A Child Of War E-Book

Ewa Reid-Hammer

• Herausgeber: Next Chapter
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Beschreibung

War leaves marks you can't see from the outside.

But inside, a tempest of trauma rages. Consumed by darkness and depression in the aftermath of war, Ewa Reid-Hammer's story is the journey of a terrified child's transformation to adulthood.

Reflecting on the emotional wounds left not only on herself, but those close to her, Ewa's story is one of survival, and self-recovery in the face of distress.

From horror to healing, her story reveals the truth of what it is to be a child of war.

Leseprobe

A CHILD OF WAR

EWA REID-HAMMER

Contents

Introduction

I. The Nightmare

1. The War

2. Boots

3. Tiger Shooting

4. Bonfire

5. A Train Ride to Nowhere

6. New Nannies

7. Saying Goodbye

8. A Skit for their Return

9. Going Away

10. Stolen Apples

11. Losing Anne

12. Arriving in Belgium

13. End of Journey

II. Living in Darkness

14. Little Poland

15. Cut off from the World

16. Sacred Duty

17. Family Trauma

18. A Polish Upbringing

19. Fear, Courage and Duty

20. Values

21. Rebellion

22. Searching for Safety

23. Disintegration

24. Effects of Trauma

25. Coping Strategies and Beginnings of Insight

III. Waking from the Nightmare

26. Searching for Meaning

27. The Hero’s Journey

IV. Healing the Pain

28. Finding Love

29. Emergence

30. Facing the Pain

31. Understanding and Empathy

32. Forgiveness

33. Opening the Heart: Reconciliation

34. Dedication To Higher Goal

V. Afterword

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About the Author

Notes

Copyright (C) 2020 Ewa Reid-Hammer

Layout design and Copyright (C) 2022 by Next Chapter

Published 2022 by Next Chapter

Cover art by Cover Mint

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the author’s permission.

Suffering is part of human experience. This book is dedicated to everyone searching to heal the pain, and to those who have supported me, especially my sister, Helen.

Introduction

At the center of my existence, in a place I am always very reluctant to visit, there is a deep dark lake of sorrow, despair, anguish, pain, loss. It was there from the very beginning and I lived at its edge until my early twenties when I read a book on Reality Therapy. This book told me that I didn’t have to live with my pain, that I could choose to be happy instead. I made a conscious rational decision to do so and was able to cut off completely for many years from that place. I truly believed that I had left it behind forever and had moved ahead in a positive way. It took a long time to realize that I had never left at all, that it was always with me, a part of me. That totally out of my conscious awareness, it continued to affect and influence every aspect of my life: my thoughts, feelings, actions and relationships with others.

As a young child, I slept with a sharp knife under my pillow. I knew I was not strong enough to kill an attacker, but I could kill myself, thus avoiding unbearable torture and pain. This made me feel safe, gave me a sense of control over my fate.

I learned young that nothing lasted so that it made no sense to attach myself. Parents would leave, home and possessions would have to be abandoned. And I knew by the time I was two years old, that neither parents nor other adults have the power to protect themselves or me from being hurt, to keep me safe.

In the past, I never wanted to share these memories. In time, I have become aware to what extent I was affected, and my life shaped by the war and its aftermath. Even though these experiences were not understood at the time, and are only partially consciously remembered, they have had a determining impact on my personality, relationships and life. I think that such impact is often misunderstood and underestimated in the case of adults, but especially in that of children. I want to explore the long-term effects war experiences have on lives that have been scorched by them. I want to share with others the fact that in the words of Oliver Wendell Holmes: “In our youth, our lives were touched by fire”. Though we may try, as I did for years, we can never leave that past behind or exorcise it. It is with us forever. Perhaps, we can come to terms with it by understanding and sharing that insight with others.

“For perhaps we are like stones; our own history and the history of the world embedded in us, we hold a sorrow deep within and cannot weep until that history is sung.” (Susan Griffin: “A Chorus of Stones”)

Telling the story, especially in writing, has the effect of shining a spotlight on the past, illuminating its dark corners and revealing its hidden meaning. This leads to a new and different, possibly liberating perspective on events that until now have been a fossilized memory of undifferentiated pain.

This is the story of a very frightened, traumatized child, who grew up to be a frightened, traumatized adult, and her journey from Good Friday, a place of suffering and death, to Easter Sunday, the place of new meaning-new life.

As Matthew Fox wrote: “Good Friday rules for a short period. But the longer period is the new life and the victory over death and the fear of death that Easter Sunday represents. It is that hope that rises daily with every new sun. Moving beyond the fear of death we can live fully again and cease our immortality projects, our empire building and pyramid constructing (wall street too) and get on with…living. Which is sharing. Now our fear of death does not have to rule our lives. Now we can live fully, generously and creatively."

The trauma of violence, which surrounds us and to which we are a helpless witness, creates a mysterious and hidden wound. It is hard to understand and accept; it is easier to deny. Others, trying to be helpful and puzzled by your pain will say: Nothing so terrible actually happened to you, get over it”, and you yourself will deny the effects following the exhortations of friends to let go of the past, to move on. But acknowledged or not, the festering wound remains unhealed, deep within the psyche wreaking damage and devastation on the inner landscape. In the outer world it is expressed by paralysis, an inability to take risks or express creativity, a rigidity and refusal to open to life. The inner kingdom lies a fallow wasteland. It is the wound of the Fisher King and it awaits a knight in search of the Grail who knows the right question, in order for it to be healed.

The quest is the psycho-spiritual journey undertaken with the goal of achieving an inner balance between the inner world and outer one in which we live. The knight is one who accepts the challenge of the quest, which is fraught with many dangers. It can be refused, but once accepted there is no way back. It must be seen through to the end. If successful, the hero returns home with a precious gift for the community.

The trauma of violence causes an existential wound, but what is the nature of this wound, and what is the question that can heal it?

Survivors of an epic trauma have a mission to never forget, to keep it alive in their own consciousness and that of the world so that it will never again be allowed to happen. We feel we owe this to the victims who did not survive, and to future generations.

It is important to make sure such events are not forgotten. When, however, we identify with them they start distorting our very being in fundamental ways, so that in the end we ourselves become that which we condemn, despise and deplore. There is a way of remembering and honoring the past without turning it into a present, which distorts history and human lives.

My story is the journey from trauma, which left me with a false identity, through anger, depression, terror and denial, finally to a transformative understanding, which allowed me to find the meaning of my experience. War is not the only cause of trauma. In fact, my deeper trauma came not from the war itself, which I was too young to understand and fully experience, but rather from its aftermath: the wounds sustained by my parents and those around me, which unhealed distorted their life and mine. Trauma does not always look dramatic from the outside. It is what happens to the victim on the inside that matters.

I had worked with or known many people, who experienced despair rooted in past trauma, and unrelated to their present life. The trauma could have happened recently or many years ago. It could have been a single unexpected, horrific event shattering a person like a bomb, or a

sequence of ongoing, painful or frightening events like indoctrination or solitary confinement, for example, which in time wear away a person’s identity and corrode their soul.

Or, it could have been a sequence of smaller wounds inflicted with regularity so they never heal, so that even though each in itself is not life threatening, over a period of time they can cause death from loss of blood.

Trauma can be a combination of both acute and chronic events, and it can happen to a single individual, to entire communities. Persecution for political, religious, ethnic or other reasons, such as the attempted extermination of Jews by Hitler, or of Kurds by Saddam Hussein, of Tutsis by Hutus or of Armenians by Turks to name just a few of a long list of genocides, traumatizes entire peoples. War traumatizes entire nations.

A single violent event like an exploding bomb, sends shock waves that kill or maim all those in its perimeter, and have a profound negative and often lasting effect all those connected to the victims: family, friends, community, even strangers. The soldier returning from Iraq with PTSD, suffering a breakdown and shooting ten people in the public square, has not only destroyed himself and his family but also the ten strangers he shot. He has had a traumatizing effect on the entire community.

Less dramatic but equally painful is the destruction of an individual, and the aftereffects on all those who loved him. The Vets who come home unable to connect emotionally with friends or family, unable to adjust to civilian life, unable to get over the rage and alienation which form the everyday fabric of their life are not only unable to move on to a brighter future, but cannot help contaminating anyone they touch with their anger and despair.

Effects of trauma are as varied as the people subjected to it. They depend on the person, the severity of the trauma and circumstances during and after. The effects are often physical, though not always easily connected with the trauma. They are always psychological. A person undergoing frightening and incredibly painful experiences must erect defenses that will enable him/her to survive. Once the threat is removed, these life-saving defenses, no longer needed, actually get in the way of moving ahead in life, but they become difficult to abandon. There is also the inevitable fact of viewing life thereafter through the lens of trauma. Intimate relationships are distorted or destroyed, and there is a negative impact on career and creativity. Shockwaves of a broken life reverberate through the family and community.

The following two stories come from books, but they reflect the experience of thousands upon thousands of victims of war and violence. They demonstrate the possibility of healing.

Unbroken: A WWII story of Survival, Resillience and Redemption, by Laura Hillenbrand.

Zamperini’s bomber was shot down in the Pacific and he survived for days in a life raft with no food or water and despite shark attacks and shootings from a Japanese gunboat. Finally captured, he then experienced the beatings and torture, the starvation rations and terrible living conditions in a Japanese POW camp.

After the end of the War, he returned to the States and married, but quickly descended into a desperate spiral of alcohol and anger that threatened his marriage and his life. Miraculously, after connecting with Billy Graham he was able to let go of his anger and desire for revenge. He stopped drinking and became an inspirational speaker and advocate for troubled youths.

I Shall Not Hate: A Gaza Doctor's Journey on the Road to Peace and Human Dignity, by

Dr. Izzeldin Abuelaish.

As the eldest son having to care for his family because of his father's illness, the author had a childhood of hardship and starvation in a poor refugee village in Gaza, after the family was forced off their land in Israel. Despite all odds, he became a doctor and the first Palestinian to work in an Israeli hospital forging close links with colleagues. While living in a refugee camp in Gaza, with no opportunities for his children, the daily humiliation of crossing into Israel for work, he lost his wife to leukemia, and then lost 3 of his daughters when the Israelis fired into his home in the Gaza strip. His daughters died simply because they had been sleeping against "the wrong wall" that evening. Despite these tragic events, he refuses to hate and continues to work for peace between the two peoples.

We all know of Nelson Mandela, who spent over thirty years in prison because of his opposition to Apartheid, before winning the Nobel Peace Prize in 1993, and being inaugurated as the first democratically elected president of South Africa. Not embittered by his suffering, he was able to lead his country forward toward healing its wounds.

The Dalai Lama lost his country and helplessly watched for years it being devastated and his people being tortured and killed. He has spent his life in exile. Yet he refuses to preach hatred against the oppressors and continues to call for peace and understanding.

How did these people do it? How did they transform feelings of anger and hate, the understandable desire for revenge, into feelings and actions that were healing for them and all those around them? How did they move from alienation to connection?

Transformation can happen in many different ways including spiritual/religious epiphany, art/music, or good works. It is the process of moving away from the past of an impotent victim of trauma, to the future of a survivor, who can not only move ahead creatively through life, but having been in hell, guide others out of the abyss. There is a different, better way to handle suffering. The scars can become a testament to experience, courage and healing instead of a focus for endless suffering.

My own journey from trauma is the story of transforming the fear and pain into understanding and forgiveness. My painful experiences became understood as a necessary, if difficult, preparation for my mission in life and for helping me develop into who I truly am, my real self. The process was an inward re-orientation from ‘Me’ and my pain, to the ‘Other’, and his/her suffering. As a result, I became able to find and pursue a path of service, which gave meaning to my life, and which freed me from the demons of my past. Nothing is perfect and I still have a long way to go. But I am on the right path.

My goal in writing this book was to provide hope, encouragement and some guideposts for all those on the difficult journey of healing.

PARTI

The Nightmare

ONE

The War

People need certain things to give them psychological grounding and stability. Loss of love, peace, feelings of safety, or one’s home causes trauma. Trauma leaves scars.

In my case, everything was lost.

In the fall of 1939, Germany invaded Poland. I was born three years later, in Nazi occupied Warsaw. My parents and extended family stayed at the time in a large apartment building belonging to my grandparents in the heart of the capital. Before the war, my grandparents had used it as a pied-a-terre, where they stayed when they had business in town, or for the social events of the winter season. The rest of the time, they resided on their four thousand acre estate, about sixty miles from the city, which in the pre-war days of horse-drawn carriages was a long ride. On the estate was located my grandfather’s sugar beet plantation and sugar producing plant. Four hundred acres of woods and parkland surrounded a small twenty-eight room manor and lake. There, my Grandmother presided over staff, family and children. It was there that my Father grew up with his younger brother and three sisters.

By the time I was born, the world of their childhood had been taken over by the invader, and my family had taken up residence in Warsaw. Gone was the power and control my Grandfather, a wealthy landowner and industrialist, exercised before the war. Gone was the free and easy lifestyle he and the family had enjoyed. Their entire life was now circumscribed by nightly curfews and threatened by random street roundups, arrests and executions. Grandfather was forced by the Germans to continue overseeing the sugar production from his plant, and was required to ship by rail all of the product to the German army. They did not know that he did his bit for the resistance by diverting every fourth bag to them. Sugar was a scarce and valuable commodity during the occupation and it could easily be sold on the black market with the money going toward the purchase of weapons for the underground army. Discovery of this ‘subversive’ act would have meant instant death for my Grandfather and his assistants.

Now, they all resided on a permanent basis in the family owned Warsaw apartment building. The large, ground-floor apartment was occupied by my grandparents and their help. The entire family often took meals together in their dining room. Because of the nightly curfew it was difficult and dangerous to venture out, so they whiled away the evenings in conversation and card games. The second floor contained several small bachelor pads used by my Dad and his siblings. At the time of my birth, my parents still lived in the now cramped apartment. There was no room for me, so I was shipped up with my nanny, to the third floor where my maternal grandmother lived. Although she did not like little children, finding them a noisy nuisance, since there was no other convenient place, grandmother agreed to let us move in.

I have no memories of my first year, but from stories I was later told I learned that despite the unusual circumstances, my life was as routine and predictable as could be. My nanny took me to mother for nursing every three hours. I slept, woke, and was diapered on a strictly regular schedule, as babies in those days were. I loved my nanny who cared for me day and night and thought she was my “mommy.”

When I was about twenty months old, something happened, the details of which are hazy in my mind, but the imprint of the event would beetched inside my body and nervous system.

In the summer of 1944, my life was routine and uneventful. My parents must have made a great effort to provide this semblance of normalcy in my daily existence, while the whole world around them was spinning crazily out of control on the edge of a precipice.

Every day, they faced news of imprisonment, torture and death of relatives or friends. These were not strangers, whose tragedies one heard about on the radio or read in the papers. These were people they knew and cared about, people they loved; people they grew up with or worked with under difficult and dangerous circumstances. They were often comrades in the underground resistance movement.

My Dad was an officer in the underground army. His task was to head up a unit of men, train them for action, procure and store armaments in secret caches, and be ready for the anticipated battle against the occupant. There were orders for subversive action to be executed. Attempts were made to free political prisoners. Usually, two or three men would attack the guards during a transfer to another prison or, to the Gestapo interrogation headquarters. Bombs and other explosives were used to disrupt enemy objectives. When a Gestapo agent or SS-man particularly distinguished himself for cruelty, he was targeted for execution by underground Headquarters. Collaborators and other traitors were also on the hit list, as were businesses catering to the enemy. When my Dad received an order, it was his duty to arrange for its effective execution.

To coordinatesubversive activities and maintain communication between the various units and central Headquarters, it was essential to have a reliable liaison corps. Since most of the men were in the underground army, this task fell to the women, who were less conspicuous in their wanderings throughout the city. Often they were Scout Leaders and Girl Guides1 whose pledge to serve God and Country put them in the ranks of freedom fighters. The job was extremely dangerous. When they were caught, they did not die a quick or easy death. Because their work required them to know the location and at least the pseudonyms of the general staff and the unit commanders they were delivering orders to, they faced relentless torture in the Gestapo interrogation chambers. Betraying one’s comrades to certain agonizing death was the ultimate fear. They carried cyanide pills to take when they could bear no more, but sometimes the pills were found and taken away; sometimes they waited too long until it was too late. It is amazing how few of these heroic women broke and betrayed their trust. My mom was a Girl Scout Troop leader assigned to liaison duty.

Warsaw was under military occupation. Citizens had no rights. Anyone looking suspicious to any German was immediately stopped, searched and frequently hauled in for a more thorough interrogation. Because of the danger of being found with incriminating documents, liaison workers had to find creative and ingenious ways to conceal them. My mother decided that although the Nazis were exhaustive in their searches, even they would have little enthusiasm for examining a baby’s dirty diapers. A thin waterproof pouch was inserted between two diapers and pinned on me. My Mom took me for a walk to visit friends. My diaper was changed in due course and the return trip home was much safer and more relaxed. When she became pregnant with my sister, especially toward the end of the pregnancy and for a few months after, my Dad was reluctant for Mom to perform her dangerous duties; so he would carry them out instead. Mom did not like him to do it. She felt that a woman with a child was less likely to be stopped by the Germans. Dad was adamant, however, and unless he was tied up by his own responsibilities he took me in my carriage with the little package securely wrapped around my behind.

As a small child, I knew nothing of all these matters. I liked the walks to the park with my beloved nanny, Danda. Her real name was Wanda, but I was just starting to talk and couldn’t pronounce her name, so she became Danda. Walks with Danda were fun. We went to the park, where she sat on a bench and talked to the other nannies, while I sat in the carriage and watched older children running around and playing. Sometimes I took a nap. Danda was never in a hurry. Walks with Mom or Dad were not like that at all. We never went to the park. We always seemed to walk quickly to some strange place I didn’t know. They changed my diaper and quickly walked back home. They always seemed in a hurry.

One day, my Dad took me for a walk. I was sitting up in the carriage, leaning over to see the sights. We came to a stop at a street corner, when a short way from us I saw a big man in uniform hitting an old man with a stick. The old man was lying on the ground. I did not understand what was happening and I did not know many words yet, but I did know the word for the bad man in uniform.

Excitedly, I leaned out as far as I could toward him, and pointing my finger shouted at the top of my lungs: Shvab! Shvab! (This was a pejorative name the Poles used for the enemy.)

My Father violently pushed me down inside the carriage. As I opened my mouth to scream in protest, he hissed at me: “Be quiet and don’t move.” There was something frightening in his voice and demeanor. The scream died in my throat. I lay quiet and motionless all the way home. I could not move my arms or legs. I could not make a sound. I was too scared to even cry.

This was the first time that violence and fear entered my short life. In subsequent years I would experience that jolt of fear again and again, piercing my body like electricity or lightning. Like that time, long ago, it would leave me paralyzed with terror. In retrospect, this was my first personal experience of the war, which would soon take center stage in my life, and which to this day remains its most defining event.

TWO

Boots

After the birth of my sister, Helen, in April of 1944, we moved in with my parents to a larger apartment on the second floor, still in the large apartment building owned by Grandfather, but this one containing two bedrooms. The building was located in central Warsaw, on a lovely tree-lined avenue.One night, about three months later, a terrifying incident took place, one that would mark my young mind forever.

I woke with a start. It was very dark, but the night was not quiet as usual. Something was very wrong.

Heavy boots were stomping up the marble steps leading to our floor. The stillness of the night was shattered by loud banging on the front door. I started to cry, but my cries were drowned by the banging. It sounded like someone was breaking down our door.

I saw the light go on in the next room, and heard my Father moving andmy baby sister crying. Soon, he came out in his dressing robe and unlocked the front door.

I heard strange, loud voices. Presently, two huge men in big boots turned on the big light in my bedroom. They looked at me, walked past the bed, and started making a big mess in my room, throwing things on the floor like two naughty kids. I hid my head under the blanket. I didn’t know who they were or what they were doing, but I felt very scared. After a while, they turned the big light off and left my room. I peeked out from under my blanket. There were clothes and toys thrown all over the floor. Danda won’t like this mess, I thought.

When they left my room, there was more talking in the hall. My room was dark, but I could partly see into the hall. The men in boots stood there, talking in a strange language I didn’t understand. From my parents’ room, I heard Mom’s voice saying softly: “May God protect you”. I didn’t know what she meant. She sounded very upset. Helen was wailing again, and Mom hushed her.

My dad came out of the bedroom, all dressed. He followed the men in boots downstairs and into the street. Somehow, I knew that he didn’t want to go with them, that he wanted to stay home with us.

I lay motionless, not making a sound until I was sure they were gone. Then I lay silent and still, making sure they were not coming back. I was paralyzed with fear.

Suddenly, I heard a sound I had never heard before. It came from the room next door. It took a while for me to realize that my Mother was crying. I had never heard a grownup cry before. I thought only kids cried and parents made them better. This made me even more terrified than the men in boots who took Daddy away. Everything was too scary. I shut my eyes tight and covered my head again with the blanket. But I couldn’t keep out the sound of her sobs. After a long time, I fell asleep and in my dreams I heard Boots on the stairs, and my Mother crying.

The next afternoon, Daddy came back, and seemingly all was well. As was the custom, no one explained anything to the children. I’m not sure what I was capable of understanding at that stage anyway. But the terror of that night remained locked in my body. For many, many years I had nightmares of bad men in Boots coming in the night to get me.

When I was much older, I learned from my parents what really happened that night. The Gestapo was looking for a certain freedom fighter and mistakenly arrested my Father. After interrogating him, they realized he was not the man they wanted and released him. This was a miracle in itself, as usually, once someone fell into the hands of the Gestapo they did not get out so easily, if at all. Mother, knowing full well of Dad’s underground activities, naturally thought they were after him, and believed she would never see him alive.

That night she lost her milk and was unable to nurse the baby again. It happened at the worst possible time, as within a couple of weeks the Warsaw uprising would begin. It would last two months, and leave us homeless. Towards the end, all food would be scarce, and that suitable for a five month old infant, especially milk, almost impossible to find. Later, Helen would develop rickets due to inadequate nutrition at that time.

THREE

Tiger Shooting

As the Germans were being pressed on the western front by the Allies, Soviet troops were marching full steam across eastern Poland toward Warsaw. In the last weeks of August, it became very clear that it was they, rather than the western forces that were going to ‘liberate’ Warsaw. This presented a major problem for the Poles. Desperate as they were to get out from under the Nazi yoke, most of them had equal fears of a Soviet occupation. The decision was made, by leaders of the underground together with the government in exile situated in London, that Warsaw had to make a critical attempt to free itself. This, the reasoning went, would prevent the Soviets from using the guise of liberation to take over the capital and the country.