Déjà Vu
I can’t help thinking back to childhood stories I heard from my parents about what they had experienced in war-torn Europe in the Second World War. The reality we are living here in the ongoing conflict that has taken an extreme turn since the 7th October 2023 massacre carried out by Hamas and taking of Israeli hostages (dead and alive ) in southern Israel, the powerful vengeful response on Israel’s part, the missiles launched by Hezbollah and the Yemenite Hotim, and then Iran, at Israel, now followed by the Israeli and American attack on Iran, the massive bombardment by that regime of the Israeli civilian population all of that brings me back to my parent’s stories and experiences on which I was nurtured. But, now what were shared nightmares stimulated by a lively imagination (thus, my two novels!) has been enlivened and heightened in (or crashed down into) very real personal experience and increased existential angst. They are trying to kill ‘us”. We are trying to stop “them”, avenge our dead and deter “them.”
It is hard to separate myself from those inherited traumas to see reality as it is.
I remember my mother’s description of escaping intensive bombing of the Jewish quarter of Warsaw in September 1939. Nazi Germany was already aiming to kill Jews at the outset of that war. My great grandmother died in that bombing on 1st September 1939 – the first of a multitude of deaths – mainly murdered -in my mother’s extensive family over the coming few years. Her older brother Yankel – who I’m told I resemble – died in the last week of that war as a soldier of the Red army as it conquered Berlin, then in ruins after intensive bombing by the then allies.
Was it in my father’s interview with the Spielberg film team who visited Melbourne to collect documentation from then still living survivors towards the end of the tape? Or was it in the Yiddish interview with Professor Dov Levin of the Hebrew university that that dear academic shared with me? I don’t remember which My Dad was asked if he ever returned to his home town to the shtetl Dizsna. His answer was a pause and then “Yes,. I went back. There was nothing there . It was a destroyed town, ruins… just a tank stood there where there had been shops, a market place… I moved on.” he said, wiping away a tear.
I see the photos of the ruins of the towns of Gaza, the ruins in Tel Aviv, Beersheba and Haifa, the destruction in Teheran, and maybe begin to understand – just a little – what my parents must have experienced. The heart wants to explode witnessing all this destruction, living with so much anxiety about the future, and remembering that inherited imaginary past trauma.
As a young man my questions, my anger, were directed at God, but today they are focused on my fellow human beings. Is there hope for a better future here given that our human ?nature remains unchanged
