Quite Without Informed Consent!

I watched a programme on the History Channel the other evening featuring newly discovered film of Holocaust victims.  We have, of course, mostly seen it, or its like,  before if we watch that particular channel and so feelings are blunted.  It’s not quite as easy to be disturbed by the horrifying content as it once was.

Nevertheless, I was taken aback by the tale of a young woman, forced to strip naked at Babi Yar and kneel in a ravine with hundreds of others waiting to be shot in the head.    She was one of the lucky survivors and somehow or other when hours had passed, disentangled herself from the bodies about her, climbed out of the gargantuan grave and after the war began to live her life once more – normally, it appears.

I could not help wondering how she did so and what nightmares lay in wait for her. How did she cope with the infiltrating memories of her unspeakable ordeal and suffering?  Then I began to wonder what makes some people more than capable of handling indescribable trauma.  What gives them the strength to adapt and consider themselves lucky to be living – whilst others seek counseling because their parents did not pay them enough attention for their liking, perhaps because a career structure claimed the larger part of their focus and the quality time just didn’t cut the mustard.   One middle aged man noted recently, with a great deal of bitterness and anger,  that during his childhood and adolescence his mother had been far too smothering to be ideal whilst his father was largely absent on account of work commitments.  To add insult to injury, as helpless infants he and his siblings had been immunized against killer diseases totally without their consent!

It was difficult to know how to respond.