Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) Support Group
Find support with others who have gone through a traumatic experience. Whether you have chronic or acute PTSD, we are here for you.
Hi, all. For those who are newer here and don't know my history, I grew up in a war zone overseas as a missionary kid and got PTSD there. Back in the USA, I became a hospital chaplain from my own PTSD recovery, working in an ER with trauma patients in Chicago. I got kidney disease and moved from hospital work to teaching nursing students.
One of the courses I teach a lot is about the nursing care of terminal patients. One of our textbooks is On Death and Dying by Elisabeth Kubler Ross, the book that gave us the 5 stages of grief (denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance). She is the doctor who founded hospice and terminal patient care, and she did it because when she was college age she was a volunteer in one of the Nazi death camps after World War II and the Holocaust.
That's why once a semester I take students on a day long field trip to the Holocaust Museum. It's impossible for me or for any teacher to describe the Holocaust in a classroom lecture, even using Youtube or movies. So I take them to the Museum.
When I was growing up as a missionary kid overseas, it turned out that my next door neighbor there was a Holocaust survivor. She was a Jewish lady who told me about it while showing me the tattoo on her arm the Nazis put there when she was in the concentration camp as a teenager. What was sad was that our South American country had turned into a dictatorship like the Nazis had, too, so she had jumped from the frying pan into the fire in escaping there from Europe.
TW
I was picked up by soldiers from that dictatorship's military on my own street in South America and made to kneel in front of the patrol while the officer leading it tried to execute me with his pistol. The pistol jammed twice, and he got impatient and didn't reach for a gun from one of his soldiers, so I miraculously survived meeting him that day. It gave me PTSD, though.
It's a heavy trip to undertake for me, thn, what with my PTSD and all, so I'm asking for your support as I go. I hope I can take care of myself and be a good teacher to others at the same time.
One set of grandparents was actively helping the Resistance with weapons smuggling and communication within the Resistance. My other grandmother had many stories of dealing with the nazis. Like taking on a job for an officer because she refused to let the younger woman he selected go to his house to clean.
Remembering is so, so important. Great that you're taking them, but it's never easy to be faced with the atrocities. Up until the day she died at 98 in December 2017, I could see the effect of that war on my grandmother. I live in a society shaped first-hand by the experience. I was raised among people that were shaped by those experiences. It's a big deal, and it's great there are people out there still treating it as such, even as time moves on.
Much support and good luck!
Anyway, Nooy, I'm at the Holocaust Museum right now. On the top floor there's a bank of computer terminals where they allow you to search the names of survivors. I found the name of my next door neighbor growing up in Uruguay who a Holocaust survivor who showed me her tattoo and described the Holocaust to me for the first time. Her husband recorded an oral history in Spanish in Montevideo, Uruguay for the archives.
I don't know what country you're from that was under Nazi occupation and I don't want to ask in order to respect your anonymity here on DS PTSD. I do know that theirs was Hungary. I knew their individual story from conversations as neighbors and friends. Here I'm learning the context of it.
They were two of a large number (400,000, I think) of Hungarian Jews who were sent to Auschwitz. It's a sobering discovery for me. I know the name of that camp to be fearsome, as are the names "Bergen-Belsen" and "Treblinka," the ones you named.
I had to fight back tears when I found the oral history was recorded here in the Holocaust Museum data bank. Then I got a hold on my emotions so I could push on and learn something more. The story says that she and her husband were 16 at the time. They were in line naked for the "showers" (to be gassed) when an elderly couple somehow swapped places in line with them and saved their lives.
I am curious to know more about the story. For example, a few simple questions I have are:
1) I imagine it must have been quite chaotic, so how did anyone swap places with anyone else in that line? How did it allow for survival? How did they know how to decide between life and death like that?
2) why was that elderly couple so generous as to give their lives for my neighbors? It's extremely moving that they did so. I wish I knew their names in order to honor them, too, in remembrance?
3) how did we wind up being neighbors in Uruguay? In other words, after WW II how did Holocaust survivors emigrate? Were they given choices? Visas? Did they know any Spanish? When I met them they spoke it well, albeit with an accent, of course.
There are many more questions, too, both big and small. I'm just glad I got a little more information here from this visit. I'm glad, too, to know that their oral history has been joined with the many others here in fitting remembrance.
Thank you for your support in my pulling this little thread of familiarity with the one Holocaust survivor I knew growing up. I appreciate your sharing the stories of the brave Holocaust survivors and the members of the resistance in your family. It connects the testimony of my neighbors somehow with a larger context that makes it all more meaningful and therefore more bearable.
It offers a little bit more healing for what happened when Uruguay fell to dictatorship in the 1970s, when I was in my teens. Things happened then like some of those that had happened in Europe in the 1940s, Sometimes they happened to me and gave me PTSD, as I described in the beginning post of this thread.
I'm doing my visit alone today because I couldn't put words to how good that little bit of healing feels if I were walking around right now with a partner. I'm glad I can write about that little bit of healing here at DS PTSD. Remembrance doesn't have to be something that's just painful and to be avoided when it is supported both here by friends like you and by this Museum. Thank you.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dirty_War
It was smaller in the number of people who died, but similar in its causes and effects. So I was glad the Museum's data base showed me good info about that Jewish family of Holocaust survivors I grew up next door to in the Dirty War.
Now I go back to teaching my classes today, and I haven't processed all of that emotion from our field trip yesterday. I'm a bit raw from it instead. That's a bit of a problem, because today is the day of my weekly schedule in which I teach from 9am to 9pm, then have the next day off. Getting through today's 12 hours feeling this raw teaching in front of a classroom is going to be a challenge for me.
Now, on to the ordinary--gotta do my taxes. :-)
That being said the pain lives in us. I believe part of walking our healing path to acknowledging that pain with those we can trust. Speaking our truth will set us free. There is no shame in being a survivor.
You are an amazing person and I would be proud to call you friend. xo