Tag: Auschwitz

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My Happiest Day, by Gillian

I
thought I might begin with some really icky remark such as, every day is My
Happiest Day, but I just couldn’t bring myself to do it! Equally, I
couldn’t begin to pick out my very happiest days, never mind one single day. I
have been blessed, and the vast majority of my days have been happy, though
with some, inevitably, more so than others.
But,
on giving the topic some serious thought, I decided that I owe the presence of
this multitude of Happy Days to the few bad ones. They were the days which
taught me humility and compassion and, above all, gratitude; the very gratitude
which has given me so many Happy Days.
I
could never describe the day I spent visiting Auschwitz as a Happy Day, but I
will always be grateful for it. The shock and horror of the awful place, with its
indescribably dreadful memories, afforded me huge gratitude for the time and
place in which I live my own life of peace and tranquility; a peace brought
about not by denying the evils of the past, and, alas, the present in too many
other places, but by acknowledging how unbelievably fortunate I have been, and
continue to be, in my own life.
The
days my parents died were most certainly not Happy Days, but their deaths, and
the depths of my loss, brought it home to me, perhaps really for the first
time, how much I loved them and how grateful I am to them for the start they
gave me in this wonderful life. Barely a day goes by when I don’t think of one
or both of them with a love so strong that it still catches me by surprise.
A
few years ago a blood clot found its way into my lung and couldn’t find its way
out again. As I lay in the hospital bed with oxygen tubes in my nose and blood
thinner I.V. in my arm, I was feeling a bit sorry for myself. Poor me! Why me?
Then I recalled that a blood clot in her lung was what had finally killed my
hundred-year-old ex-mother-in-law. I remembered a TV interview with tennis
legend Serena Williams in which she talked of being ‘on her death bed’ with a
clot in her lung. It hit me; I was lucky to be alive! In a nanosecond I went
from being sad and sorry to being oh so very grateful to be alive. A miserable
day was suddenly a Happy Day.
Of
course, the bad days that end up creating the good, don’t have to be huge
dramas. Small incidents can have much the same effects. A good, longtime,
friend of ours died a couple of years ago. Barb was a lifelong Cubs fan, and it
hit me last week how sad it is that she is not around to revel in her team’s
first grab at glory in over a hundred years. But, remembering the many Happy
Days Betsy and I shared with her and her partner over the decades, my gratitude
for them, both on my own behalf and that of Barb, relegated baseball to a mere
speck of dust on the reality of life.
Poor
Stephen, suffering all his current health problems, offered in an e-mail that
he was grateful he was not in pain.
Right
there is the secret of Happy Days; gratitude. Gratitude for everything that is.
I
am so in thrall to gratitude that I am endlessly grateful for it.
And
that’s the last I shall say about gratitude, for which I am sure you will all
be very grateful.
© 17 Nov 2016 
About
the Author 
I was born and
raised in England. After graduation from college there, I moved to the U.S.
and, having discovered Colorado, never left. I have lived in the Denver-Boulder
area since 1965, working for 30-years at IBM. I married, raised four
stepchildren, then got divorced after finally, in my forties, accepting myself
as a lesbian. I have been with my wonderful partner Betsy for thirty-years.
We have been married since 2013.
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Moving, by Gillian

The Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines the adjective as
“having a strong emotional effect: causing feelings of sadness or
sympathy.” So what is it within us, we humans, that draws us to stories or
places or events which we find moving? I know that is true for myself. I also
know the memories of such places or events, whether I have purposely involved
myself or simply stumbled into them, way outlive many other memories.
In high school I went to France with three other girls. It
was the first time any of us had been out of Britain and I’m sure we saw it as
some wild adventure. We stayed in the picturesque town of Annecy, and from the
warm glow which accompanies thoughts of it, I’m sure we had a good time there,
though any details escape me. This is supported by a few faded old photos of
happy, giggling, girls. But I remember only one thing. Our train, heading
south-east from Calais through rich farmland, suddenly entered fields growing
nothing but crosses; small white crosses which in my memory numbered in the
thousands, stretching to the horizon and continuing for endless miles. They
reside so solidly in my mind that I can feel the swaying of the train and hear
the clickety-clack of the wheels on the rails as I write. Even as a silly
giggly schoolgirl I recognized the crosses as commemorating the dead of the
First World War, while France still reeled from the Second. They moved me to
tears. They are as clear in my mind as if it were yesterday.
Years ago, I have little idea when it would have been, I was
for some reason in Washington D.C. with time on my hands and went to see the
Vietnam Memorial Wall. With almost 60,000 names, the gold lettering seemed to
go on forever, like those white crosses. The weather was windy and wet and
there were few people there. I became mesmerized by one old woman who stood,
the rain mixing with her tears, silently caressing each letter of one name. Her
wrinkled old fingers gently traced the name from beginning to end and back from
end to beginning, over and over and over. I couldn’t stop watching. I wanted
badly to put my arms around her but could not intrude on her obvious grief.
Whose name was it? She seemed pretty old for it to be her son. Grandson?
Granddaughter? Why was she here all alone? My heart felt that it would break for
her.
I remember nothing else of that visit to D.C. I don’t even
know why I was there though I suspect a business trip. But I have never
forgotten those worn old fingers slowly moving over the cold wet stone.
Shortly after I retired, I found myself in a volunteer job in
Hungary for a few weeks. I resolved not to leave without visiting Auschwitz in
neighboring Poland, and so one weekend took the overnight train from Budapest
to Krakau, to spend a day which was well beyond moving; harrowing,
heartbreaking, horrifying. After some time at Auschwitz, having reached my
saturation point of the evil of that dreadful place, I returned to Krakau in a
cab shared with four others. The five of us stood silently on the cobbled
street, watching the cab rattle away. It was almost as if we huddled together
searching for comfort from what we so recently had seen and felt. There seemed
nothing to say. Eventually we began to introduce ourselves – and a motley crew
we were. There was a Jewish woman, about my age, from Wisconsin, two young
Japanese men who, as far as I ever discovered, spoke not one word of any other
language, and an even younger man who literally spoke not one word at all, so I
never knew what country he was from or what language he would have spoken, had
he spoken. Still we seemed to have some compelling need to stick together. One
of the Japanese men gestured across the street. There was a cinema, showing,
rather shockingly I somehow felt, Schindler’s List. He turned
questioningly to the rest of us and we all nodded yes in silent agreement. What
strange impulse led us to do that? It was as if our current state of numb
misery was not enough; we needed more. After the movie we performed a strange,
hesitant, kind of loosely formed group hug, and I returned to Budapest on the
overnight train after one of the strangest days of my life. But I can still
recall every detail of that day, while most of my time in Hungary recedes into
misty muddled memory. 
Betsy and I spent the whole month of September 2015 on a 5,000-mile
road trip to and from the east coast. We stayed in so many different places and
did so many completely different things that it seems, looking back, like
several mini-vacations all rolled into one. Some things were scheduled and
planned, some were simply spontaneous. Driving back home through Pennsylvania,
Betsy spotted a tiny red square on the map. Beside it, in miniscule red
letters, were the words, Flight 93 Crash Site Memorial. Although we were in Pennsylvania,
we hadn’t given it a thought. I’m not sure we even knew there was such a thing.
Without hesitation we agreed the small detour was worth it, and took off across
back roads through rolling farmland.
The Memorial is beautifully, very tastefully, done. 

There’s a long black granite walkway
following the flight path, which comes to an end overlooking another pathway
(but you cannot walk on this one) mown through the long grass and bushes of
that infamous field. This ends at a boulder placed there to mark the impact
spot. All very simple but oh so effective.

It moves you to tears and also to
shades of the terror those passengers must have felt. There is something magic
about it that almost moves you right into that plane with them. At least that’s
what it did for me.

And after all that is why we visit places like that isn’t it?
To feel. If we don’t feel moved, then why go?
But, back to the original question I asked myself, why?
Why do I need to be moved to sorrow and sadness by monuments to death and
destruction? Since I decided to write on the topic, I’ve been thinking a lot
about it and I decided that for me it accomplishes several things.
Gratitude. I simply feel enormous, completely selfish,
gratitude. It was not me. I was not there. Nor were my loved ones: not on that,
or any other, doomed flight, not in the Twin Towers, nor the jungles of Vietnam
dodging snipers’ bullets, nor any school or shopping mall mass shootings, nor
in the Asian tsunami. It revives and strengthens that everyday gratitude I
should feel for the blessed life I have lived, and continue to live.
Balance. We need the yin and the yang, that balance of
negative and positive, in our lives; the ups and downs. Without bad, we are
less able to appreciate good. I have been so fortunate, that I think I have to
indulge in collective sorrows to keep my balance; to really feel just
how good my life is.
Connection. In feeling the pain of others, I am connected to
them. Your pain is my pain. We are members of the same tribe. At bottom we are
all tribal beings, and in sharing, no matter how remotely, minimally, the pain
and terror of Auschwitz, I keep myself connected; in the tribe.
So it’s not that I get some sick twisted voyeuristic pleasure
from being moved to tears by others’ pain. 
It’s simply that I need it.
Nicolas Sparks in, At
First Site, says, “The emotion that can break your
heart is sometimes the very one that heals it…”
I think that describes perfectly
my need for being moved to tears. It keeps my heart healthy and strong when
otherwise it might be weakened by a life too lucky.
© 2 Nov
2015 
About the Author 
I
was born and raised in England. After graduation from college there, I moved to
the U.S. and, having discovered Colorado, never left. I have lived in the
Denver-Boulder area since 1965, working for 30-years at IBM. I married, raised
four stepchildren, then got divorced after finally, in my forties, accepting
myself as a lesbian. I have been with
my wonderful partner Betsy for thirty-years. We have been married since 2013.
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Lonely Places, by Gillian

The
recent hundred-year anniversary of the beginning of WW1 started me thinking
about how war, above any other single cause, creates lonely places of the soul.
After all, the very essence of the armed services is to nullify that; to create
a sense of belonging and total commitment to your military comrades. To a
considerable extent, I’m sure it succeeds. But at the same time it still leaves
ample room for lonely places. Did that man hanging on the barbed wire of no
man’s land in agony, screaming for one of his buddies to shoot him, feel less
alone and lonely in his terrible circumstances simply because he had
buddies? I cannot imagine so. Did that 
tail gunner of the Second World War, huddling cold and frightened in his
rear turret, not feel impossible alone?
But,
sadly, it is not just the combatants who inhabit such lonely places. It is
also, very often, the survivors, and certainly the people who love the ones who
died or returned as shattered pieces of their former selves, to occupy their
own lonely places. We only have to hear that someone is a Vietnam Vet to
immediately conjure up a vision, alas all too frequently correct, of someone
with  …. well, let’s just say, a
vulnerable psyche. The estimate of total American Vietnam Vet suicides is
currently about 100,000; approaching double the number of Americans killed
during the twenty-some years of that seemingly endless, fruitless, war. Right
there are 100,000 vacated lonely places. And of course it’s not just the
veterans of that war who inhabit places so lonely that eventually they have to
take the only way out they can find. The U.S. right now suffers an average of
22 Veteran suicides each day, most of the younger ones having returned
from Iraq or Afghanistan with battered bodies accompanied by memories dark
enough to extinguish the light in their eyes, and their souls. 22 more lonely
places available every day, and no shortage of new tenants.
World
War 1, was a terrible war that was supposed to end all wars and instead gave
birth to the next, already half grown. Whole villages became lonely places.
They had lost an entire generation of men in two minutes “going over the
top,”, leaving only women, old men, and children, to struggle on. Children
dying before their parents is not the natural order of things, and creates
empty spaces so tight that they can squeeze the real life from those held in
their grip, leaving only empty shells to carry on. Consider that awful story of
the Sullivans from Waterloo, Iowa; all five sons died in action when their
light cruiser, USS Juneau, was sunk, (incidentally, one week after I was born,)
on November 13th, 1942. How on earth did their parents and only sister cope
with that one?
Several
years ago I spent some weeks in Hungary. A Jewish friend in Denver had given me
the address of her cousin in Budapest, and I arranged a visit. This poor woman
had lost her husband and their only daughter, thirteen at the time, in
Auschwitz, but somehow survived, herself. She showed me the numbers on her arm,
and talked of nothing but her child, proudly, sadly, showing me photos of this
shyly smiling young girl. I had never met a Concentration Camp survivor before,
nor anyone who had lost their family in one. I felt physically sick but bravely
sat with her for two hours, hearing every nightmare of this family’s holocaust
as if it had just happened the week before. That was how she talked of it, and
I’m sure that’s how it felt to her. She had not lived since then, but simply
drifted on through that huge empty place of the lonely soul, going through the
motions.
One
of my own, personal, lonely places, and I suspect most of us have many of them
we can topple into at any unexpected moment, is the one I can get sucked into
when I find myself forced to confront Man’s constant inhumanity to Man. It’s
not only war as such, but any of the endless violence thrust upon us by
nations, religions, and ideologies. On 9/11/2001 I sat, along with most
Americans and half the world, with my eyes gazing at the TV, somehow mentally
and physically unable to detach myself. The one horror which burned itself into
my brain, out of that entire day of horror, was two people who jumped, holding
hands, from the hundred-and-somethingth floor, to certain death below. I wish
the TV channel had not shown it, but it did. I wish I hadn’t seen it, but I
did. It recurs in my protesting memory, and tosses me into my own lonely space,
even as I involuntarily contemplate theirs. Can you be anywhere but in a lonely
space when you decide to opt for the quick clean death ahead rather than the
slow, painful, dirty one fast encroaching from behind? How much comfort did you
get from the warmth, the perhaps firm grip, of that other hand? Did these two
people, a man and a woman, know each other? Were they friends? Workmates? Or
passing strangers? I have no doubt I could find the answers on the Web, but I
don’t want to know. Those two share my lonely place way too much as it is. They
estimate about 200 people jumped that day, but the only other image that stayed
with me, though not to revisit as often as the hand-holding couple, was a woman
alone, holding down her skirt as she fell. I felt an alarming bubble of
hysterical laughter and tears rising in me, but in the end did neither. To
paraphrase Abraham lincoln, perhaps I hurt too much to laugh but was too old to
cry. No, I doubt I will ever be too old to cry; in fact I seem to do it more
easily and with greater frequency. And perhaps that’s good. At least it’s
better than being, as I was that day, lost in my lonely place, too numb to do
either.
In
May of 2014, the 9/11 Museum opened. It occupies a subterranean space below and
within the very foundations of the World Trade Towers. That sounds a bit creepy
to me. Then I read that hanging on one wall is a huge photograph of people
jumping from the burning building, propelled by billowing black smoke. Why?
Talk about creepy. Why is it there? These people have loved ones, we
presume. Do we have no reverence, no respect, for the dead or for those who
remain? I feel my lonely place approaching. It rattles along in the form of an
old railroad car; doubtless it contains doomed Jews et al. My lonely
place has much of Auschwitz within it. I know for sure that I will never visit
that 9/11 museum. I did visit Auschwitz, and it was awful, but still there’s
the buffer of time. I hadn’t, unlike 9/11, watched it live on TV. I breath
deeply and feel my biggest, deepest, lonely place, pass on by. No, I won’t be
visiting that museum. There are times when those lonely places can only be
fought off with a big double dose of denial.
© August 2014
About the Author 

 I
was born and raised in England. After graduation from college there, I moved to
the U.S. and, having discovered Colorado, never left. I have lived in the
Denver-Boulder area since 1965, working for 30 years at IBM. I married, raised
four stepchildren, then got divorced after finally, in my forties, accepting
myself as a lesbian. I have now been with my wonderful partner Betsy for 25
years.