Last December, I flew to the Indonesian island of Bali
to attend the first Quest for Global Healing Conference, a
five-day event sponsored by a handful of organizations dedicated
to fostering global awareness and social change. There, amid the
tropical paradise of the South Pacific, an audience of over four
hundred—a majority of whom were from the privileged and
progressive First World—heard the visions and voices of
those who have experienced hardship, injustice, and survival.
Some of the presenters had suffered in the most violence-torn
regions of the world, from the Middle East to Cambodia to South
Central L.A. Others bore the legacy of history's great
atrocities, such as the Holocaust. And their presentations
accompanied those of prominent individuals who have, each in
their own way, been catalysts for the emergence of a global
consciousness and conscience—most notably Archbishop
Desmond Tutu (see page 32), Apollo 14 astronaut Edgar
Mitchell, and human rights activist Lynne Twist.
Over the course of the five days, I had the opportunity to
interview many of the conference presenters. And for me, the
most powerful, poignant, and indeed, healing encounter took
place in a conversation with German-Jewish reconciliation team,
Martina Emme and Mary Rothschild. Mary's mother survived the
unimaginable horror of Auschwitz. Martina's grandfather was a
Nazi who served in the German army. My own
relatives—Eastern European Jews—were brutally
murdered by the Nazis as they swept through the shtetls of
Romania. As Mary and Martina delved into their experience of
grappling with the legacy of the Holocaust, sitting with me on
their hotel's poolside patio, I found myself awash in what I
realized were the unconscious and unresolved imprints of my own
ancestral past. “Many of them didn't even make it as far
as the concentration camps,” I remembered my dad saying
when I was young. And while I had known what had
happened to my relatives, their terrible demise had always
existed as some distant and abstract reality that I had never
allowed myself to truly feel—until that morning
in Bali, in the presence of two people who had given their lives
to facing into their own history, and mine.
Through this experience, I realized that “global
healing” takes place within the inner recesses of the
human mind and heart. It is the great gift human beings bestow
on one another when they have the courage to engage in an
unflinching reckoning with themselves and their past. And, as
powerfully conveyed in the following excerpts from my interview
with Mary and Martina, when people come together in a mutual
willingness to face into that legacy, they can miraculously
transmute the horrors of the human condition into a deep and
profound relatedness that “alchemically transforms”
them and, perhaps, may even transform the world.
Mary: When I was translating my mother's diary (from
Auschwitz), I realized that I couldn't cope with the experience
alone. So I joined a group in Los Angeles that was addressing
the Holocaust. But after a few years, I realized that something
was missing—something that I didn't have words for. I
started looking for it and came across an organization called
One by One that was engaging in Jewish-German dialogue in
Berlin, and I had a sense that I had to go there. My mother told
me that after the war, every time she heard the German language
she would start shaking. But the first time I heard a German
say, “I'm so sorry,” I relaxed; I let go. Something
inside me changed, and we were able to listen to each other on a
very deep level. I was actually able to share their suffering
and realized that they were carrying this history from the other
side, but with the same degree of pain.
We went as a group to a concentration camp and prayed
together at the site of the crematorium. By the end of our time
there, we were no longer two tribes looking at each other with
suspicion and anger across the divide of six million dead. We
were a community. And I was shocked to feel compassion for the
Germans, for the legacy that they inherited. I had the sense
that I wasn't carrying this alone anymore. There in one of the
rooms at the camp, I thought, “Though I walk through the
valley of the shadow of death, you are with me.”
Martina: I can hardly bear reading the diary of Mary's
mother, because if you let it enter you, it's excruciating. I
think to myself, “She lived through it, and I
can't even bear to read it.” But we need to go to
that valley of the shadows first, to come to that place Mary
described, and in my country so few people want to. I needed a
hammer to break through the conspiracy of silence. In fact, I've
lost friends and family who can't understand why I'm committed
to this work. They are suspicious, and they keep asking me,
“Can't you focus on your career? Can't you do something of
real value?” There is so much mistrust and skepticism.
Mary: Even among Jews, there are very few willing to
do this. The largest group of second-generation Holocaust
survivors lives, like I do, in Los Angeles—perhaps fifteen
hundred or so. Of those, maybe one hundred showed up for Second
Generation meetings there. And of that number, three of us went
to Berlin. But I believe that everyone who has a connection to
the Holocaust has land mines in their psyche and you have to
deal with them, especially if your parents were in a
concentration camp. Two years ago, my mother finally allowed
herself to go crazy, although I'm sure if someone had given her
a choice, she wouldn't have. What happened, I think, is that her
defenses fell off in old age. All the trauma came to the
surface, and she went into a state of absolute panic. But it
makes people very uncomfortable and angry when they hear that
the survivors of the camps were not liberated when the camps
were liberated. They don't want to hear it. So I can understand
why people love Anne Frank, because she left us with the naïve
perception of the world she had while she was still in hiding.
I'm sure that if someone had interviewed her in Bergen-Belsen
before she died, she would no longer have believed that all
human beings are good at heart.
Martina: You know, I have trouble with the word
“forgiveness” because, to me, what happened in the
Holocaust is unforgivable, unforgivable. When I began
these dialogues, I had never sat with people who were survivors,
or descendants of survivors, and I was full of fear. But it was
a sense of responsibility for the collective that made me
realize, “I have to do this.”
Mary: It is unforgivable. Simon
Wiesenthal said, “Forgive them not, for they knew what
they were doing.” And yet to sit in a room with people who
are working so hard to grapple with their history, with this
collective suppression, to sit still and listen to their stories
and absorb them into my being, made something happen inside me.
I don't know if it was forgiveness, but there was a sense of
profound gratitude. And I was fully alive in that room.
There was something so enlivening and energizing, inside and
outside.
Martina: The intensity of that connection is so much
more than friendship. You feel the potential for a human being
to be united, to be connected, to be related, having overcome
the feeling of being individuals. Now, there are some people who
do this because they need a process, they need
affirmation—like, “I'm a good German” or
“I'm a good Jew.” But in this work, we need more
than egocentric model; there needs to be a motive for something
else, something more.
Mary: It's not even about the Holocaust anymore.
It's not just about Jews and Germans. We are helping to heal a
very profound wound in the collective psyche, as Judith Thompson
of One by One has said, and I believe this work is rippling out
far more deeply than we realize. I feel I was born to bear
witness to this history and to alchemically transform it into
something that can help.
And there is an acceleration in this, a quantum dimension.
Our experiences have evolved into going to Bosnia, where the
people were dealing with their own atrocity. They were really
raw. We walked into their lives five years after the war, and it
was like staring at my mother five years after the Holocaust. I
saw people frozen in their grief, unable to articulate it,
unable to cry, unable to mourn. The women were impeccably
dressed. We sat in a circle of perhaps a hundred
people—Muslims, Serbs, Croats. Nobody shed a tear. And the
facilitators used us as a scare tactic because, for the people
in that circle, looking at us was like staring at their children
fifty years from now. A lot of second-generation descendants of
the Holocaust, like myself, carry post-traumatic stress; we have
rage, we have anger, we have mysterious psychosomatic and
life-threatening illnesses. In fact, research suggests that
extreme trauma is transmitted at cellular levels to six
successive generations, which means that I got it before I was
born. But I have said that the Holocaust is the “gift that
keeps on giving,” and the facilitators used us to send
this message to the Bosnians: “This is what you're looking
at if you don't start dealing with your trauma now.” It
was like two generations of genocide looking at each other
across the barriers of time. And it worked. It worked beyond our
wildest expectations, and they began to open up to each other
and talk.
Martina: When you begin to have courage and listen to
each other and face history, a miracle can happen. It's hard to
find words for it. There's something more that emerges between
two people or in a group. Maybe transformation is the right
word. You change. You are not the same person that you were
before. [Jewish theologian] Martin Buber gave me an explanation
for what unfolds when there is this deep connection—he
called it the “in-between world.” When the
relationship intensifies, this “in-between” emerges
as something more than the “I” and the
“thou.” He would call it God, and although I'm not a
religious person, I can feel the quality of it. It can be like a
catharsis. People are very exhausted, emotionally exhausted, and
at the same time—
Mary:—liberated.