How do you think our society can come to terms with traumatic events such as the Holocaust?
Although Australia is often called a lucky country, I soon realized that the Aboriginal people were traumatized. They were traumatized by being excluded from society and denied any sovereignty over the land. During the 1930s, they were excluded from the city at six o’clock every evening. Excluded from the city in their own country. I saw the health crisis and the crisis of hope among them. In a way, I was fascinated by this. But victims don’t exist for us to be fascinated. They exist for us to record their stories, to remember them, and to permanently engrave them in the landscape.
My experience with trauma is solely from the role of an observer. Besides Schindler’s List, I’ve written several novels about the crisis of the Aboriginal people, but also about the Eritreans in East Africa. In my opinion, Eritreans are now the people most similar to the Jews, especially because of the number of victims in every family. They were killed by famine, Mengistu, and the Eritrean regime itself since 1993. Many of the refugees on boats heading to Europe are Eritreans. These are people who have already lost their clan, people who have already been scarred. But they are so resilient that when you give them just a little bit of support, they get up and leave. We, the Western countries, of course, don’t have a system for opening doors to refugees. But we have to find one, damn it. Otherwise, the victimization of huge numbers of people will continue, generation after generation.
I’m aware that Australia’s strength lies in the fact that it is so distant from everyone, except the New Zealanders, who also don’t harbor hatred toward us. And so, as I said, we have a happy environment here. However, we do accept people who have been traumatized, including those who survived the Holocaust. But we should be accepting more people from modern-day catastrophes, which we all face and which we, as Australians, struggle to deal with.
Decades after World War II, issues like survivor’s syndrome or survivor guilt were not talked about at all. Even psychologists and psychiatrists only started addressing this subject in the 1960s, and intergenerational trauma much later. Do you think the care for survivors and their descendants is at a sufficient level today?
In all cultures, there was something that worked remarkably from an outsider’s perspective. Former prisoners became refugees living without papers in camps across Europe, who then made their way to places like Canada, the USA, South America, Australia, and New Zealand. And it’s very interesting that they faced a big challenge—having small children. I don’t know if I’d want to have children after going through what they did. Telling those little children they’re Jews and there are a lot of people who hate them for no reason. Managing that transition and leading a normal family, having children. These children are now indebted; they are like a group that settled among themselves, they are like parents. It’s a tough test they had to overcome while also building a company or a medical practice, or whatever they were doing in society. And so, I’m amazed at how little psychiatric help Holocaust survivors needed.
It’s clear, however, that those who survived (let’s say now asylum seekers), who come from some terrible place, from some terrible camp in Syria or Jordan, want help with work. They want to exist, and they’re being attacked by the need to secure food in a world where food is becoming more and more expensive. They want to be needed, they don’t want someone to help them with housing. Because of the games immigration plays with asylum seekers in every Western country, refugees are welcomed about as much as the Jews were in 1939 in New York, Canada, England, or Australia. That means they are not very welcome. We strip them of their humanity by pretending they are not worthy of a place in society. We are good at recognizing the horrors of the past. We’re not as good at healing the horrors of the present.
And what about you and trauma? How do you cope with being a witness to trauma?
Well, I doubt I’ve experienced a lot of it in my life. But I must say that when I wrote about the war in Eritrea for several newspapers, I couldn’t believe that such horror existed and wasn’t globally known. It seems that we are allowed to know less about Africans than about other people. For some reason, it’s considered desirable to report less about wars in Africa. The war in Eritrea was very bad, and even as just an observer, I saw enough to traumatize my somewhat neurotic soul.
One of the worst things was the disfigurement of human faces. People lost their faces because of cluster bombs, the dropping of which was denied by Mengistu and his government. People who no longer have faces. We often don’t like our faces, but it’s the only one we have. And without a face, we become horrific to those around us. It’s quite traumatizing to see such consequences. So, that’s the closest to trauma I’ve experienced. I’ve had a happy life. You know, I live in an incredibly happy country, and I have the luxury of being really very happy.
Do you think enough has been said about the Holocaust, or do you feel there will never be too many stories?
As long as you don’t look at individual stories, large events like the plague, the Irish famine, or the Holocaust seem anonymous. They are unique, especially because they don’t tell children anything until they hear the story. And so, we’ll need each of these stories, which are as individual as fingerprints. There’s a different dynamic at play here. We need not fear that the stories will be repetitive. The key is the story. You can only escape from mere statistics through the use of a story. You can only jump into human reality, into human intimacy, through a story.
Meeting Brno is about meeting and sharing. How did you feel during your week in Brno and all those meetings?
I feel that the trip to Brněnec was very important for me in my old age. I just hope I still have enough time to at least write something about that experience and to explore it a little bit.
It was also great to see Oliwia. To see her now at thirty and observe how she feels indebted for having provided a symbol that she didn’t realize when she was a child. She played the role of a child passing through a scene she only half-understood and half-was hurt by, until she became a victim herself. That’s a scene that is a phenomenon of all catastrophic scenarios. It’s easy to be sentimental about children and conflicts, but children are caught up in them, and there’s no avoiding it. Everywhere there’s a disaster, there’s a child like that. Oliwia now works with Ukrainian refugees, so it was (I dare say) a very comforting meeting. She is also a charming woman, and it’s wonderful to talk to her.
It was a wonderful evening when I met her for the first time. And it’s thanks to the clever people from Meeting Brno who organized it, and I feel indebted to them.
