Fading away

In 1947 it was calculated that there were about 900,000 Holocaust survivors living.  Now there are fewer than 190,000.  The numbers are reducing fast as the survivors themselves age.  We are losing their living history.  There are a number of survivor witnessing groups that are attempting to record the testimony of this dwindling number as quickly as possible and I fully understand the urgency around this. The clock is ticking.

This morning I watching a video clip of a woman named Alice Herz-Sommer, she is 106 years old and is the world's oldest survivor of the Holocaust.  Remarkably her mind is completely clear and even more remarkably, so is her heart.  I took real inspiration from watching the film of this little old lady, who in her heavily accented English, described her time in the concentration camp, Theresienstadt.  Alice reckoned that one of the things that kept her alive was music and she still sits at the piano and plays with great skill today.  I was particularly touched by the complete absence of resentment or hatred in this little woman.  She seems to have completely understood the concept of forgiveness and the idea that hatred that lives in your heart only poisons you.

I used to believe that forgiveness, true, genuine forgiveness was invented by the new age movement, having co-opted it from religious belief.  As I get older I experience the letting go and freedom that forgiveness brings, absent of religion or organised thought or any promise of release offered by so many new age teachers.  I am learning to trust my internal wise woman and also learning to listen to her.  When, as I did today, I experience a wave of sentimentality or sadness, I can hear it now.  I can begin to look at what is underneath those feelings.

Today, watching Alice talk about her past and reminisce about the role of music in her life, I very much missed my dad.  Th last time I saw him there was no real interaction between us, but now I see that that wasn't true.  As long as I could touch him and see him and remember in my mind and heart  who he was, there was interaction.  True that I can no longer ask him about his life, or even try to record his childhood pre-war history, but so what.  I have years of history with my father.  I have a wealth of wonderful, funny, touching times that I can recall. It's also true that I don't know where or when my dad went to school, or learned his trade.  I don't even really know the full story of how he met my mum, though I have a mythologised version that I carry around.  It's as if his life started for me when I started for him and maybe that's the only way it can be for any of us.

Last week I thought about how my life with Ralph seems to have been my whole life, that there was hardly anything before him and I guess that's how it has to be with my father.  He was never one to look back, to remember his life before the war.  He survived the war not  because of a passion for music, as Alice did, but because of a fiery burning passion for life.  My dad was always smiling. He never had to work at forgiving  because I believe he never spent time hating, it wasn't his way.

Yesterday my brother told me my father was a bit more responsive and seemed to be chattering away to himself in Polish.  He also laughed to himself.  When my brother asked him why he was laughing, he answered, 'it's funny'.  I liked hearing that.  Now that my father can't really relate to the world outside at all, he can still relate to himself.  The self that sustained him for so many years apparently still has the ability to amuse him.

These survivors, every last one of them, are extraordinary people. L'chaim.