Introduction to "Away from the Gates of Auschwitz?"
In the name of our organization committee, Marita Roesling, Marit Milstein and Regine Scholz, I welcome you – friends and colleagues - who dared to come from overseas and Israel to meet. I perceive you as the Heroes in Peace Time, as I call all those in deep conflict who choose dialogue over hateful actions. We will try, in the presence of the other and often with his/her help, to name, to contain and to transform some of the helplessness, hate, rage, denigration, shame etc, all these poisons. Groups have engendered the worst in Humans but may also elicit the best in men. Probably only in groups, only above individuality, are we able to meet in the complex way we need to do here. Individuals are always nicer than group participants – but it is being-in-the-group which determines attitudes and destinies.
I feel humbled by the task and I recommend a meeting of hearts. 3 organizations have supported us morally in this endeavor: the International Group Analytic Society, the German Roof organization 3G, and the IIGA. All conductors have a Group Analytic approach which facilitates individual as well as group expressions – Hanni Biran, Georg Hess, Dina Wardi, Evi Guggenheim and Ruth Duek. Helga Felsberger and Dieter Nitzgen represent GAS International, who wanted to contribute by being in a "third" mediating position.
Will we ever be able to leave the gates of Auschwitz? What are the influences of the Holocaust on our existence? Will we Israelis ever make a decision, individually, personally, politically, militarily without having to bear the results of Auschwitz: "never again" and "if someone gets up to kill you, kill him first"? Will Germans ever be able to have a 'normal' German identity? Will Germans ever regain the ability just to bear 'responsibility' for what happened? How does Auschwitz influence mechanisms like denial, repression, twisting, manipulating and avoiding? How can the children bear the wrongdoing of their parents on their unspoken shoulders? Can we attempt to a normal live together without 'forgetting' the past?
These are only a few from many, many questions which no one can answer for us – no politician, no clergyman, and no philosopher. We meet together, the children of victims and victimizers, because it is almost impossible to find remedies for these poisons of the soul alone I urge you to keep to the challenge of engaging yourself and others in an open encounter not once, not only for a session, not for an evening, but again and again until this conference is over. I trust groups can struggle to become Partners in the elaboration of the Auschwitz post-trauma and other related emotional difficulties. Can we Israelis, who stayed at the gates of Auschwitz even more than some of our parents had imagined, even dear to fantasize about the path away from Auschwitz?
The children and grand-children of Nazis and violent Anti-Semites after WWII grew up restricted and limited in father-murderous and father-murdered communities. Not only was it difficult to handle shame and guilt, but it was impossible, for good reasons, to really mourn for millions of war absent uncles, neighbors. Your own analyst could often not help in the prevention of the development of a False Self. In the Shfeya encounter, bearers of completely different types of identifications meet. Can it help us grow?
Auschwitz divides and unites all of us. The divisions are well known and easily accessible. What unite us are the disastrous implications on our unconscious social life: it deprived us from good objects, from our mother goodness, from the respect for fathers but provided us with a lack of faith in neighbors. Many believe S.H.Foulkes meant Group Analysis to cope with the sickness of our inner and outer bad objects we inherited from the Holocaust, by a leader decentralized and more democratic therapeutic approach. .
"The parents eat sour grapes and the children's teeth are set on edge" (distaste, or rotten) (Ezequiel 18:2)? Unfortunately, ancestors transmit un-touchable and traumatic emotions. Do we still have to wash our hands from our parents' panic, guilt, shame and blood? Let's humbly try to face this Inter-generational transmission of positions.
Personally I have made the experience that sharing emotions, thoughts and memories in an elaborating Partnership is very often a good way to bring change. The emotional movements engendered by individual thinking or Dreaming- may be continued by interpersonal Dreamtelling. Openness is needed.
I have chosen to share with you two moments that stuck me personally:
My mother escaped Germany by a miracle in the beginning of 1942, I don't have to tell you what a year it was. After many frightening moments, as she was already trying to take a ship from Spain to Uruguay, she had to flee repeatedly from ports, rail stations etc., where the Gestapo was arresting and deporting fugitive Jews. Even escaping Jews were a target? The Nazi wish of extermination, not only the expulsion of Jews from Europe is still felt by many of the children as if the right to live - died. I hope to wake up convinced that this was a nightmare. In order to even think of distancing from the Gates of Auschwitz some of us Jews will have to struggle in ourselves for secure existence. While this can't be a new German job maybe the presence of all those gathered here will help.
The other story is from the other side of the same coin: My favorite aunt was an Auschwitz survivor, who had, as she herself stated, lost in half a minute her husband, her 3 year old son whom she hold in her hands, her aunt and three cousins. Starting a new existence in Uruguay after the war, she bore my cousin and while telling us children of her sufferings in WWII, she would repeatedly assure us: "I don't hate Germans; they are people like everyone else". After some days my cousin and I followed a repetitive ritual of returning to the same question: "do you hate Germans?" For me this ritual can only be stopped by the presence of the perpetrators' children and meeting their eyes and Mind.
Away from the Gates of Auschwitz? Let's use this space to fight together for our souls. We thank you for coming.
Some words on Shfeya and the settings in which we will try to meet our challenge. The place is beautiful, is cheap and affordable for many, but very simple, and maybe even the food is less than we would expect from Jewish mothers. There are also no real lectures – not because we didn't think there were a lot of us who could give a lecture, no, not at all. It is because we wanted to give place to the personal experience, watching together movies, which will, maybe, show in one moment something you cannot describe in a thousand words. But again – also other movies, better and suitable ones, could be chosen. We know that although most of us, coming from Germany, UK, Switzerland, Austria, USA, Sweden, Netherlands and Israel. Most of us are professional people, but some of us have no Group Training. For example, participating in the Large Group for the first time, without understanding the many meanings this Space has, without having digested its uniqueness in the community's communication, may sometimes be a trying experience. Please help each other to use Shfeya as well as possible, by supporting, explaining and sharing. We hope, as the organizers of this congress, that we have provided a less-than-perfect setting in which good work may be done.
Robi Friedman, Shfeya, Israel, 4.10.2012
In the name of our organization committee, Marita Roesling, Marit Milstein and Regine Scholz, I welcome you – friends and colleagues - who dared to come from overseas and Israel to meet. I perceive you as the Heroes in Peace Time, as I call all those in deep conflict who choose dialogue over hateful actions. We will try, in the presence of the other and often with his/her help, to name, to contain and to transform some of the helplessness, hate, rage, denigration, shame etc, all these poisons. Groups have engendered the worst in Humans but may also elicit the best in men. Probably only in groups, only above individuality, are we able to meet in the complex way we need to do here. Individuals are always nicer than group participants – but it is being-in-the-group which determines attitudes and destinies.
I feel humbled by the task and I recommend a meeting of hearts. 3 organizations have supported us morally in this endeavor: the International Group Analytic Society, the German Roof organization 3G, and the IIGA. All conductors have a Group Analytic approach which facilitates individual as well as group expressions – Hanni Biran, Georg Hess, Dina Wardi, Evi Guggenheim and Ruth Duek. Helga Felsberger and Dieter Nitzgen represent GAS International, who wanted to contribute by being in a "third" mediating position.
Will we ever be able to leave the gates of Auschwitz? What are the influences of the Holocaust on our existence? Will we Israelis ever make a decision, individually, personally, politically, militarily without having to bear the results of Auschwitz: "never again" and "if someone gets up to kill you, kill him first"? Will Germans ever be able to have a 'normal' German identity? Will Germans ever regain the ability just to bear 'responsibility' for what happened? How does Auschwitz influence mechanisms like denial, repression, twisting, manipulating and avoiding? How can the children bear the wrongdoing of their parents on their unspoken shoulders? Can we attempt to a normal live together without 'forgetting' the past?
These are only a few from many, many questions which no one can answer for us – no politician, no clergyman, and no philosopher. We meet together, the children of victims and victimizers, because it is almost impossible to find remedies for these poisons of the soul alone I urge you to keep to the challenge of engaging yourself and others in an open encounter not once, not only for a session, not for an evening, but again and again until this conference is over. I trust groups can struggle to become Partners in the elaboration of the Auschwitz post-trauma and other related emotional difficulties. Can we Israelis, who stayed at the gates of Auschwitz even more than some of our parents had imagined, even dear to fantasize about the path away from Auschwitz?
The children and grand-children of Nazis and violent Anti-Semites after WWII grew up restricted and limited in father-murderous and father-murdered communities. Not only was it difficult to handle shame and guilt, but it was impossible, for good reasons, to really mourn for millions of war absent uncles, neighbors. Your own analyst could often not help in the prevention of the development of a False Self. In the Shfeya encounter, bearers of completely different types of identifications meet. Can it help us grow?
Auschwitz divides and unites all of us. The divisions are well known and easily accessible. What unite us are the disastrous implications on our unconscious social life: it deprived us from good objects, from our mother goodness, from the respect for fathers but provided us with a lack of faith in neighbors. Many believe S.H.Foulkes meant Group Analysis to cope with the sickness of our inner and outer bad objects we inherited from the Holocaust, by a leader decentralized and more democratic therapeutic approach. .
"The parents eat sour grapes and the children's teeth are set on edge" (distaste, or rotten) (Ezequiel 18:2)? Unfortunately, ancestors transmit un-touchable and traumatic emotions. Do we still have to wash our hands from our parents' panic, guilt, shame and blood? Let's humbly try to face this Inter-generational transmission of positions.
Personally I have made the experience that sharing emotions, thoughts and memories in an elaborating Partnership is very often a good way to bring change. The emotional movements engendered by individual thinking or Dreaming- may be continued by interpersonal Dreamtelling. Openness is needed.
I have chosen to share with you two moments that stuck me personally:
My mother escaped Germany by a miracle in the beginning of 1942, I don't have to tell you what a year it was. After many frightening moments, as she was already trying to take a ship from Spain to Uruguay, she had to flee repeatedly from ports, rail stations etc., where the Gestapo was arresting and deporting fugitive Jews. Even escaping Jews were a target? The Nazi wish of extermination, not only the expulsion of Jews from Europe is still felt by many of the children as if the right to live - died. I hope to wake up convinced that this was a nightmare. In order to even think of distancing from the Gates of Auschwitz some of us Jews will have to struggle in ourselves for secure existence. While this can't be a new German job maybe the presence of all those gathered here will help.
The other story is from the other side of the same coin: My favorite aunt was an Auschwitz survivor, who had, as she herself stated, lost in half a minute her husband, her 3 year old son whom she hold in her hands, her aunt and three cousins. Starting a new existence in Uruguay after the war, she bore my cousin and while telling us children of her sufferings in WWII, she would repeatedly assure us: "I don't hate Germans; they are people like everyone else". After some days my cousin and I followed a repetitive ritual of returning to the same question: "do you hate Germans?" For me this ritual can only be stopped by the presence of the perpetrators' children and meeting their eyes and Mind.
Away from the Gates of Auschwitz? Let's use this space to fight together for our souls. We thank you for coming.
Some words on Shfeya and the settings in which we will try to meet our challenge. The place is beautiful, is cheap and affordable for many, but very simple, and maybe even the food is less than we would expect from Jewish mothers. There are also no real lectures – not because we didn't think there were a lot of us who could give a lecture, no, not at all. It is because we wanted to give place to the personal experience, watching together movies, which will, maybe, show in one moment something you cannot describe in a thousand words. But again – also other movies, better and suitable ones, could be chosen. We know that although most of us, coming from Germany, UK, Switzerland, Austria, USA, Sweden, Netherlands and Israel. Most of us are professional people, but some of us have no Group Training. For example, participating in the Large Group for the first time, without understanding the many meanings this Space has, without having digested its uniqueness in the community's communication, may sometimes be a trying experience. Please help each other to use Shfeya as well as possible, by supporting, explaining and sharing. We hope, as the organizers of this congress, that we have provided a less-than-perfect setting in which good work may be done.
Robi Friedman, Shfeya, Israel, 4.10.2012