Betrayal

"Not to transmit an experience is to betray it." Elie Wiesel

Yesterday was National Holocaust Remembrance Day. I was working on a post, but I didn't publish it because it really didn't say what I wanted it to say. I guess you and I are comfortable enough with each other now, I guess you know me well enough now that I am good with just putting it out there with no need to impress you. So here it is unfinished, unvarnished, unedited.

My parents' generation was the one that fought in World War II. My own father didn't. I'm not quite sure why and he is not alive anymore for me to ask him. I think I vaguely remember something about his blood pressure being too low to pass the physical. I have low blood pressure (that always pleases my doctor) so it could be the case.

That generation doesn't talk about what they experienced, what they saw, what they did. I had a client years ago who was a Pearl Harbor survivor. Seventeen years old at the time (he had lied about his age to enlist) and he told me, "I peed my pants."

I understand their stoicism. Those people who were children during the Great Depression, who came of age during World War II, well they like their secrets. Maybe some of it is wanting to give us, their children, a better life, and why burden us with the gruesome details of war? Perhaps some of it is they were men who were raised not to cry, not to show emotion, and recounting their experiences would take them to a place men aren't supposed to go.

It is a betrayal to keep those secrets. They aren't betraying me or my kids or my grandkids. They are betraying themselves. One of my professors said that the worst violation is to deny someone their reality or truth. There are those people in the world today who think the Holocaust was a hoax. I'm shaking my head here. I have experienced just a sliver of man's (human's) inhumanity to man (humans.) Just a tiny sliver compared to those like Elie Wiesel, who as a young boy lost his family, went on to live in a concentration camp and then to speak of the unspeakable. To deny him his truth betrays him all over again. To deny those brave men and women, who are becoming all too few, their reality of what life was really like in the 1930's and 1940's their truth, is the worst betrayal.

I am thankful for people like Wiesel who have told their stories, who have shared their truths, who have opened up that ugly can of worms, who have shared their pain with the world. I hope we learn from them. Never again. Never again.

Susan