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Oct. 2nd, 2012 12:18 pmI've had a lot of bedtime this last day. I'm over the worst of the virus, though I still have a mild fever and I still can't eat. This latter is not such a bad thing.
What's interesting is that specific conversations repeat when one is stuck in bed with a very high fever. The bit that hovered in my mind is the statement made to me that Holocaust survivors are healing. My mother's next door neighbour isn't. She carries with her still the memory that she went home after surviving concentration camps (she doesn't talk about life in camp except when she gives reasons to her doctor for refusing to diet - it's a dark hole in her life narrative) and only survived going home because she got to her ancestral place and saw the lights on and heard people laughing. A family had moved into her home and was living in the house they had stolen, using her family's possessions as if they were their own. She was weak and sick and still couldn't even face going to a hotel for a night, to report into the town council that she was alive as she was supposed to do and to get her identity papers and some money for food. She got on a train and went straight back to the refugee camp. The refugee camp was not a good place, but it was better than someone she knew sitting in her father's chair as if he had always owned it.
Her best friend stayed in Chelm overnight and was killed by locals who felt that it was wrong that any of their Jewish neighbours and childhood friends had survived.
What R always tells me is that she's one of the lucky ones. Being lucky isn't the same as healing. Surviving isn't the same as healing. Every time I see her, I can see the ways R is not healing. She makes jokes about her visits to the doctor, but she still bears the concentration camp burden of physical frailty and emotional trauma.
I've told R's story before, because I asked her if I could. For every story I can tell, however, I have a hundred I can't. For every survivor seeking public education (and maybe personal healing - some are doing this and some aren't), there are many more people who cannot. Their suffering hurts them, their family, their friends. Each time someone who dislikes Jews throws a stone, or a bomb, or sends a "You should have all died" letter, a person who was in a camp, whose relatives and friends were all murdered, who suffered so much that their old age is damaged beyond belief (mind and body) has to sort things out. I fully admit that the mild antisemitism I have suffered (and I include losing a job for being Jewish and having endured Molotov cocktails as mild, not just the "You have a Jewish accent" and other etc) has nothing on these peoples' lives. I fully admitted this in that conversation, for it's true.
I would be much happier today if a person I respect had not tried to get me to say that these souls are healing. Some are. Most aren't. And it hurts. These were the adults who were my honorary aunts and uncles when I was young: they're never numbers or history to me even when they hide those numbers they wear or don't talk about their own history. What I wish most is that I didn't have the PTSD, for I used to be able to explain these things in a way that communicated this civilly.
Conflux was wonderful - but that one conversation I regret.
What's interesting is that specific conversations repeat when one is stuck in bed with a very high fever. The bit that hovered in my mind is the statement made to me that Holocaust survivors are healing. My mother's next door neighbour isn't. She carries with her still the memory that she went home after surviving concentration camps (she doesn't talk about life in camp except when she gives reasons to her doctor for refusing to diet - it's a dark hole in her life narrative) and only survived going home because she got to her ancestral place and saw the lights on and heard people laughing. A family had moved into her home and was living in the house they had stolen, using her family's possessions as if they were their own. She was weak and sick and still couldn't even face going to a hotel for a night, to report into the town council that she was alive as she was supposed to do and to get her identity papers and some money for food. She got on a train and went straight back to the refugee camp. The refugee camp was not a good place, but it was better than someone she knew sitting in her father's chair as if he had always owned it.
Her best friend stayed in Chelm overnight and was killed by locals who felt that it was wrong that any of their Jewish neighbours and childhood friends had survived.
What R always tells me is that she's one of the lucky ones. Being lucky isn't the same as healing. Surviving isn't the same as healing. Every time I see her, I can see the ways R is not healing. She makes jokes about her visits to the doctor, but she still bears the concentration camp burden of physical frailty and emotional trauma.
I've told R's story before, because I asked her if I could. For every story I can tell, however, I have a hundred I can't. For every survivor seeking public education (and maybe personal healing - some are doing this and some aren't), there are many more people who cannot. Their suffering hurts them, their family, their friends. Each time someone who dislikes Jews throws a stone, or a bomb, or sends a "You should have all died" letter, a person who was in a camp, whose relatives and friends were all murdered, who suffered so much that their old age is damaged beyond belief (mind and body) has to sort things out. I fully admit that the mild antisemitism I have suffered (and I include losing a job for being Jewish and having endured Molotov cocktails as mild, not just the "You have a Jewish accent" and other etc) has nothing on these peoples' lives. I fully admitted this in that conversation, for it's true.
I would be much happier today if a person I respect had not tried to get me to say that these souls are healing. Some are. Most aren't. And it hurts. These were the adults who were my honorary aunts and uncles when I was young: they're never numbers or history to me even when they hide those numbers they wear or don't talk about their own history. What I wish most is that I didn't have the PTSD, for I used to be able to explain these things in a way that communicated this civilly.
Conflux was wonderful - but that one conversation I regret.