The Meaning of Suffering

Dear _____,

I am glad you are okay.

Finding out the people who hurt us were hurt, can be liberating. In a very real sense, they had no choice.

That any humanity and character or personality remained to survivors [of the Holocaust] after being subjected to such inhumanity is a mystery of grace. Many survivors ended up committing suicide, which seems counter-intuitive at first until you think about it, and then it makes perfect sense.

I still can't really forgive my parents for what they deprived me of, even though I understand that, in the words of Yeshua, "they did not know what they did". Maybe it is God I really blame unconsciously, or myself.

There are probably many more other books on the children of Holocaust survivors, including studies; the one I posted to you is just the one I happened to read and the one that amazed me because I could identify so strongly with the accounts. My father is not Jewish, though I did find Jewish relatives at a distance. My father did appear to witness some horrific things during the Hungarian Revolution in 1956 before he managed to emigrate. He never wanted us to grow up without an understanding of man's inhumanity to man, even if he had to brutalize us himself in order to make sure we didn't. Gee, as a child I only wanted to be loved. But I'm glad that I had the childhood I did, because I couldn't stand the burden of intimate relationship now, except relationship with my Higher Power.

I'm glad you are okay, what you are dealing with is horrific and unmitigated trauma. I hope you are taking support from your therapist. There are undoubtedly organizations and fellowships of Children of Survivors out there which offer understanding and guidance.

Well I found out how old _____ is, he is 80. He was born in 1946, right at the end of the war. I can't believe the world is doing this shit again.

I was actually in Budapest for a Talking Heads concert, that was their tour w the Tom Tom Club (Genius of Love). I met an American Hungarian named _____ Béla, we wrote to each other for a while. He once sent me a set of ginzu knives c.o.d to my college dorm as a gag gift. Ha. He stopped talking to me after I once suggested he might be gay, years later. None of his romantic relationships w women ever worked out. But neither did mine. Gender preference had nothing to do with it. I don't know why I asked him that, he used to annoy me quite a lot. He used a persona of manic clowning and lightheartedness to hide behind, but he would never "get real". His dad was a reactionary, and Béla seemed to inherit deep inner conflicts. I had met a gypsy boy in Budapest on one visit, who wrote me letters in Hungarian (Magyarul) which I couldn't read. I once sent one to Béla for his father to translate, and his father said whoever wrote that letter was a psychopath, or something like that. I never got a translation. When I finally got ready to move on, I couldn't bear to throw them away so I mailed the entire bundle of letters to a small publisher in case they had literary value! 😂 Man, I did some crazy shit. Interesting side note about Béla's father and my father: Béla's dad was totally nationalistic and wanted his son to know himself as a Hungarian person. Béla spoke fluent Magyarul and visited Hungary constantly. My father, the alleged humanist, told me once when I wanted an extended stay in his country of origin, that Hungarians wouldn't understand why I'd want to go there for my "roots" since everyone there wanted to come here. Can't win for losing.

Just like the Florida Cubanos, Hungarian expats tend to be reactionary. My father had a friend named _____ Huba, (_____ is my grandmother's maiden name). Huba lived in California and was a fascist. He wrote a screed/memoir in which he blamed the Jews for the Holocaust. I once told him, in my last letter to him, that he and his wife _____ would have turned in their Jewish neighbors. Many Hungarians did. The tragedy of the Hungarian Jews was the fact they were slaughtered at the very end of the war, and the Nazis kept up deportations even though Germany had already surrendered, that is, until they were forced to stop. A very famous poet named Radnóti Miklós died in a forced march after Germany had already surrendered. The blood stained notebook found in his pocket by his wife was printed in facsimile and is a national treasure. I bought a copy for my father when I was in Budapest, but he gave it back to me one time because he was a total asshole, then I gave it to a friend and my dad got mad when he found out years later that I didn't have it anymore!!!

If there is one thing I am more convinced of every day, it is the brokenness of all people. I used to feel like the whole world was "normal" except for me. Now I know that is a crock of shit. Everyone is broken and twisted by life. I told you about the Mermaid and the Minotaur. It explains how we are unique among species in our complete vulnerability as infants, and in the extreme duration of the period of our dependency, literally years and years. As a result, early childhood dynamics can shape (or mutilate) an entire life. Add to that injustice, poverty, oppression, torture, sickness, war, victimization...First, you are screwed up by your family, then the world crushes you. It makes a believer of me because it has to be a miracle of grace that people can even be as human as they manage to be. The Jewish mystic Etty Hillesum actually was able to pity Nazi soldiers...When you can transcend, you see that evil is "nothingness" that only goodness is real (Simone Weil). If you believe in spiritual reality, you can understand that souls leaving the world, no matter how horrific the circumstances, are alive in another realm. Nobody dies, they just leave.

So if 6 millions (plus all the victims of all the pogroms in history) Jewish souls have crowded heaven, maybe Moshiach really is almost here.

Sartre said the only real question of the 20th century is torture. I have thought a lot about it all my life. There was a DEA agent named Kiki Camarena. He was working undercover when the cartels got a hold of him. They used cocaine or speed to keep him awake while they tortured him, so he couldn't pass out. The thought of it fills me with hatred for the inhuman race. Whenever anyone tries to give me bullshit about "being positive" that's the story I tell them. It is wrong to call human monsters "animals", because animals are more humane than people. Animals are innocent; humans are capable of incomprehensible evil. The real victory is being able, like Etty, to affirm the beauty of life IN THE VERY ACKNOWLEDGEMENT & EXPERIENCE OF THE DEEPEST EVIL & DEPRAVITY, NOT IN IGNORANCE & DENIAL OF IT.

One of the men at my last job tried to give me that bullshit. He was religious in the worst sense. He just ignored all the atrocities going on in the world and kept going to church. I asked him could he imagine what it would be like to survive a concentration camp, and if not, did he have the right to tell a survivor to have a "good attitude"? He didn't even think about it more than a second, then he just said "yes, because what else is there"? Which is a valid response from someone who WAS THERE, like Viktor Frankl, but not a valid response from someone who totally ignores & cannot comprehend human suffering. I told him being "nice" is not the same thing as being GOOD. I really reacted to this man because of his self-righteousness. To me he is a "person of the lie". I am like a prophet or a lightning rod when I go into society. I react to the pathological people, (takes one to know one). There were a couple of those pathological guys at my last job and I had incidents with them. I told my boss and one of the other guys (it was a hardware store), what I thought of those sick guys, what their true nature was. A part of me hopes that the sick ones reveal themselves to the others so I can be vindicated. Another part of me knows that is a wrong thing to hope.

I hope you can believe in some part of your heart that Yeshua was there, with your father and with all the victims in the camps. And that Yeshua experienced all the suffering of the world, from all eternity, including Shoah, on the Cross. The only way it could be technically "acceptable" for the Holocaust to have happened would be if it stood as a lesson and was NEVER repeated. We know now that is not the case, that it is being repeated today.

I hope you can believe and imagine that the goodness of the Supreme Soul is so extreme that the joy of proximity to it makes suffering as nothing by comparison. Etty Hillesum experienced connection with the Divine while living in a transit camp which was the last stop before Auschwitz. She knew she was going to die. She had heard stories about what to expect, yet she was spiritually FREE. THEY COULD NOT TOUCH HER.

No matter how extreme, there is a limit to human suffering (death), but there is no limit to the inexpressible goodness and power of God. If this was not true, it would mean that EVIL WINS. I hope you are not offended by me speaking this way. I shared w you about Kiki so that you would know I have been submerged into the question of human suffering my entire life, and that I myself have suffered. Otherwise I would have no right to talk to you about God.

I once met a therapist who condescended to me about my beliefs. She said that victims of trauma can find healing with spiritual belief, but she implied that such belief was merely palliative. To me, it doesn't matter. Even if my spiritual beliefs are just a neurological phenomenon, it makes no difference because faith is what gives my life meaning and what has enabled me to heal. You should see Crimes and Misdemeanors. In one scene, the Jewish protagonist (who has committed murder), goes back to his old home and imagines an argument at the Seder between the religious relatives and the secular relatives (Communist; Communism is a form of religion). What a powerful scene. It always bothered me that the Rabbi says "even if it was not true, I would still choose God" (sic). I felt it was a failure on the part of Woody Allen to present the notion that belief in God amounted to choosing God even if "it was a Lie", i.e., as opposed to Truth. You can't choose God "over Truth" because God is Truth, whatever the Truth may be. But here I am saying the same thing: if belief in God is a "drug", then for me it is medicine that makes life not just bearable but wonderful,
and is the only thing that enabled me to recover from a hopeless condition of mind and body.

Sorry this letter is so long. With your consent, I might use it as a blog, in revised and anonymous form. Don't worry, nobody reads my blog!

Be Well,

All my love,

Kat

(Sorry I don't have the citation)