or, “sometimes your brain does weird shit when your grandparents were refugees”
There’s this video floating that’s been floating around the internet for a few years called “The Most Shocking Second a Day Video“. The title is terrible and click-bait-y, but the video is incredibly well-made. Its purpose is to show the trauma war has inflicted on the children fleeing Syria, which it does by portraying a white British girl whose world slowly collapses into chaos after the outbreak of war.
I saw this video again for the first time in a few years and had the strangest experience: a visceral feeling of terror and vulnerability, like I was being reminded of my own long-forgotten experience. It wasn’t just effective filmmaking; it felt like I was watching a recording of something from my own memory.
I’ve written before about how my maternal grandparents lived through WWII, then fled East Germany after the Soviet occupation. I’ve been fortunate enough to be able to speak to many of my family members, including my grandparents, about their experiences during and after the war: a great aunt (then a teen) remembers running into the woods to avoid the “liberating” Soviet army. My grandfather recounted how his toddler-aged son contracted tuberculosis in a refugee camp in West Berlin after they left their village. My grandmother was reluctant to speak on the subject, which says a lot, too.
I know what you’re thinking—I wasn’t there! I know that, I swear. I grew up middle-class and safe (honestly kind of over-protected) in the Clinton-era United States. These things happened decades before I was born, and were effectively family lore by the time I heard about them. Yet still, somehow, when watching this video the feelings of terror and trauma are so real that I honestly question my own experience. Am I a time traveler? Am I somehow the reincarnation of someone who died in Hohenwalde during the occupation? How is it that I seem to be able to remember traumatic events that didn’t even happen to me? Why is it that I feel more complete when I return to the village where my grandparents were born but I never lived, or speak a language that is not my native tongue? How can it be possible that these things that never defined me in my own life feel so necessary to my sense of self?
There are a lot of possible explanations for this kind of phenomenon (at least that’s what my social work classes have been telling me), but instead of discussing the possible intersections of different factors that led me down this odd and confusing emotional path, I think my experience should be a reminder to everyone that we do not exist in a vaccuum. We carry with us cultural traditions, language, communication styles, and family dynamics that have been part of us for more generations than we can even conceptualize. Much as we try to pass on only the good to our children (figuratively speaking, as someone who does not currently have children) it is inevitable that some of our pain will become wrapped up in those things we will pass on. I am sure it would devastate my grandparents to know that I carry some of the emotional weight that they brought with them from Germany, but I also know no other way to live. In some ways to have this trauma taken away from me would leave me devoid of many of the aspects of my identity that make me feel like I have a purpose or, indeed, anything interesting to say. So for now, barring any other explanation or course of action, I choose to accept experiencing the occasional moment of sudden and bewildering false memory in exchange for my admission into the club of “ethnic” cultural and family identity.
weary traveler 