Incredibly, after so many years and so much therapy and investigation, I am still so influenced by my parents' history. It really is an inescapable fact that what my parents experienced during the war will shade and colour my life forever. As much as I try to escape this fact, as much as I make feeble efforts to live in the here and now, my Holocaust history is here to stay.
Even though it may seem odd, on some levels I value this legacy and even value the horror that goes with it. It has made me a better person than I might have been. I am very concerned with living in a world where people value each other for who they are and what they bring to the table rather than any diverse arbitrary characteristic like religion, colour, race, etc. It means that the work I do has enormous meaning and true importance in helping me to re-create my world as a safe and nurturing place. When I teach acceptance and welcome of difference I feel that I fully understand the cost of not living in that way, of not valuing differences. I have seen some of the result.
In almost every therapy session I've had all my neuroses (and there have been many) have come back to the historical damage that my parents suffered. All my fears, anxieties and negative thinking can be directly or indirectly traced back to those experiences. Sometimes I get really angry at this. It feels like I can't even have an original trauma of my own. The last time I was in therapy, when my therapist said that all my fears could be traced back to the Holocaust effect, I quit therapy. What was the point? If it all came down to history and its huge impact, what difference did it make to me that I understood this?
It does make a difference. I see that I don't have to live at the mercy of history. It is important that I know it and it is even more important that I acknowledge the negative impact this has had on me, but ultimately I get to choose whether or not I live as the next generation's victim of Nazi persecution. Important point - I get to choose.
I do not choose to live in defeat. I recognise that my depressions and my enormous Jewish guilt go with the birthright I have inherited, but I have also inherited an incredibly rich heritage. My parents taught me to speak Yiddish,a language of such wonderful expressiveness that I wish more people spoke it. They made me understand courage in the face of uncertainty and doing things in spite of being frightened. I often stop and remember my mother, this little woman, looking scared and unsure, before she got on a plane, walked into a room of strangers or had to complain to the bank. She would feel all those fears and you could see it in her eyes and she always pulled herself up and did what was needed. My dad never even acknowledged his fear. If I were to ask him he would certainly deny feeling any fear and yet, sometimes when his guard was down, I could see the vulnerasbility in him. I found and still find this remarkably touching.
It is almost impossible to express the way I feel about my parents. I feel enormous sadness for their loss of family. I feel enormous grief for how much pain they went through and I also feel real pride for who they became. They overcame all the madness they experienced. They picked themselves up and carried on with their lives in a way that I'm not sure, if tested, I could do.
Actually, I am sure that I could do the same. They taught me well. That survivor reflex is in-built and works just fine. I can and do live in a way that is courageous. I have overcome some pretty rotten times and survived, not just intact, but better than ever. I feel enormous gratitude to these two little Jews who took on the world post-1945 and succeeded in winning. They taught me this and for some reason, today, I feel very sentimental and very close to both my parents.
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