this act
of compassion, hearing the cries of our
grandparents through us.
Gradually, other
stories emerged; Jewish stories of loss, despair
and pain. Growing up orphaned while our parents
were still alive. Protecting our parents from
their pain while there was nobody around to
protect us. Creating extended families out of our
friends. German stories of pushing against a
collective conspiracy of silence to get to an
unbearable truth.
I learned that in
Germany one must have permission from the spouse
of the perpetrator to do research into a parent's
Nazi past. A system designed to perpetuate the
legacy of silence and the subsequent collective
sickness...
Ruth, a German
woman with constant tears in her eyes was torn
between grandparents who risked their lives to
help a Jewish couple survive the war, and a father
who enthusiastically embraced the Nazi ideology.
Sometimes in the
middle of the week, our group visited the Wannsee
Conference House. I walked into the conference
room alone. A table stood solitary in the middle
of the room with yellow documents protected by an
acrylic cover.
On the wall were
the portraits of those who were responsible for
the decision to annihilate the Jewish race. I
looked in their eyes and every one of them seemed
insane. The evil generated from that room sent a
shiver down my spine. On Tuesday I walked into the
local pharmacy and there was an elegant man in his
seventies. My first reaction was to recoil. My
mind reeled with: "Who are you, where were you in
1940? Do you have Jewish blood on your hands?"
That encounter reminded me that I was in Germany,
the land of mass murderers who are still alive and
well while my mother....
During the fourth
day of the Dialogue, Martina, one of the German
facilitators said "I am so sorry for what our
parents did to your people." At that moment,
something in my heart opened in gratitude and
trust. Perhaps in the miracle of hearing "I am
sorry" from a German I knew the other reason I
came to Germany; emotional restitution;
Wiedergutmachung of another order.
Later that day,
Ilona, daughter of an SS man, said "I am so
sorry..." Natalie another daughter of the Third
Reich remarked that it is the first time she said
those words in German. The language of Goethe and
Heine. And horrors, as my mother calls it. And so
the innocent made amends for the guilty... Because
amends had to be made and the guilty cannot or
will not say "I am sorry."
The Hawaian
Kahunas can teach us about the power of making
amends. They know that someone who is sick is only
the conduit for the dysfunction of the village.
They understand that the person will only get well
when amends are made and that forgiveness must be
earned.
The tribe gets
together, they place the sick person in the middle
and they start to say "I am sorry" to each other
until the sick person is healed. Their premise is
that every human being has three Selves: The
Higher Self which is connected to God, the Middle
Self - the ego, and the lower Self which represent
the unconscious. According to the Kahunas when
someone hurts someone else, unless amends are
made, the Higher Self disconnects from God and the
person no longer gets the goodness from life. The
Kahunas understand that making amends is an
important step to healing.
As the stories
emerged, the room became smaller, filled with
despair, shame and guilt.
Thursday night I met Helga whose father is
personally responsible for the death of 40,000
Jews in White Russia. A wave of relief washed over
me from hearing the truth about her father's
deeds. Nothing in my life has prepared me for the
pain that radiated from Helga's eyes and being,
yet she carries it with courage and dignity. I
don't want Helga to suffer, but the pain in her
eyes reassured me that I am not alone: on the
perpetrators' side, a few people also carry the
pain for what happened to my people.
I was surprised by what I said to this courageous
woman and others who expressed remorse: "I am so
sorry for the burden your parents and grandparents
left you." At that moment I felt compassion for
the pain these people carried, not just for their
families but also for the majority of Germans.
The last day came
with a very emotional end of the dialogue; we had
emerged from our grandparents' ashes and the
Thousand Year Reich legacy of shame, a community
of people miraculously bonded.
A healing had
occurred in the retelling of one's tale in front
of witnesses. Seated in a sacred circle for five
days we shared compassion, mutual understanding
and yes, love.
The honest
expression of our truth had set us freer from our
burdens. For five days we had confronted the
Holocaust together rather than each other, and
like memorial candles we carried our history.
What happened in
that room at the Adam von Trott Haus is the
closest to a religious experience I have ever had.
Our honest
sharing became a birth canal through which one
could be reborn in a healthier form.
For isn't this
how God had intended for us to treat each other?
Isn't this how a human being was meant to be
extend oneself in love and compassion to another
no matter how great the abyss? Judaism teaches us
that when you save one soul you save the world
entire.
Divided by the
death of six million, and bound by mutual pain, we
faced each other and struggled against the power
of evil to claim the future. We had the generosity
of spirit to set our pain aside to receive the
other. And perhaps in doing this we each saved a
soul: Our own.
In this age of
anti-heroes every one of us is on our own heroic
path; to change our relationship to history and
prevent its recurrence. I had a vision of the ever
expanding circle of such dialogues of
reconciliation...
A daughter of an
SS man said that guilt occupies so much space, it
leaves no room for a sense of responsibility and
action. I remembered the German poet Ursula Duba's
words in a conversation we had on the phone: "the
challenge of Second Generation Germans is to not
mistake the futility of the guilt with the
necessary expression of sorrow."
Sunday - my last
day in Berlin. I went to Sachsenhausen
concentration camp with eleven people, Germans and
Jews.
I heard somewhere
that one can only approach the music festival in
Salzburg on their knees. In front of that gate, I
felt one should only enter a concentration camp on
their knees, and in absolute humility before the
magnitude of human suffering.
I walked through
the first gate alone. I wanted to hear the voices
of the ghosts. That morning I wore the warmest
winter clothing I own. Beyond the first gate,
inside the camp, an icy, sinister cold penetrated
through every layer of clothing and chilled me.
There was an invisible wind that could be felt but
not seen.
It was as though
a fifth season had descended into the place. There
were no birds in sight and I was surprised to see
trees.
Wolfgang, our
tour guide, an energetic man in his eighties, who
spent three years in Sachsenhausen for the crime
of dating a Jewish woman, told us that even in the
heart of summer it is cold in Sachsenhausen.
Once we walked
through the gate marked "Arbeit Macht Frei" it
became colder yet. I felt alienated from the rest
of the human race. I wanted to say a prayer at the
crematorium for my three grandparents murdered in
Auschwitz. We marched there in silence and
approached a statue built on what used to be the
crematorium. Before the visceral evidence of
genocide I felt crushed. Our group huddled
together and several people read prayers in German
and English. I followed with the 23rd Psalm: "The
Lord is my shepherd... I shall not want... Though
I walk through the Valley of the Shadow of Death,
I shall fear no Evil... For Thou art with me..."
During the
prayers a tangible warmth surrounded us. In a
place from whence everything holy departed long
ago, the invocation of God caused Arnold, son of
survivors, to collapse in tears in my arms. I
started sobbing.
Ruth, the
daughter of an SS man, put her arms around us and
cried with us. Or maybe for us. We became a
tangled mass of hair, bodies and tears, Jews and
Germans...
After boarding a number of trains to return to
Berlin, I was left alone with three German women.
By then a healing had taken place: we were no
longer Jews and Germans, but a group of people
sick with despair over what happened fifty years
ago. Were we not the conduit for a diseased
society which also needs to heal?
Perhaps such
dialogues, like an alchemical process, can
transmute the guilt and anger through recognition
and understanding into something meaningful and
productive, and prevent our legacies from being
passed on like a defective gene to the next
generation.
As a specie we
have a long way to go, but this is a beginning.
Because being human is not a given. Our biological
status does not necessarily grant us anything, as
illustrated by our history. We are work in
progress and must struggle every waking moment
against primitive impulses in ourselves and
others.
I spent the last
six years moving away from the abyss that almost
claimed my life. To meet the descendants of those
responsible for the devastation of my family I had
gone back to the edge of that abyss. I learned
that when a calamity such as the Holocaust is
unleashed upon the human race, we are all losers.
My world has
never felt safe, but after Berlin some measure of
fear has left me. In writing her memoirs my mother
uses the collective "we." The Holocaust was a
collective wound inflicted by Germans on the Jews,
and perhaps some profound level of healing can
only happen between Jews and Germans...
Healing happens
when responsibility is taken, remorse shown and
repair work done. And these can be more
effectively done with "the other side." And even
if we never come to a place where everyone loves
everyone else, I would like to live in a world
where everyone tolerates everyone else.
It seems the
paradox of self-renewal is that it always brings a
person into contact with others and the event that
activates self-renewal is empathy from another
person. I am still in awe of the power of three
words: "I am sorry."
A person's
capacity to understand the meaning of their
experience, process it and metabolize it into
something productive is another key to the miracle
of healing. Through an honest dialogue there is
the possibility of redemption for Germans and
emotional reparations for the Jews.
By becoming a
mirror of the long-range consequences of Nazism,
the Dialogue creates understanding, empathy and
healing.
In confronting
the consequences of war together with "the
others," I felt like a pioneer charting an unknown
territory into what is still utopia to the rest of
the world: living in peace with one another...
POSTSCRIPT
Igne Natura Renovatur Integra - Nature is entirely
renewed by fire! This fire holds a multiple
meaning (1) it is the fire which will destroy a
world dominated by evil; (2) it is the interior
mystical fire; this was translated as : "You are
yourself the philosopher's stone; your own heart
is the prime material which must be transmuted
into pure gold."
From a text on alchemy
For most of us death is an experience we know we
shall inevitably come across some day. My mother
absorbed the terror of death on every level of her
being, every day, for months.
Nothing of the
magnitude of the horrors of Auschwitz will come
into my mother's life to wash away the pain and
losses. For her, the war did not end with
liberation. For my mother, as for other survivors,
the Holocaust was the "gift" that keeps on giving.
I am confronted with that reality every time I
look into my mother's eyes.
Existential angst
which afflicts every thinking person is a concrete
reality for me; I could not afford the luxury to
ask the questions.. Evil versus good, was part of
my daily oxygen and I had to find the answers.
Yet, I have
learned that I cannot save my mother from
Auschwitz and that giving up my life will not
restore hers.
Proximity to the abyss has not only traumatized my
mother, but also created a myth of epic
proportions for my brother and me. How can anyone
compete with Auschwitz other than to live a heroic
path no matter how challenging?
How can I create
meaning out of the ashes of my murdered relatives,
my mother's traumatized life and my own years lost
to the task of healing? What is my destiny, since
it cannot be that of my mother. What is my story?
How am I supposed to mythologize my life?
And if the
Holocaust was my problem, dealing with it became
my path to liberation. The healing, which I sought
for years, happened during the ONE BY ONE dialogue
in Berlin. I left much of my pain and despair in
that room where Jews and Germans afflicted with
the trauma of war met each other at soul level.
Who I used to be, the person living out my
mother's experience, died during the dialogue
process in Berlin and I was freed in ways I am
only now beginning to perceive.
There I actually
experienced that the solution to stereotyping is
to know each person one by one, to look into their
eyes, to receive their story and to respect the
sacredness of their being. The solution to hate is
love. These are some of the insights I recently
shared with Berlin high school students.
In one school a handsome young boy wondered why we
gathered to discuss these events because "they are
so far removed from me they feel like a dream." I
asked him if he has ever been called a Nazi
outside Germany and he said "Yes."
I suggested that
we are still tied by a steel umbilical chord to
these events as evidenced by our presence in that
room and the emotional charge we seem to have. In
the end, this belligerent young man came up to me,
shook my hand and thanked me for sharing my story
with his class.
In another
school, a young girl asked me what I thought of
Neo Nazis. I told her that everything suppressed
in one generation will inevitably explode in the
next. One girl remarked on the difference it made
to hear a story about a real death camp survivor,
rather than read about statistics in a book. One
young man asked me how much longer will the trauma
of the Holocaust linger on. I told him that on the
survivor side it will be passed on to six
generations. And since the day of reckoning has
never come to the majority of perpetrators, it
will be passed on to many more generations as
well.
A classmate asked if it can be stopped.
I suggested that
perhaps through honest dialogue, second and third
generation can metabolize the pain and guilt into
responsibility and healing and thus stop the
transmission of trauma. One young girl in a
classroom in former East Berlin asked about ways
for her to convey to the Jews in America that she
wants to make restitution for what happened. In
one school, a teacher challenged me from the back
of the classroom: "do you mean that it is that
easy, you are willing to forgive and forget?" I
replied that I was in no position to forgive since
no crime was committed directly against me, and
the Germans I met during the dialogue were
innocent. Before I walked into the classrooms, I
asked the teachers if these meetings were
mandatory and I was told that the students chose
to be there.
During our end of
the week meeting with members of One by One we
invited high school students to join us and
several showed up. Two young girls huddled
together and one of them mentioned that she was
Polish and didn't know what she was doing there
"this has nothing to do with me."
A hostile young
woman in her late twenties, said that "Germany was
in economic crisis at the time." I replied that I
hoped, we come to a point in the evolution of our
species, when we can solve economic crisis without
killling eleven million people. She then demanded
that we put this history behind and move on with
our lives.
I suggested to
her that wishing it was over will not make it so;
that the paradox of healing and separating from
the Holocaust is in knowing one's personal
connection to this history.
At the end of the
meeting, after we all had the chance to tell our
stories, the same Polish teenager, told us with
tears in her eyes that "I cannot believe you are
all sitting here side by side, Jews and Germans,
it is so moving to me..."
"The solutions to problems may be found in the
middle of them." Albert Einstein The Holocaust
"climate" in Germany ranges from guilt to a sense
of responsibility. Guilt abundant in the third
generation seems to generate either paralysis or
else anger and resentment. At the other extreme
are the Germans who met us in dialogue, who choose
responsibility over guilt. The productive kind of
responsibility which engenders healing and
positive changes.
What is the
process that transmutes the futility of guilt into
a sense of responsibility? How can we help this
generation of Germans become a different
generation than their grandparents? How can they
separate from their history if this culture does
not encourage or reward a personal connection to
that history?
Perhaps through
these dialogues with "the other side."
Or perhaps
creating a safe forum where they can express their
anger at a guilt they carry for something that is
so removed it feels like a dream, and yet one they
cannot be free of. Up in the hills of Malibu,
California, is the Serra Retreat ran by Franciscan
monks. When they learned of our dialogues with
descendants of the Third Reich, the monks said:
"you are doing God's work."
In a paper
written for Psychoanalytic Psychology, 1984, Yael
Danieli PH.D., comments about Freud who said that
Copernicus gave humanity the first blow, the
cosmological blow, when humankind learned that it
was not the center of the universe. Darwin gave
the biological blow when he said that humanity's
superiority to the animal kingdom is questionable.
Freud claims that he gave the psychological blow
by showing that we have limits to our
consciousness. Nazi Germany gave humanity the
fourth, the ethical blow, by shattering our naive
belief that the world we live in is a place in
which human life is of value, to be protected and
respected.
I had the
extraordinary good fortune to spend time with
Germans who are helping me heal my own shattered
belief in the basic goodness of human
nature.Towards the end of the week when our
speaking in Berlin high-schools was completed, we
all went out for lunch. Gottfried, the former
Hitler youth, was sitting on my left and so was
Inge, who is second generation. I thanked them
both for their courage to do work that goes
against their culture and in many cases, families
and friends. Tears started running and I didn't
try to stop them. Inge and Gottfried both grabbed
my hand.
I felt our
connection and their love and at that moment
gratitude infused me like a prayer: "though I walk
through the valley of the shadow of death, I shall
fear no evil, for thou art with me..." my fellow
Germans, the second generation righetous and
responsible gentiles who walk with us and who
carry their burden of the Holocaust...
It is at moments
like this that I know, in a way that nothing else
can tell me, God exists.
REFERENCES
Bar-On, D. Fall (1989) Holocaust Perpetrators And
Their Children, A Paradoxical Morality. Journal of
Humanistic Psychology,
Emme,M. Gerut,R. Busse,W. Lapidus,J. Spring 1999,
vol.39 #2 Descendants of the Holocaust Meet
Descendants of the Third Reich; The One By One
Dialogue Group Concept. Journal of Humanistic
Psychology
Descendants of the Holocaust and the Nazi Regime;
Journeys of Transformation - working title of book
in process of being published by Puffin Foundation
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