Repression

  She made an appointment to discuss problems she was having with her children.  I proceeded to ask questions to get a grip on the nature of the problems.  I was particularly focused on asking about roles and the dynamics of power at play in the relationships.  We talked and as time went on, she became more and more agitated until the poor woman cried out hysterically. 

She sobbed.  Finally, she came out with the disturbing revelation that she had been abused as a child.  Some thirty years later nightmarish visons of the sexual abuse came flooding back.  Memories of shoch and revulsions washed over her until this woman was a helpless mass.

 

Freud called it repression.  “By carrying what is unconscious on into what is conscious, we lift the repressions.”  But what is simply too painful to feel with now we squirrel away deep into the recesses of our mind so that we can go on living.

 

 

The Shoah was a crime so enormous in the mind of our people that few spoke of it for ten years after the Nazi defeat.  Utterances about the unfathomable pain were few.  Collectively, the incomprehensible was repressed so that we could go on living.

 

Elie Wiesel’s personal testimony, Night, was essentially the first detailed experience of a survivor came a decade after the Holocaust.  Until then survivors had great difficulty in finding their voice to convey an experience so horrific.  And the world was not prepared to hear their testimony either.  It took a long time to convince ourselves that humanity might be worthy of that name.

 

At that time, we dismissed the broken souls that returned to Poland in 1945, crippled in body and spirit.  What else does a survivor do but try to return to his roots and pick up the threads of his life where they were abruptly cut short?  Some came to reclaim what had been stolen from them, others to attempt to regain a semblance of an ordinary life after Auschwitz.

 

On July 4, 1946, mobs of Poles raced through the streets of Kielce in search of survivors to rid themselves of the Jews that had the temerity to return to their homes and reclaim what the residents had stolen.  Carrying guns, ropes, knives they attacked the Jewish worn and beaten stragglers.  Sparing no one forty-three lay dead by the end of the day and many seriously wounded.

 

My pilgrimage to Poland.

For me, coming to this place was an act of confirmation of my deepest psychological fears.  There was a carefully thought-out and viciously executed plan to exterminate every Jew from every city, town and village in Europe.  Having lost members of my extended family, whose names and lives will never be known, as well as being a potential victim is no small weight to bear.

 

One of the most incredible aspects to seeing the plains of destruction is the striking fact that businesses were opened for the specific and sole purpose of killing.  The complex called Auschwitz was designed for murder.  The evil ones used poison gas, bullets, burning, starvation, beating to death, hanging, crucifying, vivisecting…

 

Truly horrifying was the single picture of a mother clutching her baby as she walked to the gas chamber.  One wonders, what this mother was singing to her child to calm her fears?  What prayer passed her lips when her little one was wrenched from the land of the living?  If there was a time when God should have given up on His creations in utter frustration at our evil machinations it was then.

 

‘Terrified,’ describes the look on the face of the young girl as she lies on the earth, naked.  Her mother comes to her side to give comfort and reassure her she us not alone.  But the expression.  No, it is not terrified.  It looks more like confusion, amazement.  Her mouth hangs open.  The expression pleading, “What is happening here?  It is not human.  It cannot be real.”

 

There was one barrack filled with hair.  Some were braided, others with a ponytail.  Long flowing locks of golden hair shorn from the body.  Thousands of lives were betrayed by that room.  Some hair was woven into fabric, and some cut off to simply further dehumanize the victims, the Jews.  All that remains of ten of thousands of lives is this mass of hair thrown haphazardly into massive piles while the bodies were erased.

 

One expects to hear the voices of the dead rise.  Passing through the Concentration Camp (really an awful misuse of language as they were murder factories not concentration camps) I expected to hear anguished screams of the dead penetrate the thick air.  But there were no sounds.  Only quiet.

 

There are no words in these places of utter horror.  There are no phrases that capture the sense of such gross violations of all that is sacred, only a pervasive awareness of silence and despair.

 

We said out prayers.  They were of no comfort.  We lit candles to the memory of the dead.  It was symbolic.  Then we wept.  A dozen rabbis, pious and learned cried at this place of darkness.