I recently received a list of Classic War Quotations from Simran Khurana at About.com and wasn't surprised that all of them were by men. War seems to be the special province of men.
But while we think about war and read about war, we should never forget that a lot of times the people who suffer most are the civilians, the people left behind while the men are fighting. These are generally women and children. War hurts them in profound and lasting ways.
My mother was just a school girl when she saw her mother, her sister and her sister's baby killed by Nazi soldiers. The effect of this and the more than two years my mom spent in German concentration camps transformed her. The grief and depression she felt stayed with her all her life.
I wrote a poem about this that I included in Lightning and Ashes, my book about my parents. The poem is called "What The War Taught Her. "
Here it is.
What the War Taught Her
My mother learned that sex is bad,
Men are worthless, it is always cold
And there is never enough to eat.
She learned that if you are stupid
With your hands you will not survive
The winter even if you survive the fall.
She learned that only the young survive
The camps. The old are left in piles
Like worthless paper, and babies
Are scarce like chickens and bread.
She learned that the world is a broken place
Where no birds sing, and even angels
Cannot bear the sorrows God gives them.
She learned that you don't pray
Your enemies will not torment you.
You only pray that they will not kill you.
______________
The brutalization I talk about in this poem, of course, didn't stop with my mom and the millions of women who suffered in World War II. Wars continue to happen, and women continue to be the victims of wars.
Christina Pacosz, a poet and friend of mine, sent me a note that came from a UNICEF site on Sexual Violence as a Weapon of War:
"The State of the World's Children 1996 report notes that the disintegration of families in times of war leaves women and girls especially vulnerable to violence. Nearly 80 per cent of the 53 million people uprooted by wars today are women and children. When fathers, husbands, brothers and sons are drawn away to fight, they leave women, the very young and the elderly to fend for themselves. In Bosnia and Herzegovina, Myanmar and Somalia, refugee families frequently cite rape or the fear of rape as a key factor in their decisions to seek refuge."
__________
I write about my parents and their experiences at my blog Lightning and Ashes. One of the blogs there is about Women and War. The photo above is of my mom, my sister Donna, and me in Riverview Park, Chicago, 1956.
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Comments
The winter even if you survive the fall."
Sitting here crying. Thank you so much for telling me about this post.
With much love and respect from another survivor's child. Rated.
That is one reason I tell young people eager to join the military that someone needs to stay behind to protect those at home. You don't have to go overseas to be a hero. There are plenty of battles to be fought right here at home.
I think one of the things that has kept me writing about my mom and dad over the years is the sense that it continues the conversations that I had with them when they were still with me. Yes, writing about them is a way of praying to them.
Are scarce like chickens and bread.
all life-giving symbols which makes it so sad. Psychologically, very "female"symbols.
The Greeks certainly knew about war and the toll it took on women. We have, for example, Euripides' "The Trojan Women." Even "Antigone."
Villifying the female began with Genesis when all the goddess symbols were rolled into one: the sacred garden and tree, the wise serpent or renewal. Woman, the life-giver, became an agent of death and God suddenly had a penis, the male's ultimate weapon.
Thank you for this post. This is a subject near to my heart. Huge amount of observation does indeed reveal that women and children are the overwhelming victims of war. In WWI, 10 soldiers were killed to 1 civilian. Now it is reversed and is about 100 fold.
Women make peace, men make war. Even the Security Council has formally acknowledged (SC 1325) women's great role in peace and reconstruction, yet money for these things flows in the same old (male) channels. NATO, in Afghanistan, ignored Kofi Annas's call for gender mainstreaming. They are locked out of the process so wars continue.
"The rising of the women" would truly mean the rising of the race.
We move forward.
"Tell me, in sifting through the rubble of so much evil and misery, have you come away with a sense that life has ultimate meaning, or are you a nihilist? "
It's a question that I think about all the time. I look at the kinds of things that have happened and continue to happen and I have to wonder if there is an "ultimate meaning" and if that ultimate meaning is a good thing.
I came across a quotation by the novelist Saul Bellow a while ago, and he seems to express for me the dark vision of that ultimate meaning. Here's what he says:
You think history is the history of loving hearts? You fool! Look at these millions of dead. Can you pity them? Feel for them? You can do nothing! There were too many. We burned them to ashes, we buried them with bulldozers. History is the history of cruelty, not love, as soft men think. We have experimented with every human capacity to see which is strong and admirable and have shown that none is. There is only practicality. If the old God exists, he must be a murderer. But the one true god is Death and history is made by madmen and butchers.
When I read that, I think that maybe the ultimate meaning is that you and I and billions of others should be dead and the sooner the better. The ultimate meaning is that the only meaning is that we are here for a brief moment and it doesn't matter whether we suffer or not.
I consider that and then I consider what my father and mother felt. My dad spent four years in a concentration camp, and he came out of that experience thinking that he had an obligation to be kind and helpful. I've written about this in my poem "What My Father Believed." You can hear Garrison Keillor read it online: http://writersalmanac.publicradio.org/programs/2007/12/24/#friday
My mother, on the other hand, was a skeptic and a cynic. 100% of the time when I would ask her if there was some kind of ultimate meaning in the universe (and you can be certain I did ask) she would say, "No priest has ever come back from heaven to tell me if what the church says is true."
Despite this, she had a spoonful of optimism in her--A hopefulness that kept her going past the deaths she witnessed in the war, past the suffering in the camps, past two cancers that left her crippled for the last 4 years of her life.
When I once asked her after her second surgery for cancer how she could go on, she said, "Optimism is a crazy person's mother."
I think that optimism is my mother too.
The Bellow quote is certainly sobering. But of course there are others who, presented with the same evidence, reach a more hopeful conclusion. I liked the last line of your reply.
For a long time, that made no sense to me. I would think of the 50,000,000 who died in the 2nd world war and say, "How could anyone experience such tragedy and still believe in God or an ultimate purpose in the universe?"
Recently, what I've come to see is that such tragedies could be worse. The 50 million could have been 100 million. The 6 million Jews could have been 10 million. The 150,000 who died in the tsunammi last year could have been a million.
Maybe there is some ultimate force that prevents things from being as bad as they can be.
I do take an odd sort of comfort from this quote by the poet Mark Doty, in his memoir Dog Years:
"Everything dies, because the world's only a constantly mutating mask for the deep, wild life of energy, veiling itself over and over as matter, taking shape in order to express the dynamic nature of its character, plunging into matter and sailing up -- as if inside the belly of a vulture -- into energetic life again."
Is this force capable of kindness? Or is it something beyond good or evil that we are incapable of grasping? Perhaps kindness is a value that's only meaningful when seen within the context of our own tiny human sphere. But does that make it any less important? Another blogger here, Dorinda Fox, referred in a recent post to C.S. Lewis' vision of the difference between heaven and hell. First, Lewis was taken to hell, where he saw a beautiful banquet spread out before the guests, but because the spoons they were given were 10 feet long, they couldn't bring the food to their mouths, so as a consequence, everyone was starving. In heaven, he found the same banquet and the same food, but everyone ate because they had learned to feed one another. And that was the only difference between heaven and hell.
It sounds like your father had a similar vision.
Thank you for remembering, and so beautifully, poignantly giving voice.
I think it's time I reread Viktor Frankl's "Man's Search for Meaning." He survived the camps (although his parents and wife did not); he drew some powerful conclusions about suffering and our spiritual life. It's been many years, and I don't want to give a garbled version, but as many people here have pointed out, genocide continues today, and we need wisdom as well as empathy to understand.
I re-read Frankel's book recently, and it as you say is essential reading. I also highly recommend Primo Levi's Survival in Auschwitz.
Reading books like this gives me a sense of clarity about what people can do to each other and what they can survive.
I think this is an appropriate poem to share. A poem, by Robert Deluty.
I love it because Robert H. Deluty shared this in detail, over a delicious meal.
*LESSONS*
He loved t tell the story of how, On his first day of Yeshiva in Poland's Jewish
Ghetto, Mothers
brought honey cakes, Shaped like the letters of the Hebrew alphabet,
So that their children would come to associate Learning with Sweetness.
~
A brilliant man, deprived by war
Of even a high school education,
He set his foot on a college campus
More than fifty years later to attend
His first son's Ph.D. conferral. When
introduced to the faculty, With utmost
Respect and pleasure, He bowed.
~
His second son, now a professor,
Remembers these stories
As he teaches his daughter
Her ABCs.- Robert H. Deluty.
from:` Within and Between.
It's a powerful poem. I was going to pick out certain images that really struck me, but found it all goes together. I love the photograph.