Tag: Terror

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Dreaming About War

I’ve been having Holocaust dreams lately.  Not actual scenes of concentration camps or ghettos, but disturbing scenarios with enough related resonances  to let me know I’m in the territory–cozying up with the inherited terror of my family’s refugee/survivor history.

In one dream, my husband comes upstairs from the laundry room carrying a huge sack of clothes slung over his shoulder. Someone has stolen our brand new laundry cart, which I’d left downstairs.  I rant about the cost of a new cart and fret about not being able to trust our neighbors anymore.  In real life, the next morning, my husband reported that I’d cried out in my sleep, “What are we going to do?!!”

In another dream, I’m overseas at a huge conference center.  My flight home is in a couple of hours but I haven’t packed yet and can’t remember where my room is. I begin a race against the clock to find my room, get my stuff, and make it to the airport.  Nobody will help me, so I run around anxiously, in and out of buildings and through wooded paths.  Finally, I see some members of my group descending a giant staircase with their suitcases. “Wait for me!!” I cry, desperate not to be left behind, alone. Continue reading “Dreaming About War”

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Let the healing begin!

As the granddaughter of Jewish Holocaust survivors, Poland was a place I was taught never to forget, but also never to set  foot in.

In the 1980s and ’90s, when Jews around the world started visiting Poland and Eastern Europe to “find their roots,” my grandmother Brucha thought they were crazy.  She’d been a refugee from Nazi-occupied Warsaw, escaping in the months before the Ghetto was locked down. To her, returning for any reason was unthinkable. “To go back to Poland, you’d have to take me in chains,” she’d declare, absolutely adamant.

Naturally, years later, when I decided to attend an international workshop on Healing From War in Poland, I felt terrified.  I shook with fear every time I considered voluntarily getting on a plane to the land my family had fled for their lives– the cauldron where the vibrant Jewish culture of my ancestors was extinguished in the most violent and terrible way. Irrationally, I imagined I might arrive and be immediately imprisoned, or executed.  But I was determined to go, to shake up this mindset that imprisoned me all on its own. Continue reading “Let the healing begin!”