Do you want to read my Holocaust essay?
The Indestructible Within Us: A Holocaust Survivor’s Confession to his Psychoanalyst
Only to the extent that we expose ourselves over and over to annihilation can that which is indestructible be found in us.
—Pema Chodron, quoting a well-known Buddhist saying.
I dream about telling to humanity but should I be able? Should Shakespeare be able? And what yet I who am only a little proud of understanding Shakespeare?!
—Salvaged Pages: Young Writers’ Diaries of the Holocaust: collected and edited by Alexandra Zapruder.
He seated me in a small room, threaded a tape into a large recording machine, showed me how to start and stop the tape, and left the room, I paused before turning on the machine, a little awed by what I was about to do: eavesdrop on a patient's confessions to his analyst, I remembered Freud's admonition in the first of his Introductory Lectures: "You cannot be present as an audience at a psycho-analytic treatment, you can only be told about it; and, in the strictest sense of the word, it is only by hearsay that you will get to know psycho-analysis, the talk of which psycho-analytic treatment consists brooks no listener," I turned on the machine, and listened for fifty minutes to a young man's halting, rambling soliloquy describing ordinary trivial events and expressing commonplace thoughts and feelings, it was like listening to a boring, self-absorbed acquaintance, Freud had been right: an outsider eavesdropping on an analytic session gets almost nothing from it; he is like an eavesdropper on a conversation (or monologue) in a foreign language.
—Janet Malcolm, Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession.
As is well known, extravagantly long sentences can be found in [the Holocaust novel,] Austerlitz—sometimes a page in length, in a few places more than that, many of them of great beauty and intensity, there are multiple conceivable justifications for the use of this remarkable literary device, one possible explanation for the extended sequences of clauses and sub-clauses, whether or not the author had this purpose in mind, could be that they mimic the stream-of-consciousness associations that characterize the psychoanalytic method, Sebald’s expansive, Joycean, reminiscence-laden prose is actually a very fitting background for psychoanalysis, where free association generates its own rhythm, for Austerlitz, the consuming emotional valence attached to repressed memories often forces them to spring up urgently into consciousness, becoming incompatible with pauses and punctuation
—Robert C. Abrams, A narrative reconsidered: The Psychoanalytic Method in W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitz.
It is no doubt necessary to give full meaning and range to Freud’s assertion that the unconscious does not know time and that, as a consequence, the processes of the unconscious system are timeless.
—Jean-Pierre Vidal, Setbacks or the Timelessness of the Unconscious.
_____________________________________
A twenty-eight-year-old analytic patient lays on a beige leather couch in the office of his psychoanalyst, who signals to the patient that he may begin the session. It is October 1948, three-and-a-half years after the patient was liberated from Auschwitz:
As we disembarked from the windowless, infinitely long transport train on a bleak October day, feeling like condemned cattle herded towards an unavoidable fate, we, the persecuted human remnants of the doomed Warsaw Ghetto uprising, found ourselves in a fogbound realm at the edge of existence, with the death-suffused camp, which we could not see emerge in the distance, awaiting us with inexhaustible eternity darkly looming, as we stepped off the train, afraid and uncertain—foresensing that our time was up—only to be greeted by an unsettling spectacle of two accordionists, their squeeze boxes spilling out incongruously joyful music, alongside an out-of-tune saxophone player adding a jarringly grotesque note to the scene, it felt like an apparition conjured from the depths of foreboding, a cruel mockery in this soulless kingdom at the end of the world, a land forsaken by God, this phantasmagoric tableau, nestled in the flat terrain of central Europe, proof that our surreal visions of the “time-space continuum of Auschwitz” were all too real, upon entering the swarming, dehumanized sequestration of the barbed-wire-hedged camp, among the influx of tearfully silent prisoners cast off by the whole world, I struggled with an onrush of intertwined memories, as if my past was a crowded room of familiar faces, each memory holding hands, forming an unbroken chain that pulled me deeper into introspection, with time itself folding in on me, enveloping me in a tapestry of what was and what would never be again, the heavy rain before my arrival had left my environs puddle-filled, my leather shoes offered no protection against the mud-choked quagmire that engulfed my every step, my tan shoes, relics of a past civilized life, were now a cruel mockery of my present struggle, the air was thick with humidity and mosquitoes, and the sucking sound of mud as I advanced only gradually seemed to hover in my surroundings, my feet sank deeper with each step, making progress slow and arduous, while the dampness seeped through the seams of my shoes, chilling my feet and soaking my socks, the once crisp and polished leather was now stained and muddied—a testament to the relentless elements I and the other beleaguered prisoners faced—stained and muddied by the viscous, human-ash filled sludge, a dark testament to the regime’s cruelty, the incessant buzzing of insects adding yet another layer of torment, as it is said, the relentless agony of a thousand mosquito bites (as with “a thousand slights, a thousand indignities, and a thousand unremembered moments,” for that matter) can surpass the sharp impact of an assaultive blow by the Gestapo, the sludge itself holding within it the gray ash of shattered humanity’s remains, more than a million lost names, now transformed into tortured ghosts, silently whispering their gnawing anguish and penetrative sorrow into the air as involuntary martyrs, their spectral forms a lingering reminder of the atrocities of this massacre-laden killing factory that subverted the moral order; here, in a killing factory that revisited the ancient genre of moribund suffering in this torture chamber contained within a zone outside conceived perception, the odor of ancient earth filled my senses, glistening spots dotting the dark water, and, bending over, I observed my own spectral reflection in that water, a macabre imprint of my inner self, in the sunlight’s uneasy gloom, an unsettling radiance tainted the sky, and I saw the entirety of my life mirrored in the pond’s somber castings, mourning the phantom ruins of a life now lost to the endless night of death, a vision both haunting and profound, and in that moment, I disappeared into my interior self, which might as well have been housed in a body banished to a different planet—a timeless planet, where the conventional past-present-future axis lost any meaning, for in this place, time was not a concept as it is commonly known; every fraction of a second had a different wheel of time that lay outside the sequential stride of perceived duration, it was a mental landscape where the human occupants had no names, no parents, no children, they were not clothed as we are clothed here, they were not born there and they did not conceive there, it was a place where the inhabitants breathed and lived according to different laws of nature, a realm that aligned with the blighted waste land of lost souls, governed by laws as alien to our reality as dreams are to waking life, they did not live according to the laws of this world of ours, and they did not die by our laws . . . their name was a number . . . we all felt the same deep hopelessness, as if, within the segregated confines of the death-bordered camp, the Nazis had invented a new private language of suffering for their own singular use, and only the deluded among us failed to grasp the immensity of the calamity, while some of the old, hollow-eyed prisoners hoped for a messianic reprieve in the face of the inhuman, a savior who would step in and reverse the course of events and bring things back to how they once were, believing that only such cataclysmic occurrences could free them, but in time, hope vanished, as did the prisoners’ sanity and autonomy, they showed a corrosive emotional disengagement from their past relationships and from their inner selves, as if they were unwilling players in a morbidly depraved re-visioning of Shakespeare, enacting a harshly grim and despair-laden theatrical depiction of man's cursed place in the universe, it often felt, I must say, like the events weren’t truly happening to “me,” there being a clear separation between the “me” experiencing the events and the “me” observing them with decoupled disinterest and . . . days slipped by, revealing a new understanding: the cruelly endemic starvation we endured in the concentration camp taught us self-control, a perverse abnegation of impulses, as, previously, I avoided fully exploring my wildly primal thoughts out of fear and uncertainty lest I succumb to an inescapable feral mental state, but now, a simple truth emerged—having confronted death, I realized I would never again fear anyone’s judgment, opinion, or any trials life could place before me, the other prisoners, too, in their own way, retreated into an inertia of apathetic mental spaces, becoming detached and unemotional, speaking little, each categorically absorbed in private meditations on the foul blur of futility, our thoughts, like Lear’s despondent soliloquies declaimed to the winds, were our constant companions, breeding vain illusions in defiance of the barbarous fabric of our lives—what is the real answer to this insane existential dilemma? how can someone find solace imprisoned and tormented in a gruesome sector removed from ordinary existence, a place where time was distorted, elongated, or seemingly frozen by the constant presence of soul-crushing misery?—the key lies in recognizing that we always possess the freedom to withdraw into the abstruse regions of the mind, having forsaken the rigorously agonized reality around me, I spent sleepless nights in the barrack striving to overcome situations of profound complexity and moral ambiguity, my imagination running wild in speculative directions, eager to unlock the mysteries of my subconscious, secluded from the world, I found comfort in laboriously decoding the recesses of my interior being, transforming it into a sanctuary of imagination where my restless death premonitions could finally find peace, I blocked out the sounds of the other prisoners, immersing myself in my memories to find respite from the torturous time flow of afflictive confinement, and, as the external world faded away, my inner world of fantasy grew, making my mind a vast, uncharted territory, I sought refuge in the deepest recesses of my memory, resolute in my effort to ignore the harshness of life, my mind became a haven, a place where I could escape the clamorous disorder of the outside world, I closed my eyes to the external reality, which usually, in normal circumstances, provides an escape from everything, but here, it offered nothing, I was determined to hold on to the specters of my mind’s conjuring, striving to recreate the cherished intellectual pursuits of my past with all my strength, lost in an ominous reverie and logically opaque numbness, I stood aside from the others, feeling like an alien among aliens, observing and mentally archiving their behaviors, seeing their regression to a state of total identification with the bestial camp commandants, die Lagerführer, our assassins, who dwelled outside the synapses of logic and morality, registering the prisoners’ loss of any confidence in the testimony of their own senses, reduced to mere shadows of men who silently toiled, changing into mechanical obedient automatons, a state of living deadness that I would not permit myself to enter, vowing to hold on at any price, endeavoring to maintain my sense of identity—out of a commitment to staying true to who I am, resisting self-betrayal, I could only survive by resurrecting within myself the redemptive power of the spiritual legacy of music left by my years at the music conservatory studying and performing the Beethoven string quartets and, indeed, these quartets were my intellectual nourishment in Auschwitz . . . committing something to memory, especially something deeply meaningful, is like embedding it into the weave of your consciousness, ensuring it becomes an inseparable part of who you are, and, in the camp, these mental blueprints served as an anchor, a way to preserve my identity, my sanity, and my sense of self, having internally engraved the precisely structured, temporally transcendent music of Beethoven, which resonated from a dimension unaffected by the rhythm-space framework, music that transcended the physical world, becoming untouchable and immune to the forces that might otherwise strip me of who I was . . . I would say from my own observations as a prisoner that those who gave up and died were the ones who had abandoned any attempt at independent selfhood; who acquiesced to their captors' aim of dehumanizing and exercising total control over them, but, in contrast, I preserved my life and rationality by deliberately and methodically going through the four parts of each of the Beethoven string quartets, which I knew by heart, in order to maintain some measure of personal agency in the face of overwhelming governmental power, my emotional well-being was sustained by a pact negotiated between identity and memory, for, here, in a place where a malevolent dread cast its shadow, the exercise of recall was a messianic act that brought redemption nearer, and, in my moments of deep musical engagement, it was as if I felt the air from another planet, a timeless planet beyond past, present and future, where “time is compressed into a moment eternalized as space.”
The psychoanalyst ends the session, saying to the patient, “Our time is up.”
Only to the extent that we expose ourselves over and over to annihilation can that which is indestructible be found in us.
—Pema Chodron, quoting a well-known Buddhist saying.
I dream about telling to humanity but should I be able? Should Shakespeare be able? And what yet I who am only a little proud of understanding Shakespeare?!
—Salvaged Pages: Young Writers’ Diaries of the Holocaust: collected and edited by Alexandra Zapruder.
He seated me in a small room, threaded a tape into a large recording machine, showed me how to start and stop the tape, and left the room, I paused before turning on the machine, a little awed by what I was about to do: eavesdrop on a patient's confessions to his analyst, I remembered Freud's admonition in the first of his Introductory Lectures: "You cannot be present as an audience at a psycho-analytic treatment, you can only be told about it; and, in the strictest sense of the word, it is only by hearsay that you will get to know psycho-analysis, the talk of which psycho-analytic treatment consists brooks no listener," I turned on the machine, and listened for fifty minutes to a young man's halting, rambling soliloquy describing ordinary trivial events and expressing commonplace thoughts and feelings, it was like listening to a boring, self-absorbed acquaintance, Freud had been right: an outsider eavesdropping on an analytic session gets almost nothing from it; he is like an eavesdropper on a conversation (or monologue) in a foreign language.
—Janet Malcolm, Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession.
As is well known, extravagantly long sentences can be found in [the Holocaust novel,] Austerlitz—sometimes a page in length, in a few places more than that, many of them of great beauty and intensity, there are multiple conceivable justifications for the use of this remarkable literary device, one possible explanation for the extended sequences of clauses and sub-clauses, whether or not the author had this purpose in mind, could be that they mimic the stream-of-consciousness associations that characterize the psychoanalytic method, Sebald’s expansive, Joycean, reminiscence-laden prose is actually a very fitting background for psychoanalysis, where free association generates its own rhythm, for Austerlitz, the consuming emotional valence attached to repressed memories often forces them to spring up urgently into consciousness, becoming incompatible with pauses and punctuation
—Robert C. Abrams, A narrative reconsidered: The Psychoanalytic Method in W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitz.
It is no doubt necessary to give full meaning and range to Freud’s assertion that the unconscious does not know time and that, as a consequence, the processes of the unconscious system are timeless.
—Jean-Pierre Vidal, Setbacks or the Timelessness of the Unconscious.
_____________________________________
A twenty-eight-year-old analytic patient lays on a beige leather couch in the office of his psychoanalyst, who signals to the patient that he may begin the session. It is October 1948, three-and-a-half years after the patient was liberated from Auschwitz:
As we disembarked from the windowless, infinitely long transport train on a bleak October day, feeling like condemned cattle herded towards an unavoidable fate, we, the persecuted human remnants of the doomed Warsaw Ghetto uprising, found ourselves in a fogbound realm at the edge of existence, with the death-suffused camp, which we could not see emerge in the distance, awaiting us with inexhaustible eternity darkly looming, as we stepped off the train, afraid and uncertain—foresensing that our time was up—only to be greeted by an unsettling spectacle of two accordionists, their squeeze boxes spilling out incongruously joyful music, alongside an out-of-tune saxophone player adding a jarringly grotesque note to the scene, it felt like an apparition conjured from the depths of foreboding, a cruel mockery in this soulless kingdom at the end of the world, a land forsaken by God, this phantasmagoric tableau, nestled in the flat terrain of central Europe, proof that our surreal visions of the “time-space continuum of Auschwitz” were all too real, upon entering the swarming, dehumanized sequestration of the barbed-wire-hedged camp, among the influx of tearfully silent prisoners cast off by the whole world, I struggled with an onrush of intertwined memories, as if my past was a crowded room of familiar faces, each memory holding hands, forming an unbroken chain that pulled me deeper into introspection, with time itself folding in on me, enveloping me in a tapestry of what was and what would never be again, the heavy rain before my arrival had left my environs puddle-filled, my leather shoes offered no protection against the mud-choked quagmire that engulfed my every step, my tan shoes, relics of a past civilized life, were now a cruel mockery of my present struggle, the air was thick with humidity and mosquitoes, and the sucking sound of mud as I advanced only gradually seemed to hover in my surroundings, my feet sank deeper with each step, making progress slow and arduous, while the dampness seeped through the seams of my shoes, chilling my feet and soaking my socks, the once crisp and polished leather was now stained and muddied—a testament to the relentless elements I and the other beleaguered prisoners faced—stained and muddied by the viscous, human-ash filled sludge, a dark testament to the regime’s cruelty, the incessant buzzing of insects adding yet another layer of torment, as it is said, the relentless agony of a thousand mosquito bites (as with “a thousand slights, a thousand indignities, and a thousand unremembered moments,” for that matter) can surpass the sharp impact of an assaultive blow by the Gestapo, the sludge itself holding within it the gray ash of shattered humanity’s remains, more than a million lost names, now transformed into tortured ghosts, silently whispering their gnawing anguish and penetrative sorrow into the air as involuntary martyrs, their spectral forms a lingering reminder of the atrocities of this massacre-laden killing factory that subverted the moral order; here, in a killing factory that revisited the ancient genre of moribund suffering in this torture chamber contained within a zone outside conceived perception, the odor of ancient earth filled my senses, glistening spots dotting the dark water, and, bending over, I observed my own spectral reflection in that water, a macabre imprint of my inner self, in the sunlight’s uneasy gloom, an unsettling radiance tainted the sky, and I saw the entirety of my life mirrored in the pond’s somber castings, mourning the phantom ruins of a life now lost to the endless night of death, a vision both haunting and profound, and in that moment, I disappeared into my interior self, which might as well have been housed in a body banished to a different planet—a timeless planet, where the conventional past-present-future axis lost any meaning, for in this place, time was not a concept as it is commonly known; every fraction of a second had a different wheel of time that lay outside the sequential stride of perceived duration, it was a mental landscape where the human occupants had no names, no parents, no children, they were not clothed as we are clothed here, they were not born there and they did not conceive there, it was a place where the inhabitants breathed and lived according to different laws of nature, a realm that aligned with the blighted waste land of lost souls, governed by laws as alien to our reality as dreams are to waking life, they did not live according to the laws of this world of ours, and they did not die by our laws . . . their name was a number . . . we all felt the same deep hopelessness, as if, within the segregated confines of the death-bordered camp, the Nazis had invented a new private language of suffering for their own singular use, and only the deluded among us failed to grasp the immensity of the calamity, while some of the old, hollow-eyed prisoners hoped for a messianic reprieve in the face of the inhuman, a savior who would step in and reverse the course of events and bring things back to how they once were, believing that only such cataclysmic occurrences could free them, but in time, hope vanished, as did the prisoners’ sanity and autonomy, they showed a corrosive emotional disengagement from their past relationships and from their inner selves, as if they were unwilling players in a morbidly depraved re-visioning of Shakespeare, enacting a harshly grim and despair-laden theatrical depiction of man's cursed place in the universe, it often felt, I must say, like the events weren’t truly happening to “me,” there being a clear separation between the “me” experiencing the events and the “me” observing them with decoupled disinterest and . . . days slipped by, revealing a new understanding: the cruelly endemic starvation we endured in the concentration camp taught us self-control, a perverse abnegation of impulses, as, previously, I avoided fully exploring my wildly primal thoughts out of fear and uncertainty lest I succumb to an inescapable feral mental state, but now, a simple truth emerged—having confronted death, I realized I would never again fear anyone’s judgment, opinion, or any trials life could place before me, the other prisoners, too, in their own way, retreated into an inertia of apathetic mental spaces, becoming detached and unemotional, speaking little, each categorically absorbed in private meditations on the foul blur of futility, our thoughts, like Lear’s despondent soliloquies declaimed to the winds, were our constant companions, breeding vain illusions in defiance of the barbarous fabric of our lives—what is the real answer to this insane existential dilemma? how can someone find solace imprisoned and tormented in a gruesome sector removed from ordinary existence, a place where time was distorted, elongated, or seemingly frozen by the constant presence of soul-crushing misery?—the key lies in recognizing that we always possess the freedom to withdraw into the abstruse regions of the mind, having forsaken the rigorously agonized reality around me, I spent sleepless nights in the barrack striving to overcome situations of profound complexity and moral ambiguity, my imagination running wild in speculative directions, eager to unlock the mysteries of my subconscious, secluded from the world, I found comfort in laboriously decoding the recesses of my interior being, transforming it into a sanctuary of imagination where my restless death premonitions could finally find peace, I blocked out the sounds of the other prisoners, immersing myself in my memories to find respite from the torturous time flow of afflictive confinement, and, as the external world faded away, my inner world of fantasy grew, making my mind a vast, uncharted territory, I sought refuge in the deepest recesses of my memory, resolute in my effort to ignore the harshness of life, my mind became a haven, a place where I could escape the clamorous disorder of the outside world, I closed my eyes to the external reality, which usually, in normal circumstances, provides an escape from everything, but here, it offered nothing, I was determined to hold on to the specters of my mind’s conjuring, striving to recreate the cherished intellectual pursuits of my past with all my strength, lost in an ominous reverie and logically opaque numbness, I stood aside from the others, feeling like an alien among aliens, observing and mentally archiving their behaviors, seeing their regression to a state of total identification with the bestial camp commandants, die Lagerführer, our assassins, who dwelled outside the synapses of logic and morality, registering the prisoners’ loss of any confidence in the testimony of their own senses, reduced to mere shadows of men who silently toiled, changing into mechanical obedient automatons, a state of living deadness that I would not permit myself to enter, vowing to hold on at any price, endeavoring to maintain my sense of identity—out of a commitment to staying true to who I am, resisting self-betrayal, I could only survive by resurrecting within myself the redemptive power of the spiritual legacy of music left by my years at the music conservatory studying and performing the Beethoven string quartets and, indeed, these quartets were my intellectual nourishment in Auschwitz . . . committing something to memory, especially something deeply meaningful, is like embedding it into the weave of your consciousness, ensuring it becomes an inseparable part of who you are, and, in the camp, these mental blueprints served as an anchor, a way to preserve my identity, my sanity, and my sense of self, having internally engraved the precisely structured, temporally transcendent music of Beethoven, which resonated from a dimension unaffected by the rhythm-space framework, music that transcended the physical world, becoming untouchable and immune to the forces that might otherwise strip me of who I was . . . I would say from my own observations as a prisoner that those who gave up and died were the ones who had abandoned any attempt at independent selfhood; who acquiesced to their captors' aim of dehumanizing and exercising total control over them, but, in contrast, I preserved my life and rationality by deliberately and methodically going through the four parts of each of the Beethoven string quartets, which I knew by heart, in order to maintain some measure of personal agency in the face of overwhelming governmental power, my emotional well-being was sustained by a pact negotiated between identity and memory, for, here, in a place where a malevolent dread cast its shadow, the exercise of recall was a messianic act that brought redemption nearer, and, in my moments of deep musical engagement, it was as if I felt the air from another planet, a timeless planet beyond past, present and future, where “time is compressed into a moment eternalized as space.”
The psychoanalyst ends the session, saying to the patient, “Our time is up.”
