It is tempting when one has never been the victim of vicious violence or terrible injustice, to fall prey to the romantic notion that suffering inevitably ennobles the soul. It is not always so.
In some cases those who have suffered terribly are left to wade through generations of bitterness, resentment, and anger. There seems to be no end to the dark tunnel of tragedy that continues to unfold from the hurts of the past.
I had always naively hoped that people who, by some unimaginable good fortune, survived the horrors of the Second World War would have come through the experience possessed of a deep affirmation of the power of life and the indomitable resilience of the human spirit. According to Dana Kletter the wounds of 1939-1945 did not necessarily come to an end with “liberation.”
Dana Kletter is a writer and musician who lives in San Franciso. Writing in the December issue of “The Sun” magazine, Kletter tells the story of her grandmother and her mother who by a strange twist of fate “passed through ghetto, boxcar, Auschwitz, Birkenau, Buchenwald” with their physical lives, but nothing much else, still intact. They survived but lost almost everything.
Kletter writes,
My mother and grandmother emerged at the end of the war liberated of everything: family, friends, home. They had nothing left but hate.
Hatred is a tragic legacy of a system built on hatred and destruction. It is a legacy transmitted from generation to generation.
So we learned to hate, we, the children and grandchildren, and we became like them, giving in to fury like Dionysians to ecstasy. We battled each other ferociously until we were bloodied. And when our fights we over, we would pick our injured bodies up off the floor and walk away, no apologies.
So the horror of Holocaust continues. The poison of Nazism passes from parent to child. Death flows in the bloodstream of the descendents of pain.
In the face of so much death, the world cries out for pioneers of life to stand at the frontier of forgiveness forging new paths through the darkness.
In the end Dana Kletter’s mother chose to become one of those pioneers. Soon after Dana’s grandmother Anyu died, Kletter’s mother stood in her own mother’s home and
shouted, ‘I know what you want! You want me to forgive you. I forgive you, Anyu. I forgive you.’ She stood in the living room in a kind of ecstasy, eyes closed.
Forgiveness is the only power with the capacity to break the cycle of violence, anger, and hatred.
Forgiveness is never easy and no one can tell another when the time has come that makes forgiveness possible. But, there comes a point when the demand for human “justice”, has run its course. There is a moment in every tortured human relationship when a space opens and it becomes possible to let go of the past and imagine a future that finds a new way through the wilderness.
Forgiveness is not forgetting. It does not mean wiping out or in any way diminishing the terrible wrongs of the past. To forget the Holocaust is to risk losing sight of the inhumanity of which human beings are capable and to repeat the worst horrors of our species.
Forgiveness means letting go of the need to make right that which can never be fixed.
If the Holocaust teaches anything, it surely teaches that there are certain wrongs that simply cannot be made right. The scales of justice will never be perfectly balanced. There is no way to get even, no way to fix what has been so terribly broken. We either continue suffering from the hurt and transmit that hurt to others, or we stand in the middle of the living room and shout
‘I forgive you, Anyu. I forgive you.’
We say ‘Today, by forgiveness, I make a breach in the fortification of resentment. I choose to let go of my need for resolution. I surrender my demand for life to be tidily balanced according to my vision of the way life should be. I release those who have so long held me in their grip and refuse any longer to give them power in my life.’
This is the power of forgiveness. It is the only power stronger than the violence of the past. It is the only choice that has the potential redeem the horror towards which we humans seem so often to be inexorably drawn. Forgiveness opens us to the possibility of a new frontier.
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January 26, 2012 at 10:37 pm
lindsay
“We say ‘Today, by forgiveness, I make a breach in the fortification of resentment. I choose to let go of my need for resolution. I surrender my demand for life to be tidily balanced according to my vision of the way life should be. I release those who have so long held me in their grip and refuse any longer to give them power in my life.’”
*like*
January 27, 2012 at 12:08 am
jaqueline
Forgiveness is essentially us giving up not just our need but our right to justice, our right to something being fixed..forgiveness costs us: our right to have our lives be what they should have been.
We do have a right to and a need for these things and we feel it in our bones…we have the right to want to expect those who have harmed us to get their due,;we have the right to want those who have harmed us to look us in the eye and say
” I am sorry “.
I hate how Oprah goes on: ” We don’t forgive for the sake of the other person, we forgive for our own sake.” Who is she kidding? That is not forgiveness at all. It is selfishness masked as nobility. It is not forgiveness because it STILL DENIES THE HUMANITY OF THE OTHER which is how hurt originated in the first place.
The day I began to forgive my mother…and I continue to forgive her, was the day I saw her as a human being, someone who had hurt and anguish and broken dreams, who had needs and longings that were so terribly unfulfilled. I FELT for her. I SAW her. And I wept for her. I let her sins toward me go because I no longer saw her as the cause of my hurt, but I saw her as one who hurt too.
That woman in this story could forgive her mother because she loved her. Her anger said it all. She loved her. She recognised her mother’s need for forgiveness. She gave her mother what she needed yet didn’t deserve even though her mother could never give her daughter what she needed and what she did deserve.
I could not for the longest time tell my mum I loved her. Could not because I wasn’t sure I did any more. Until one day I told her how much hurt she had left me with.”I cannot say the nice, sweet I love yous that you think you deserve or are entitled to or that you think a daughter should share with her mum, but the fact, that despite everything, despite being so angry with you, despite the hurt I still feel and despite what you still do to me I keep trying to relate to you; that I will not let you go and just walk away means I love you.”
That’s the ” I love you ” my mum got. And my heart filled with wonder to have proof that I do love my mum, to be able to tell her I loved her, because I did want to tell her, you see, because I know deep down, deep down in each of us despite it all, the reason we do hurt is because we love. And the reason we forgive is because despite it all we are choosing to love that person who has hurt us.
Who forgives much, loves much, after all.
January 27, 2012 at 9:24 am
lindsay
Franz Stangl (on wikipedia) doesn’t seem to have any change of heart until after the court case, and then only when his interviewer let’s him talk ….
“The philosopher John Kekes discusses Stangl and the degree of his responsibility for war crimes in chapter 4 of his book, The Roots of Evil.[15] The court Schwurgericht Düsseldorf found Stangl guilty on October 22, 1970, and sentenced him to death.[9] Since the death penalty was abolished at this time in West Germany, the sentence was automatically commuted to the maximum penalty, life imprisonment. While in prison, Stangl was interviewed extensively by Gitta Sereny, for a study of him published as Into that Darkness:
“ “My conscience is clear about what I did, myself,” he said, in the same stiffly spoken words he had used countless times at his trial, and in the past weeks, when we had always come back to this subject, over and over again. But this time I said nothing. He paused and waited, but the room remained silent. “I have never intentionally hurt anyone, myself,” he said, with a different, less incisive emphasis, and waited again – for a long time. For the first time, in all these many days, I had given him no help. There was no more time. He gripped the table with both hands as if he was holding on to it. “But I was there,” he said then, in a curiously dry and tired tone of resignation. These few sentences had taken almost half an hour to pronounce. “So yes,” he said finally, very quietly, “in reality I share the guilt. . . . Because my guilt . . . my guilt . . . only now in these talks . . . now that I have talked about it all for the first time. . . .” He stopped.
He had pronounced the words “my guilt”: but more than the words, the finality of it was in the sagging of his body, and on his face.
After more than a minute he started again, a half-hearted attempt, in a dull voice. “My guilt,” he said, “is that I am still here. That is my guilt.”[16]“
January 27, 2012 at 8:31 pm
jaqueline
His interviewer let him talk because she approached him as a human, not a monster, and letting him talk as a man, he saw himself and knew and faced it.
I only read an excerpt of this interview, which included this section…in Sereny’s book ” The German Trauma”.
“Into that Darkness” would be too horrendous a journey I think.
January 27, 2012 at 2:46 pm
Tyler
Thank you for these stories.
I think a modern pioneer of forgiveness is Master Charles Cannon – he was a victim of the 2008 Mumbai terrorist attacks, and one of his friends was killed. Instead of being angry at the people that took his friend’s life, Master Charles only spoke of forgiving them. He talks about it in his book “Forgiving the Unforgivable” (http://forgivingtheunforgivable.com) which I have found to be incredibly inspiring.