found in this account, as a few seem to believe, it should be chalked up to that.
I cannot see how he could recount this without a feeling of bitterness. He is still hurting, and strangely enough, very determined to stay at the same place that hated him so much.
To have seen what his eyes had seen, and to further know what he knows was done as the result of the Nazi belief he was not a human, but a 'dirty rat,' an enemy to mankind as they told their people for years leading up to this event - such things are not likely to be forgotten.
I had a chance to be in an suburban psychiatrist hospital in the eighties and get to know people there. One in particular became particularly attached to me and had several bad days.
He was an old man, who survived a concentration camp. I forgot which one. I spoke with his grand children who brought him in as he was having one of his flashback episodes.
He showed me the crudely made tattoo on one arm, with his number scrawled on his skin. Like a piece of livestock.
He was terrified in the evenings, as the facility had security, not for the patients in this very modern, pleasant facility who patrolled the grounds at night and checked the doors.
He was obsessed with the thought, crazy as it was after all these years, that these were the very same guards in the camp forty years earlier.
He kept saying, 'They will come in soon, we must hide, they are going to come in here.' And I kept assuring him they would not, but he wasn't really there, you know?
No, he was back in the days when the guards came in to beat them and do other things, or drag them out and kill them. The change in milieu did not mean a thing. The flood of memory distorted the present.
I've been around people in the midst of what is called a 'psychotic break.' They are not in the 'here and now,' they cannot escape their nightmare.
I suggest any criticism of this account should be judged in that context. As late as the sixties, I knew Jews in my city whose parents had fled Germany and were first generation. The simple mention of Germany, the language, or anything, freaked them out. They were not being politically correct nor did they seek pity. They were panicked.
Who is to say if this is the best way to describe what happened in those days?
I know people in Norway whose grandparents dealt with the fallout of Nazi occupation; others who are in Germany of this and older generations who saw first hand what we have not and the history books have sanitized.
Anyone can fault Jews for anything they want, but their paranoia is not a fraud. If anyone believes that this did not happen, they should get to know some Jews firsthand.
JMHO.
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