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Not Paradise


by Anna Rosner Blay


Last month I received a book from Australia entitled “Not Paradise by Anna Rosner Blay”. It was an exceptional book. I contacted Anna Blay and checked the web for further material, knowing that this book will resonate with survivors and their families around the world.

Paula David

The following is the announcement that accompanied the publication:  

Anna Rosner Blay, author of Sister, Sister (shortlisted in The Age Book of the Year and the New South Wales Premier's Awards), draws together in her new book Not Paradise the moving and revealing stories of four women who emerged from the horrors of the Holocaust and strove to reconstruct their shattered lives on the opposite side of the globe, in safe, sun-filled Australia.  

She explores their tenacity to hold onto life and keep moving forward – and entwines their stories with her own personal journey beyond the loss and despair of a broken marriage – to weave a compelling and fascinating inquiry into how we understand the past, where we find the courage and resilience to continue in the face of suffering and hardship, and how we can discover a way forward, beyond trauma, to a life of hope and fulfillment.  

Thomas Keneally, author of Schindler's Ark wrote: ‘ Sister Sister is the vivid and intimate tale of two personable sisters who survive the great European catastrophe ... In celebrating these two vigorously human sisters, the author does eloquent honour to all the lost sisters of history. Many will cherish this book.'  

Not Paradise will also claims our hearts and our minds with its careful and intelligent exploration of the young survivors' will to make a new life, and the author's decision to change her own life.  

Alana Rosenbaum, of The Australian Jewish News, reviewed the book on 4 June 2004 . She wrote:

Faced with the task of rebuilding her life after a broken marriage, Anna Rosner Blay turned to elderly Holocaust survivors for guidance and wisdom.

If they could emerge from the ashes to build new lives, she too could start afresh and tackle the depression and loss of focus that followed her marriage breakdown.

Blay did not have to look too far for guidance. All four women she interviewed at length in her new book Not Paradise belonged to a tightly-knit circle of survivors that included her own parents.

Given their proximity, it would be inappropriate to call them subjects; she tells us they all held her as a baby, and at least one drank coffee with her parents in the migrant quarters of postwar Paris where they had spent several years in limbo.

“The fact that I'm linked to these women by find threads of connection keeps drawing me back into their lives,” she writes.

Gently, Blay evokes the interrupted girlhoods of these women more than half a century ago. She does not dwell on their incarceration, picking up from the end of the war when the women, now alone in the world, went in search of jobs and husbands, with a view to leaving the continent where so much Jewish blood had been spilled.

She notes that many survivors, eager to replace the families lost in the Holocaust, paired up in haste with incompatible spouses.

One of the women featured in Not Paradise talks candidly about her emotional paralysis in the wake of trauma. Her wedding – to a man she met in Paris – had been a non-event, and she booked to sail to Australia days before she was to be reunited with her mother whom she hadn't seen since her incarceration. Sixteen years later, the marriage fell apart. “When I look back, I realise that I was completely without sensation. It was a sort of deadness, the same sort of numbness and lack of feeling that I had during the war,” the woman says.

Blay also writes of lost love due to adverse circumstances. After the Holocaust, one of the women regained contact with her childhood sweetheart, but by then it was too late to rekindle any romance because she was already married to a Polish man who had converted to Judaism and undergone circumcision for the sake of the marriage.

Woven into the women's stories is Blay's account of her own marriage breakdown. Throughout the book she considers how her parents' Holocaust experience shaped her life and influenced her relationship to her estranged husband. Ultimately she finds herself alone in Paris , in tears, walking the streets her parents had decades earlier.

Not Paradise is Blay's second book about the Holocaust. It follows Sister, Sister which was shortlisted for the Age Book of the Year and the NSW Premier's Awards.

                       

 

Foreword by Dr. Paul Valent

In this book, Anna Rosner Blay continues the journey she embarked upon in her well-received Sister, Sister . Whereas in the earlier work she focused on the Holocaust experiences of two survivors – her mother and her aunt – and their legacy, this time she explores what we might be able learn from survivors about coping with major problems of a more ‘everyday' nature.

The author chose four women whom she knew and respected. She believed that by listening to their recollections about migration and adjustment to Australia , she would be able to extract the essence of their resilience and wisdom, gained in the Holocaust and applied in their daily struggles throughout the years that followed. Anna believed that the responses of these women to the challenges they faced would teach her how to deal with the traumatic upheaval she was undergoing in her own life: the breakdown of her marriage.

Anna did not consider that the women's Holocaust experiences were directly relevant to her relatively commonplace trauma. ‘How can I compare my own troubles to those of people who really suffered?' she asks. How could these measure up against the enormity of what they had been through? Therefore she set out to ask her interviewees only about their post-Holocaust adjustment difficulties.

The tension between Anna's view of herself as suffering only ‘everyday' difficulties, as against the extreme traumas the survivors had endured, gives this book its unique strength. Her dilemma is that she wants to learn from the Holocaust, surely a most powerful teacher with regard to trauma and its consequences, yet she does not allow herself to, because she feels that her own hardships can scarcely compare.

But to Anna's surprise, the four women do not distinguish their Holocaust and post-Holocaust traumas as distinctly as she did. She has to acknowledge that the themes of the women's predicaments and her own are not so dissimilar. In a sense, the fact that humans have only a certain repertoire of responses to traumas generally, and that the Holocaust highlights them so sharply, is precisely why it can be such an insightful source of learning in our lives.Of course it may be countered, ‘Yes, but the content and the intensity of the traumas, and of the responses to them, are so much greater than in ordinary life.' On the whole this is true, but there is another point to consider. It is that survivors struggled to survive, so that they could later struggle with everyday problems, and at last fulfil their ordinary human desires for love, family, achievement, self-esteem and meaning.

Whereas during the Holocaust the immediate concern was survival, the ultimate goal was similar to Anna's – fulfilment of one's being. We should remember that if ‘ordinary' life goals are not achieved, life can come to appear meaningless and futile, even to the point of suicide. In the end Anna does learn from the survivor women, but not exactly in the way she anticipated. The importance of this journey, which the reader is invited to share (and to partake of much incidental wisdom in the process), is that it clears the way for us all to learn from the Holocaust without feeling overwhelmed by its scale and losing sight of our own importance. The book is another step toward freedom, while at the same time honouring memory.


(Dr Paul Valent is a retired psychotherapist, who founded the Child Survivors of the Holocaust group in Melbourne, and the Australasian Society for Traumatic Stress Studies. He has written texts on traumatology and is the author of Child Survivors of the Holocaust , now in its second edition.)

Excerpts from Not Paradise

(P.6) April 1999. It's twelve days into the war in Kosovo. I watch the daily news with grim absorption. Shivers of recognition run through me as I hear of the deaths of thousands of civilians, populations fleeing their homes, the systematic rape of women and the setting up of concentration camps.

The Kosovar Albanian refugees haven't suffered the horrors of death camps and years of imprisonment that Jews suffered during World War II, but the conditions they live in are dreadful. Daily I see images on television of weary families trudging for miles in rain and slush, not knowing what awaits them. They walk for days, sleeping alongside the roads and railway lines. They are hungry, cold, frightened. When they manage to cross the border they finish up in camps housing thousands of people in tents, which offer little protection from wind or rain.

The scenes of loaves of bread being thrown at random into the crowds of people, their arms waving desperately, send shudders through me. They remind me of scenes of more than fifty years ago when the Jews were the ones who were hungry, uprooted, devastated. Today the eyes of the world are upon the Kosovars. I watch the military manoeuvring on my television screen, but what stays in my mind are the staring eyes of the refugees, the old women with tears streaking their cheeks, the children in layers of colourful clothes gazing in confusion at the inhospitable world around them. How do such refugees cope? Not knowing if they'll ever see their homelands again, torn swiftly from everything that was comfortable and familiar, how can they begin to think beyond their everyday needs of food, water, shelter? Is it possible to start anew in a foreign country and live a normal life once again? Will the grief of loss and suffering continue for ever?

These are my thoughts when I confront the reality of my continuing life of day-to-day concerns, a relatively comfortable and mundane existence, while on the other side of the world human beings are living in torment. Although we have the illusion of living in a progressive and civilised society, all around the world there continue to be outbreaks of violence and wars. Refugees, asylum seekers, queue jumpers – whatever we call them, they are human beings who are dislocated and frightened, looking for a way to begin their lives again.

How do you collect the shattered pieces of a broken mirror and put them back together, without the reflections of your own fractured face leering back at you? How can you handle these jagged fragments and not suffer deep cuts that bleed? What do you do about the splinters that lodge in secret recesses and refuse to budge?

Those who survived the Holocaust experienced unimaginable suffering and losses. Most of them were between fifteen and thirty-five years of age in 1945. After liberation, survivors thought that their struggles were over, that life would go back to the way it was. But the men and women who emerged faced all kinds of pressures. Not only did they have to cope with their grief over the loss of family and friends, and come to terms with their own horrifying experiences; they also suffered the dislocation and disruption of having to move to totally unfamiliar environments and face the demands of building new lives. They were often sick and malnourished. There was the unfinished mourning for the losses of those around them. In countless cases their whole families had been wiped out. They were dislocated, their homes gone, their neighbourhoods destroyed. Many wanted simply to get on with life once again. They were desperate to recover some sense of normalcy and to begin families. Added to that were the demands of travelling and adapting to a new country, learning a new language, being faced with new customs and new responsibilities. Often they believed ‘others' were not interested in their Holocaust experiences or their traumas. The only way to continue to live was to try to put the past behind them.

Now, as these survivors age, long-suppressed memories of trauma seem to surface, poignant and painful as ever. Even though they insist that they were not special or courageous, they could never put their ordeals totally behind them and pretend they hadn't happened. There is no way you can ever ‘get over' trauma. But despite that, they did what they had to do: start their families and get on with the job of living. Yet for these women, the time of transition and huge change was extraordinary. Emerging from years of horror, scarred and grieving, they were somehow able to resume functioning, to give birth to children and to create new communities. Nothing about this was easy. Nothing could happen quickly. Few outsiders had the time or inclination to ask them how they were coping. There was no such thing as grief counselling or therapy to cope with trauma; or if there was, survivors tended to see searching for help as a sign of weakness or even mental illness, a crutch not needed by someone who had survived and conquered death.

Well-meaning people tended to say, ‘You are in a new country now, full of opportunities. The war is finished, this is a new beginning for you. There is work for you to do, plenty of food to put on your tables, houses for you to live in. This is a country of safety and security. Be happy!' And of course, all that was true.

Australia in the fifties has been portrayed as a place of optimism and boundless potential. Jobs were plentiful and life was good; people built houses with big backyards in the suburbs, led a complacent lifestyle and cared little about problems beyond their local community.

In reality there were the hidden struggles, the undercurrents of fear and the far-reaching effects of trauma, which didn't just go away in this wonderful new country. But to admit any serious emotional damage would imply that the effects could be passed on to their children – virtually a victory to the Nazis. The survivors wanted their children to be happy and healthy, so they tended to protect them from the past. This, of course, was an illusion. The war changed their lives forever and influenced the way they brought up their families. Grief was not talked about; suffering was silent and private.

***

(P 62) YEARS HAVE GONE BY in a haze of numbness. I begin to be dimly aware that I have lost control over my own life. I can't see any way out. A fog hangs around me as I try to focus on the certainties: I am married with three wonderful children. My husband often tells me he loves me. We have a home and two cars. What more could I want?

A different question keeps hammering and echoing in my brain: what right do I have to be unhappy? After what my parents have been through, nothing can compare to their suffering. No small dissatisfaction or vague resentment can be equated with their trauma. It's hard to admit, even to myself, that I am unhappy. This is not just momentary sadness or resentment or dejection. It threatens to engulf me totally. I use all my energy to keep up the façade of normality. I keep a mental record of all the good things in my life (and there are many), and decide that marriage is an inevitable minefield of negotiation and compromise in order to get through each day. Of course life is difficult; how can I believe otherwise? The very familiarity of what I am living through prevents me from seeing that another way is possible.

The truth is coming in small doses, difficult to digest, disappearing for days at a time but still everpresent – and the truth is that I'm feeling miserable. But then the voices rush in: What's not to be happy about? You should count your blessings; you live in a beautiful country; you're alive; the sun is shining (this, my mother's voice). Still the anxiety won't leave me alone. My neck and shoulders are rigid, like iron bars fixed inside my body, throbbing and crushing me. I walk around every day trying to support their weight. Some days I think I just can't do it any more.

***

(P.148) ‘When the baby was due I was told I had to have a caesarean. Dr Lawson was a Catholic and I said to him, “I don't want to die again.” Puzzled, he asked, “What are you talking about?” “I don't want to die again; save me,” I pleaded. Because once before I had died in the camps, and that was temporary, but now the threat was real again. I told him, “You are Catholic and with your beliefs you are going to save the child before the mother. I don't want to die again.” Can you understand what I mean?' Her eyes scan my face, searching for a sign that I grasp the significance of her words.

…

(P. 149) ‘ Eugene was six weeks old when he had an operation for pyloric stenosis which saved his life. He recovered from his operation, but I was still worried about him. When I wheeled him in his pram along the street, I would wonder which of the neighbours could I leave him with …'

As I listen to Kitia's account, it takes a while for me to understand the significance of leaving her son – she does not mean for an hour or two, but in case of her being taken away, permanently. As she speaks, she repeatedly beats her clenched fist on the table.

‘I continued to have feelings of panic about his safety. I prepared a little suitcase for Eugene , in case something happened. It had holes in it so that he could breathe. I scrutinised the neighbours, wondering: can I trust them to leave my child with them? And then as Eugene grew bigger my fear grew – where will I get a bigger suitcase? How will I manage to hide him without being detected?'

It's hard to imagine what it must be like to live in constant fear of harm coming to your child. Children of survivors sometimes reproach their parents for being over-protective. I keep being reminded of the depths of anguish they must have felt at the perceived danger around every corner.