Friends and Enemies: Our Need to Love and Hate. Dorothy Rowe

the truth of it and that we have lived. This is why graves are marked, memorials are built and histories written. If no one knows your story it is as if you are nothing and, when you die, it will be as if you have never existed. This is why many people are pleased that their name has been in a newspaper or that they have been glimpsed on television by millions. The fear of being a nothing, of never having existed, can feel like utter shame, the utter terror.

      It was this utter shame and utter terror which the SS militiamen guarding the German concentration camps visited upon the prisoners. Primo Levi recorded that

      the first news of the Nazi annihilation camps began to spread in 1942. They were vague pieces of information, yet in agreement with each other: they delineated a massacre of such vast proportions, of such extreme cruelty and such intricate motivation that the public was inclined to reject them because of their enormity. It is significant that this rejection was foreseen well in advance by the culprits themselves.²⁴

      He went on to quote Simon Wiesenthal, who described these SS militiamen in the last pages of his book The Murderers Are Among Us. They told the prisoners that

      ‘However this war may end, we have won the war against you; none of you will be left to bear witness, but even if someone were to survive, the world would not believe him. There will perhaps be suspicions, discussions, research by historians, but there will be no certainties, because we will destroy the evidence with you. And even if some proof should remain and some of you survive, people will say that the events you describe are too monstrous to be believed: they will say they are exaggerations of Allied propaganda and will believe us, who will deny everything, and not you. We will be the ones to dictate the history of the Lagers.’²⁵

      Primo Levi described how

      Almost all the survivors, verbally or in their written memoirs, remember a dream which frequently recurred during the nights of imprisonment, varied in its detail but uniform in its substance: they had returned home and with passion and relief were describing their past sufferings, addressing themselves to a loved person, and were not believed, indeed, not even listened to. In the most typical (and most cruel) form, the interlocutor turned and left in silence.²⁶

      This dream became a reality for many of the survivors of the Holocaust. People did not want to hear their story because it threatened their own meaning structure. In a television news report about the fiftieth anniversary of the foundation of the state of Israel, one woman, a survivor of Auschwitz, told how, when she finally arrived in New York, her relatives did not want to hear about her experiences because they had suffered so much during the war. They told her, ‘The queues for food were dreadful.’

      Perhaps her relatives prided themselves on their ability to suffer and they did not want to acknowledge that someone else’s suffering was greater than their own. Perhaps they did not want to examine the question of why God would let good people suffer in this way, or perhaps they could not tolerate a story which showed how a person can be trapped and helpless. Concentration camp survivors who did tell their story were often challenged by their listeners, who asked, ‘Why didn’t you try to escape?’

      Sometimes listeners would offer suggestions based on what they thought they would do in such a situation. Primo Levi recalled such an event. He wrote,

      I remember with a smile the adventure I had several years ago in a fifth grade classroom, where I had been invited to comment on my books and to answer pupils’ questions. An alert-looking little boy, apparently at the head of the class, asked me the obligatory question: ‘How come you didn’t escape?’

      Primo explained to him how the Lager was organized. The boy wanted a diagram, which Primo supplied. The boy studied it and presented Primo with a plan:

      At night, cut the throat of the sentinel: then, put on his clothes; immediately after this run over there to the power station and cut off the electricity, so the searchlights would go out and the high-tension fence would be deactivated; after that I could leave without any trouble. He added seriously: ‘If it should happen to you again, do as I told you; you’ll see that you’ll be able to do it.’²⁷

      The dangers of not being believed were recognized by the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission. A system for briefing and debriefing those people who testified was set up, and though it did not work perfectly, it went some way to prevent those who had to talk about the traumas they had suffered from feeling that they had not been believed.²⁸

      Just as we need other people to confirm our story, so we need to confirm our story to ourselves. That is, we need to tell ourselves the truth. Our story is a construction, and if we want to lead a reasonably peaceful life we need to create a life story in which the pieces fall into a pattern where the pieces fit and which does not conflict with our need for a sense of pride and self-worth. But what if the events in our life conflict with this need? One solution is to lie to ourselves. It is an easy thing to do, but the results are always disastrous.

      I have met many people who describe their childhood as idyllic and their parents as perfect. Some of these people say that they do not actually remember their childhood but they are sure it was a perfectly happy one. Not all these people were suffering from depression and anxiety. Some led apparently normal lives, though they were often troubled by their inability to maintain good relationships with others.

      No childhood is idyllic and no parent is perfect. All children suffer, but some are fortunate enough to suffer less than most. One of the tasks of adult life should be to inspect the beginnings of our story and see it clearly and truthfully. From our adult perspective we can modify the interpretations of events we constructed in childhood.

      In a workshop I once ran one of the participants talked about the brutal punishments his father administered. In adult life his great problem was his rage, which had disrupted all his important relationships. Later he and I travelled by train together, and we talked about our fathers: they were both men of considerable ability who had never had the chance to put that ability to good use. Limited by education and opportunity, they had seen it as their duty to work in demanding, unsatisfying jobs in order to support their families. As my companion talked about his father he acknowledged that he could take some pride in him, and with this some of the sadness which lay beneath his rage showed through, the sadness of a child who had offered his father love and been rejected.

      In looking at his story from an adult perspective he made the story more complex. It was no longer about a brutal father who terrorized his son. It became a story of a man who was trying to be what he thought a good father should be, and a son who loved, hated and feared his father. A more complex story, but a more truthful one.

      Simple stories lay blame simply. ‘My father was totally wicked,’ or, ‘I was wicked and my father was right to punish me.’ Complex, more truthful stories apportion not blame but responsibility.

      Responsibility properly applied relates to that over which the person has control. Parents have a great deal of control over what happens to their children when they are small, and so have great responsibility for the care of their children. Parents have no control over what happens to their adult children and how their adult children interpret what happens to them, so parents cannot be held responsible for what their adult children do. However, the question of responsibility becomes more tricky when the parents see a link between what they did when the children were young and what their children do when they are adults. Had they acted differently would their children now be acting differently? In those past years could they have chosen to act differently or was their choice constrained by what they knew at the time?

      This is the question which plagues many parents when they review their lives, often at the behest of their adult children. As a parent concerned about your children’s education you might have surveyed the options for secondary schooling and, after much deliberation, you might have decided to invest your savings in your children’s education