On your mother and writing

Her question whether she could get something published or not, is quite peculiar. I believe it was in a conversation with Mark Schaevers that she said: 'If I wanted my memoirs to be published, someone, or some editing house would most likely be willing to do so.'

I don't keep a backlog of you, or your mother's interviews. Therefore don't take it ill of me that I paraphrased her.

Competition , even between victims, is standard procedure.
(from a book, I forgot the author, and from personal observations)

Dear Jan

Would you describe yourself as a lonely person?

Eric

@Eric
Although once I knew a lot of people, yes, a lot of them described me as a lonely person. Of course I was unaware of that, then.
Strangely, now that my mother is dying, I feel deep grief. For the first time I really feel connected to her. She was an orphan, she was a lonely person too.
Thanks for asking.

arnon

the last sentence, shouldn't that be "haunted" instead of "hunted"? Otherwise I enjoyed this entry.

Dear Jan,

my mother is 83 but still very much alive. I'm afraid she also has to die before I can connect with her.
Maybe we can only connect to that what we have lost. Or losing...

Eric

Dries

Yes. Thanks. It has been corrected.

@ Arnon

Six years in concentration camps. Only the real winners lasted that long. Now I understand where you did get your fighting spirit.
Six years in concentration camps. Not only do I think the world is interested in those experiences, I think your mother as one of the few remnant she has almost an moral obligation to inform the world. That is at least if she is up to it.

@ Jan

It took me more than forty years before I could connect with my mother. Cherish those moments, better late than never.

mieke

and the ones that didn't survive were losers?

@ Dries

I didn't want to implicate that.

Only six months after my mother checked out I am still not able to miss her. I think I can't believe she won't come back. At least she had time to tell her story, even if the audience was very small and the plot rather insignificant.

I don't think anybody has the moral obligation to tell their story. We should be glad most people don't. And even then most stories are forgotten after only a short while.
Most likely not the best achievements are remembered, but the best stories. So you could tell your mother that if she had really wanted her story to be in many bookshelves she probably should have provided a more dramatic ending.

@Eric
I think the connection has also something to do with people changing in the face of dead.
I remember my grandfather dying when I was a toddler. He was a very stern person and hardly spoke a word to me, only to give orders. The day he felt he was dying, he suddenly approached me and raised his hand – I thought he was going to hit me, standard procedure in those days – but he only wanted to shake hands with me. These last few hours, his iron face became kind and friendly.

@Mieke
Thank you too.

Why would people like to feel connected to victims? Could it be that people long for suffering in general? Or do people think that people who have suffered are heroes in some way? People who make people suffer are bad and people who suffer due to others are somehow good, so we prefer being (or feeling) connected to the latter? Should this be seen as an act of solidarity or do people just get turned on by watching others suffer? I believe that people are suckers for suffering, yet they prefer others to suffer for them.

I work at the Anne Frank House, where every day thousands of people stand in line in order to get a better connection to a victim (here: Anne). Some of these people tell me (and I'm only a simple ticket/book seller) they have (had) a relative or a friend or acquaintance who has suffered in a similar way Anne did. Others tell me they are from Israel (and usually demand free entrance to the museum). I think they are all looking for the same thing: they want to feel closer to the victim then others, because somehow that makes them feel better or more important.

@ Sander

In historical revisionism a story like Rutka Laskiers is easily made out to be fraude.
Arnon's mother is one of the few survivors. Her story is therefore very important She lost most of her relatives in the Holocaust. How much more drama should it need.

Jules

People do not long for suffering in general. People suffer in general.

Jan

that's a touching story

Arnon

Maybe your mother confused Anita Laskier with Anita Lasker-Wallfisch. She survived the concentration camp. And wrote a book about it.

Dries

They suffer in general but do they long for more suffering at the same time?

Dries
In general people want to be second to none when it comes to their suffering.

@Jules
I think most of us are more or less attracted to extreme experiences, in pleasure or in pain. We are attracted to victims, but also to perpetrators (see all those books about A Hitler, Stalin etcetera). Voyeurism is not only a sexual habit.
As Pablo states, people want to be second to none in suffering as well as in lust (the best lover ever).

Rutka

Rutka Laskier-sorry.

Highly recommended twice

The Jewish Messiah by Lebowski is a splendid edition indeed.

The diary of Rutka Laskier is very touching.
And curious.

Sander

What do you mean with "not being able to miss her" exactly?

@ Arnon

Not being able to miss her means that I rationally know that she's not there anymore, but emotionally I am still in a state of shell shock. It just don't feels as if she has gone forever.

@Sander
Do not worry about that contraction, there is the rational knowledge she had died, but emotionally she will always be a part of you, emotionally there is no such thing as ‘leaving you forever’.
She is there in your thoughts and dreams.
Believe me, life is very weird.

@Sander
Sorry – contraction , read contradiction
(shut up, Freud)

@ Jan Thys

Strangely the grief I felt was deeper when she was still alive. You are right, she'll always be part of me.

Take care in this absurd and special moment in your life. There is not much more to say than the ordinary clichés, but in cases as these they all seem to be true.

Dear Jan

Couldn't it be that in the last few hours of your grandfathers life the muscles in his face relaxed -being tired from the life he lived.
Remarkable is that he wanted to shake hands. Did he say something when you shook hands?

Eric

@Sander
Thank you Sander, indeed.

@Eric
You describe a psycho-somatic phenomena. Yes, I think now, he was tired of the life he lived. Maybe tired of being strong, being a winner.
(I think he did not lose neither)
Yes, he did say something I did not quite understood first: “Give me the five, boy, I am going to rest now”. (An old Flemish expression for shaking hands). He died a few hours later from a stroke, in the canapé in the company of his wife and daughter.
I the meantime I felt comforted and played with my toys, a red plastic airplane and I was happy.

Yes i meant could it not be we want to see victims, because we don't know how to express our own suffering. that's why we turn to the image of someone else suffering. for example the image of a crucified christ that us catholics all used to gather round, or for female catholics the image of the griefed mother mary. normally we are not allowed to indulge in our own suffering, life goes on and all that, but now and then we allow ourselves to deliver ourselves to what it means to suffer, we turn to an image of suffering.
i think it has less to do with wanting someone else to suffer, or seeing someone else suffer instead of us, than wanting to see our own suffering expressed in someone else.

@Dries
I can agree with you very much.

On the other hand… the gathering around a martyr… reminds me of and seems to be a descendant of pre-christian practices: the gathering around a killing… which wouldn’t have served the function of “looking for a reflection of one’s own suffering” but the opposite…
The attraction to martyrs seems like an inversion of lynching or sacrificing…
But does that mean this inversion is forever contaminated by its origin? I still want to believe the shift from [identifying with the violator] to [identifying with the one who is violated] is also accompanied by a change in the intention of the spectator itself…

@Dries
You probably heard of René Girard and his Works about the scapegoat. Another light on our fluent lives, thoughts, feelings and emotions. Our lives shine, change and fade or freeze like the billion colors of the rainbow.
Not I quit before I get too mellow.

I mean, now I quit before I get too mellow.

Jan

Yes Jan, I think most of what I said is derived from Girard