Trauma

1756trauma/927 words

Aug. 3, 2018

Trauma

By

Harley L. Sachs

Most of us have heard of trauma centers, hospitals that deal with emergencies, people rescued from airplane crashes, horrible highway accidents. Those traumas are physical and no doubt may be followed up with fear of fires, fear of getting in the confines of an airplane. Flashbacks.

There are other traumas, traumas  not brought on by physical stress. While the body  can recover from physical injuries, psychological damage may be life long. Military commonly suffer PTSD, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. the effect of long term fear   and the shock of seeing your buddies blown to bits before your eyes.

Not everyone has to be in battle to suffer that kind of trauma. My wife has never gotten over the shock of her mother’s early death. She had not been kind to her mother, and has been plagued by guilt ever since.

Loni, a neighbor on our floor in this retirement building, is an ethnic German who was in an eastern bloc country at the end of World War II. Many people do not know that when the war ended and the German occupiers went home, the local populations of countries that were the victims of the war turned on the ethnic Germans, some who had been there for generations. The  Russians, new occupiers, gave the locals three days to do as they wished to the ethnic Germans. Anyone who spoke German was subject to abuse, rape, imprisonment in old concentration camps, and killed. Survivors were deported. At  the end of World War II about forty million people were displaced, many of them ethnic Germans no longer welcome.

Loni and her family fell into Russian hands. Her brother went to a Russian prison camp. She became a child laborer on a farm. The trauma of that experience as a displaced child has stuck with her ever since. She has never told her son about it and cannot go to a movie with anything about war. Loni is psychologically wounded much like many combat veterans. The shadow of that early trauma hangs over her.

I have not been in a car or plane crash and never served in combat. The idea of childhood trauma seemed foreign to me, until I remembered.

They say a child’s personality is set at the age of five and view of the world at age ten. Before age ten we are not aware of the world outside our family.  What, then, happened to me?

My father was from Poland and came to the United States during World War I. Most of his extended family remained in Poland. The Germans invaded in 1939 and we did not enter the war until December 1941, so I was nine or ten during that brief interlude, 1939 to 1941 when we were not in the war yet but mail could be delivered from Poland..

My father got a letter that was sent to his mother in Chicago. It was from a neighbor in Poland, probably a suburb of Warsaw. I don’t know if it was written in Polish or Yiddish, but I do remember my father cried for three days. His uncles, aunts and cousins were all dead.

I had never seen my father cry, which is upsetting enough. Then my mother told me what was in the letter. Twenty four of his family had been slaughtered, beaten to death on the street, their house set afire. A baby had been thrown into the burning house, was rescued by one of the boys but the baby was thrown in again. The boy, one of my father’s cousins, tried to save the baby again but was burned alive.  

At school my teacher, Miss Hill, was a Catholic and an anti-Semite. When we had a spell down and my turn came she went down the list of words and picked one I would not know: catechism.  She smirked. Defeated, I returned to my desk wondering what catechism was. A girl who sat next to me showed me her catechism book and I understood. One had to memorize the correct answers to theological questions.

When we had show and tell and it was my turn I told the class about the letter from Poland and cried. I knew that the Poles were Catholics but I did not know then why they hated Jews and would even kill them and burn their homes with the baby thrown into the flames.

That was my trauma.

It burned into my consciousness an awareness of anti-Semitism and Catholic dogma which to this day includes a prayer about “the perfidious Jews” in the Easter Latin mass.

The Catholic Inquisition of Spain that drove us out of the country in 1492 continued for five hundred years and did not officially end until 1956 when the Pope declared that today’s Jews were not personally responsible for the death of Jesus. I never thought I was, but found the pardon at least too long delayed.

That was my trauma. These scars don’t heal.

Now we have a new round of trauma against children. Over three thousand immigrant children have been forcibly taken from their parents and sent off to unknown foster homes while their parents are deported and may never return. This inhumane treatment of children, like the post World War II expulsion of ethnic Germans from previously occupied countries, will cause a lifetime of trauma. How many new Lonis has our government created?

This is not the kind of trauma that can be undone. When will we ever learn?