Dyadya Misha and the Holy Archangel Michael

 “I really don’t think I remember much of my childhood except a horrible war. And when the war sort of ended, but it wasn't ended yet, the Germans were still there and they had let us open some churches. My brother Mikhail, Michael, was still alive at that time, and that's when he was baptized in the church, when it opened.”

“Oh, it was a beautiful, big church. I saw angels singing on top of the church, but when I was telling someone that I saw angels, they said I probably just heard people singing.”

Tears well up as a girlish smile emerges and Lubachka unearths some joy from the recesses of a brutal early childhood. Lubachka is affectionate for Luba, which is short for Lubov, which means love. Luba is my mother. Named for a Holy Martyr, who at age 9, was tied to a wheel and beaten with rods until her body was covered with bloody welts.  She and her older sisters, Faith and Hope, survived being burned over an iron grating, then thrown into a red-hot oven, and finally into a cauldron with boiling tar.

Did Lubachka see angels?

Maybe.

Maybe it was the hunger or the dehydration causing hallucinations.

Maybe it’s something none of us can explain and some of us want to believe. The word angel is derived from the Greek word angelos and the Latin word angelus, both meaning messenger. We all hear messages.

I hear voices, though they’re far from divine. I hear voices when I’m asleep. I hear voices when I’m paring down a few thousand words of analysis, emotion, and research into a thousand never-quite perfect words, in an hour before I race out the door to school for pickup, halted suddenly by the slow flow of leisure parents who have been lingering outside the building for hours, complaining that they won’t be able to head “down east” until Thursday this week.

I hear voices when the subway stops between stations for a sick passenger in another car and swim team practice is about to let out and I have to get the puppy and walk her over to the rec center to meet my son.

I’ve heard a voice, just a few times, that told me if I meander into rush hour traffic while an 18-wheeler and a MTA bus blow through a red light, that nobody would suspect suicide when I’m flattened into the pavement.

Sometimes I’m floating or cutting through gentle waves in the Caribbean Sea, or pushed up against a throng in a nostalgic trance on the floor at a show, and the voices stop. They always pick up again when I can’t sort out which anxiety is keeping me awake and there’s few precious hours before daylight.

Maybe it’s my Dyadya Misha, my Uncle Mike, telling me it’s OK. Maybe he’s trying to break through my stubbornness and ego to remind me that I have to be more forgiving of my mom, not because she sees angels or hears voices, but because we all hear voices.

Maybe I should listen. We invoke Saint Michael for protection from invasion by enemies and from civil war, and for the defeat of adversaries on the battlefield. He conquers all spiritual enemies. Over all the Nine Ranks of the Heavenly Powers, the Lord appointed the Holy Archangel Michael (his name in Hebrew means “who is like unto God”), the faithful servitor of God, as Chief Commander.

At least little Michael, Mishinka, lived long enough to be baptized. In the Orthodox faith, babies are baptized about three months after birth. Mishinka was immersed in sanctified water a little later, as there was no escape from holding places in camps to do it secretly. Lubachka’s two younger brothers died in infancy, unbaptized.

Did angels appear when Mishinka’s frail body was tossed into a mass grave?

Most of Lubachka’s loved ones were dumped into unmarked pits, some with limbs mangled and dismembered, genitals violated and mutilated, but essentially in tact to resemble the remains of a human form. Others with brains blown out by the stock of a rifle, to save bullets. Hitler explicitly ordered a surge in ammunition production in early 1940, for fear of the shell crisis that’s widely blamed for toppling the Kaiser’s armies in the autumn of 1914.

The most traumatic memory isn’t the moment of Mishinka’s death, it’s a moment of regret.

Lubachka’s memory impetuously blinks back on, like a light bulb dangling from a frayed wire, to retrieve another visceral early childhood experience, one she’d likely repressed.

“I do remember something which I'm very upset about. My little brother Michael became sick because there was this one room where we lived with four or five families because we all lost our houses and everything. But it was not where I was born in Vitebsk Oblast near the Russian border. It was somewhere farther away, closer to what is now the Polish border. My mother was in quarantine because she had typhoid fever, and my little brother Michael was still breast-fed at that time, and she wasn’t with us and the two of us were left there, and this one woman in another room had a cat, and it was a cold, a very, very cold autumn day.”

“It was very cold outside. And, of course, he wasn't dressed, he only had a shirt, like some kind of an undershirt. The woman with the cat came and threw him outside, and I wasn’t able to pick him up or anything because I was too small. And then that's when he got very sick. For what seemed like a long time, he was very sick, and there was another girl that was my age that lived in that room, and we were playing cards, and my little brother would cry, and I would get very angry at him because he was disturbing me. To this day, it tortures me that I was angry at him. That I did that.”

“The woman with the cat, she was Polish, and her daughter had affairs with the German soldiers, so they had everything. We didn’t have anything.”

Everything, in this instance, means enough clothing to cover a full body or enough food to keep children alive.

The cause of Michael’s death remains unknown, but the timing spurs a rush of atrocious memories. In the mind of a child, Mishinka was ill for a long time, but his feeble breath lingered and his weak heart ticked only a little longer than that of his twin Ivan and their youngest sibling Pyotor.

“When my little brother Michael died, that's when my grandmother, my father's mother, and his sister were very brutally killed.”

Michael died in “either October or November. I don’t know. I don’t know what year it was. Maybe 1944, probably 44. And the thing is, we were living at that time where the German soldiers were, but my grandmother, my father's mother, and his sister that were killed, they were killed in a place the Partisans watched in the daytime, and the Germans would be there at night. The Partisans were there, or the Germans, I don’t remember. But anyway, somehow, I do sort of remember going to the graveyard, and they were all, as far as I know, all killed and just buried in one, unmarked grave. But the graveyard was where we lived before the war started.”

Lubachka can’t recollect how or why they’d returned to the border of Smolensk.

“My aunt, at that time, was in school in Russia where they had to learn German. The German soldiers took her and another 16-year old, and they were asking who is living in this house, and they had a list of people and they were told to burn down their houses.”

“She was 16, so of course, she's going to say whose house it was. She was lucky because her father was also a Partisan, and of course he wasn't there at that time, but he was in their party. And my father was against the Bolsheviks and everything else, and he was in a German zone. And so when the Partisans came after them, they told him whose house it was.”

“They came to get my aunt, they wanted just her. My grandmother, she ran after her daughter. And then they took them a few miles away from there, but they had to cross some kind of a river, and they were going to be interrogated there by the Partisans, where their headquarters were. But what happened, it became close to nighttime, and they had to get out of that region because I guess that's when the Germans were coming or something, so the Partisans said that we know what's going to happen with them. They didn’t want to waste the bullets.”

“So they used the other part of the rifle, the wooden part, and they beat their heads open. That's how they were killed, and when my father saw that, it really affected his mental state for the rest of his life. And so then we had to just, I guess, put them in ground, and we had to leave there because the fighting between the Germans and Russians was about to start.”

“And then when we got back to the place where we lived, and the second day, or I don’t know, maybe it was the same day, I don’t really remember. I was outside. And I saw my brother who was all in white, that's not the way he was buried. I guess I don’t know what he was buried in, that I don’t remember, but I saw him outside and to me he had represented an angel.”

Some two decades before my mother told me this story, I was standing over the open casket of her father, my degushka, my grandfather, at a monastery in rural Herkimer County, New York, a home for decades to the Shastokovich family for two generations.

Maybe I hallucinated. I’m certain there was an apparition in the form of a body outlined in bright light. There wasn’t enough sunshine pouring in through the stained glass windows of the cavernous church to explain what I saw.

I was tired. I had barely slept for days. I rarely sleep enough. Those voices keep me awake.

And when the time of our demise shall approach, and of our liberation from this body of clay, leave us not, O Archangel of God, without defense against the spirits of evil under heaven, who surround us to close off the ascent on high for human souls; so that, guarded by thee, without stumbling we may attain unto those glorious habitations of Paradise, where there is neither sadness nor sighing, but life without end.

Geography Of The Heart: Memory Eternal To My Babushka Alexandra

Далеко. Далеко. (Pronounced “Daleko. Daleko,” it means “Far away. Far away.”)

From my early childhood until my maternal babushka (grandmother) Alexandra Dimitrievna (Dimitrieva) Grishaev lost her ability to speak and was bedridden for nine years until her death 21 years ago, she and I bantered about where she would go when she died. She’s buried alongside my maternal degushka (grandfather) Grigori Ustinovich Grishaev, at the largest of three cemeteries at Holy Trinity Monastery in Jordanville, New York, where celebrated Russian composer and pianist Dmitri Dmitriyevich Shostakovich and his wife Nina Varzar lived and left a home to their son, conductor and pianist Maxim Dmitrievich Shostakovich.

Born March 3, 1913, in Dubrovka, a village in Vitebsk Oblast, Belarus, my babushka died one day after he 85th birthday on March 4, 1998, in Wilbraham, Massachusetts.

In stark contrast to all of my school and neighborhood peers, I attended countless funerals as a young girl, and visited my grandparents’ mostly older friends confined to some of the most dilapidated, under-staffed, and sometimes unsanitary nursing homes, municipal homes, and municipal and veteran’s hospitals, nearly every Sunday after Liturgy and Orthodox Holy Days. This was the fate of so many forced immigrants from German displaced persons camps who fell ill before they could save enough money working hard labor jobs around the clock to pay for more humane facilities.

Death wasn’t a taboo subject as it was for most of my non-church friends. It was an intrinsic part of daily life, and part of my childhood dialogue along with visceral stories of the countless murders, killings, and untimely deaths of my mother’s three infant brothers, dozens of close family members, and hundreds of dear friends, under Stalin, the Belorussian Partisans, and Hitler. My mother, her parents, and family and friends, were trucked “like cattle,” by my mother’s recollection, from labor camp to labor camp, with the fortunate few surviving to find access to food, clothing, education, and church services at the DP camps in Germany.

Holy Trinity Monastery was some three hours without traffic from my childhood home, mostly along a desolate stretch of I-90. To me that ride always was the future route of my babushka’s final resting place. Somehow, referring to it being “Далеко. Далеко.” made it easier to think about that last drive following a speeding hearse on the fiercely policed interstate.

I was days shy of my 27^th birthday when my babushka died at my parents’ home, and thereby expected to drive the car. The Ukrainian-American funeral director, who respected Slavic customs, illegally agreed not to embalm her and not to seal the casket, which would remain open overnight at the Monastery. I feared a State Trooper pulling over the hearse and discovering this carefully rehearsed crime.

Bringing my babushka “home” to Jordanville didn’t seem “Далеко. Далеко.” It seemed endless. She’d been waked, in an open casket, at my parents’ home where she spent the night in my parents’ dining room ahead of the voyage to a hamlet in the town of Warren, Herkimer County, New York, at the intersection of New York State Route 167 and County Route 155. It’s nowhere to most people, but a sacred destination to thousands of Russian Orthodox Christians. Settled by European Americans after the Revolutionary War, the name was derived from the nearby Ocquionis Creek, which was used by settlers for baptisms and likened to the Jordan River. Jordanville is now best known for the Monastery. Most Russians from my grandparents’ and my mother’s wave of immigration in 1950 refer to the Monastery and cemeteries simply as Jordanville.

When taking our son Michael Alexander to his first sleepaway camp on Lake Oneida this summer, I drove past the exit to Jordanville. Guilt poured over me, even as my focus was the pending lifetime adventure for my son and the complex emotions that accompany leaving your child alone for the first time. I had to fight an impulse to make that left-hand turn. It’s been too long since I’ve been to Jordanville. I’ve taken my husband Mike to see the graves of my father and my maternal grandparents, but haven’t, in nearly nine years, taken my son.

Далеко. Далеко. Jordanville is about four hours from my home of two decades in New York City, as I-90 cuts through western Massachusetts making the route from there an hour shorter. It may be far, especially for a family that has to rent a car, but it’s forever close, imprinted on my psyche.

My Name is GRISHAEV

GRYCHAJEW

HRYSCHAEV

GRYSEHAJEW

GRISCHAIL

GRISHAJEV

GRYSHAJEVA

GRYSHAJEV

These are among the many misspellings of my mother’s maiden name as they appear on various prisoner, work and displaced persons papers from Germany. The Anglicized, phonetic spelling my maternal grandparents choose was GRISHAEV. Grishaev is a patronymic surname formed by adding a Russian suffix to the personal name Grigori (Gregory). Grigori was my maternal grandfather’s first name.

As many variations for the spellings of first names Grigori, Alexandra (my maternal grandmother) and Luba (my mother) exist on those German records.

The English spellings they choose were very important in creating a permanent identity once they arrived in the United States in 1950.

Today is my Babushka’s birthday. She was born March 3, 1913, in Dubrovka, Vitebsk Oblast, and died March 4, 1998, at my mother’s home and under my mother’s sole care in Wilbraham, Massachusetts. As part of my remembrance process (a hybrid of grief and fond and joyful recollection), I was going trough photos and records mostly from the 1940s.

I have countless times compared the different misspellings and what they might imply. Yet it only occurred to me this morning why mother was so upset by my tween and early teenage practice of playing with different existing and made-up spellings of my own name.

As a young girl I thought: it’s my name, I can do with it what I want. As a westerner, why would I think otherwise? Clearly I’d shut off my eastern mind and for decades shut out contemplating what drove my mother’s emotional and adamant reaction to my name word play. To me it was as innocent as practicing new eye makeup application techniques, one of my favorite 1980s pastimes.

Poring over these papers this morning, entering all German text into Google Translate, I was walloped with a fresh dose of guilt over all the anguish my tween and teenage rebellion inflicted on my mother.

Of course she was angry that I’d want to spell Natasha, which is the best phonetic transliteration of Ната́ша, any other way. I was taking for granted being born in a country free of deadly domestic upheaval and genocide. I was lucky that U.S. agencies and authorities agreed to document my name as it was given.

As a student of Russian literature, I became obsessed with the origins and meanings of names, but yet my own mother’s visceral objection to my manipulation of the spelling of my name eluded me until now. In my attempt to delve deeper into the meaning of 19^th century texts, I’d alienated myself from my own mother.

In my own ignorant defense, I meant nothing by adding or subtracting or substituting letters in my name and now feel foolish for not realizing why and how I’d hurt my mother. At the same time, I was inscribing Bowie and Le Bon as my last name on the backs of notebooks and textbooks. My mother had no problem with the surnames, as long as Natasha was in tact. 

Leaving Lyssenko: Displaced Memories

The years my mother spent at Lyssenko Displaced Persons Camp in Hanover, Germany, were “very good.” The young girl who’d spent her first half decade herded from labor camp to prison camp to concentration camp had finally found a “home.” Those formative years at Lyssenko were not rife with killings and rapes and bombs and grenades and constant fear of which enemy would strike next and at what gate.

The notion of leaving a displaced persons for a new life in a faraway land sounds like a dream for most people. To my mother it was an end to the first era of her life that didn’t involve constant suffering and instability. And it meant saying goodbye to people she came to know as family in the wake of losing so many blood relatives. It was horrifying. It meant recalling all the previous tragedies and again losing friends by separation.

“And then people started to immigrate to different countries, and they started to place us. Two of my father's friends went to England. And they had lost their families, too, during the war. Whether they were killed or what happened to them, I don’t know. They sent us pictures from England. They were handsome men and when they got to England, they had sent us rubber boots, which were beautiful, and chocolate candy. I can't find any here like that. It was like a candy bar, but it had crispy part inside of it. That was delicious.”

I’d brought home, from my first trip to England in 1991, what I thought my mother had described but she insisted it wasn’t the same. That time in her early childhood offered her very first taste of joy and nothing since could be sweetening to comparison. It was as if anything from those years was magical, almost otherworldly, and could never be duplicated again. I can only imagine the shifting emotion from a life of desolation and destruction to one that offered her very first creature comforts. They were so simple, yet perfect, those articles of clothing or pieces of chocolate. I think my mother begrudges herself any of life’s comforts, partly because of the guilt, but also because she can never again feel such immense satisfaction that comes with the very first experience.

For my mother, all of these places are defined by whatever iconic item she received in a care package or the descriptions in letters written by those who had relocated. She has never left the United States, save for Canada and the Caribbean, since childhood, and to her those places where other families from Lyssenko ended up remain frozen in memory and unchanging by time.

It makes sense that she would hold on to any image or idea from those years, as they were her first happy memories. All my wanderlust is lost on her, and I feel like a criminal, stealing her childhood snapshots of places she’d never visited by informing her of sweeping social change.

“A lot of our best friends, my best friends, my mother's best friends, went to Australia, some went to Brazil, some went to Argentina. But my father wanted to go to America, because from what he knew from the history lessons in school, it was the best country to go to. And because I was the only child, it was easier for us to choose to go to a different country, and my parents were still young and healthy, so we didn’t have problems. But America was the hardest country to get to because we were in British zone, but we used to get coffee, and we used to (barter and) trade it with the Germans because they didn’t have the good coffee. It was chicory, but they liked it, so we never had drank it ourselves. We always used to trade it for clothes or something. At that time, it was very, very good for us, because we could get beautiful clothes for the coffee, and again berries, we used to go pick berries and trade those. And I sang and we had a church, and I sang in a church choir. We had Christmas parties. It was wonderful. We used to go Christmas caroling. It was a wonderful life, you know.”

My mother’s explanation that her parents were selected to come to the U.S. because of their savvy in trading with the Germans in the British zone is lost in her happy memories. She clings to those early years, which are forever idyllic for their simple pleasures. There is an innocence that overrides any ignorance that may stem from an unwillingness to acknowledge how culture has changed with time.

My mother and her parents ended up in New Hampshire, not far from Dartmouth, but still in a community that hadn’t been opened to the wider world. Stevens High School in Claremont, New Hampshire, didn’t offer English as Second Language and there was no public assistance available to her family. They had to toil to pay back every penny to the farmer who had sponsored their trip here via Church World Services. They lived without hot water for years, working at multiple manual labor and service jobs around the clock for a pittance of a wage, and saving to have fewer comforts and concessions than those that were available at Lyssenko or through bartering with the Germans. They traveled frequently throughout the Northeast to visit with friends from Lyssenko and to maintain a dispersed community in the absence of the ghettos that allow most immigrants to retain their culture.

“Some of my friends did come to America. One of them lives in Connecticut now. And the others, mostly all of them, live in New Jersey. I went to eleven weddings and I was a bridesmaid. [laughter] But the camp was actually the happiest part of my life at that time, because we didn’t have any cares. And we had food. We had clothes. It didn’t bother us that we slept on cots in just a corner of a room. We were all just happy. People used to go fishing, and they would get fish and we would have parties and stuff like that. My mother's best friend, the ones that went to Australia afterwards, her husband somehow had good luck of catching a lot of fish. One time when it was my birthday, he says ‘this is going be for Luba's birthday’ and he caught so much fish and since we didn’t have a big stove with hot plates, a lot of women, like five or six, were frying that fish. They had a big, big party for me at that time.”

My mother believes it was her 10^th birthday, but the date isn’t a detail that matters.

“That was the best birthday party I ever had and it was the first one I ever remember. And that was very good. There were a lot of people at the table. I don’t know, maybe twenty, maybe thirty, I don’t know. A lot of people. And of course, there was vodka but we kids didn’t drink. [laughter] We didn’t have to.”

It is unsurprising that mother’s happy memories are vivid and retold in great detail. She is not one to repress any memory and the abundance of traumatic ones had to be offset somehow, if only to cope.

In the epilogue of The Brothers Karamazov Book XII, Chapter 14, Alyosha offers life-affirming hope for the next generation when speaking to a group of schoolboys at the funeral of their peer Ilyusha. Memory Eternal (transliterated from Old Church Slavonic as Vechnaya Pamyat) a chant sung at the end of Eastern Orthodox funerals and memorial services is heard in the background. Alyosha epitomizes the ideal human being (or, as my father would have said, a human becoming as humanism is a lifelong pursuit) in a Dostoyevskian universe rife with the conflicts and constraints of faith. Identified at the start of the novel by the narrator as its hero, Alyosha is an exemplar by being open-minded and forgiving. The character is named for Dostoevsky's son who died of an epileptic fit at age 3. 

"You must know that there is nothing higher and stronger and more wholesome and good for life in the future than some good memory, especially a memory of childhood, of home.  People talk to you a great deal about your education, but some good, sacred memory, preserved from childhood, is perhaps the best education.  If a man carries many such memories with him into life, he is safe to the end of his days, and if one has only one good memory left in one's heart, even that may sometime be the means of saving us. "

Of Guilt and Self Punishment

A testament to how little is written or discussed of the lifelong emotional impact of watching other people die, even a voracious lay consumer of psychological and medical research and studies as myself hadn’t heard the word “survivor’s guilt” used in the context of my mother’s early childhood until seven years ago. Not a single doctor treating my mother has ever expressed it, and the countless doctors who treated my maternal grandparents for a variety of ailments never made any connection. None have ever seemed to comprehend how and why she’s still so traumatized and often acts, by the standards of practitioners of Western medicine, erratically, irrationally or with extreme sensitivity and volatility. As a teenager, my husband watched as someone very dear to him killed herself. This, to me, is an unimaginable horror – the stuff of nightmares, the kind I’ve had. It’s especially challenging for me to articulate empathy in any profound way that would make my mother understand how passionately I strive to recognize the emotions she experiences. Sharing such emotions isn’t easy and it may not be healthy. Those nightmares were chronic in my early childhood and pre-adolescence, and only began to taper in frequency in my mid-teens. Many would be of what I imaged as concentration camps or people hovering over mass graves as their loved ones were piled into pits like compost. Naturally all these images were based on what my mother and her parents had endured.

My mother with her mother, 1949. My mother with her
father, 1947. Both photos taken in Hanover, Germany. No photos exist of my mother before the displaced persons camp in Hanover. 

Sigmund Freud referred to survivor’s guilt following his father’s death, in a letter to his friend, otolaryngologist (ear, nose, and throat doctor) Wilhelm Fliess, referring to “that tendency toward self-reproach which death invariably leaves among the survivors.

Simply put, it’s the feeling that you have harmed others, especially loved ones, just because you were spared death when they died. The term "survivor syndrome" was coined in 1961 by psychoanalyst W.G. Niederland, who in the 1950s began studying concentration camp survivors.

Among survivors of World War II concentration camps, guilt is sometimes manifested in strange yet subtle forms, such as behaving as if they themselves are dead, inhibiting themselves from success or engaging in self-destructive acts in response to survivor’s guilt in regard to a dead parent or sibling, A H Modell revealed in a seminal article published in 1971 in The International Journal of Psychoanalysis. I recall one instance when my grandfather lied down under his car, acting as if he were dead. I was a young teen. I was horrified. I knew it had something to do with his experiences, and I felt guilty for lacking the psychological study to identify his condition. (I have an unsupported theory that survivor’s guilt is passed down to the next generation more so than other forms of guilt.)

“Survivor's guilt constitutes the failure of the psychological immune system to grapple with tragedy of great magnitude. Like an infection that overwhelms the body's immune system, survivor's guilt overwhelms the psychological immune system. Instead of exaggerating the difference between oneself and a victim, the similarity is what strikes people as most obvious. ‘That poor guy was no different from me; it could just as well have been me instead of him.’  With survivor's guilt, the differences between oneself and another person shrink, and so too do the differences between what actually happened and what could have happened. As with a bad infection, the best recourse is medical treatment,” writes Neal Roese, Ph.D., in his 2005 book, “If Only: How to Turn Regret Into Opportunity.”

I find this fascinating, as I've often wondered if there was any correlation between people of my mother’s (and grandparents’) immigration and a proliferation of autoimmune diseases. I rarely share this premise, as finding Western medical professionals who even discuss something that’s not published in a study they read or wrote is generally impossible. In any case, I know more than most people outside of endocrinology about autoimmune diseases as it took decades for me to find a doctor to properly diagnose mine. I'd been confident for years that I had some form of autoimmune hypothyroidism, as my maternal grandfather suffered from hypothyroidism and my mother had a thyroidectomy. My grandfather wasn’t diagnosed until it was too late, when he was hospitalized for what may have been delayed symptoms of a nearly fatal car crash that he “miraculously” survived, doctors and first responders told me at the time. (At 15, I was in the ambulance and in the operating room with him.) My mother’s hypothyroidism also went undiagnosed and untreated for decades. Doctors blamed my symptoms on anything else, even my own behavior, and refused to send out blood work for a quick, simple and cheap test of free levels of triiodothyronine (T3) and thyroxine (T4), which together regulate your body’s temperature, metabolism and heart rate, because my "TSH (or thyroid stimulating hormone) is fine." Finally, I found a doctor who’d written an article on a study that articulated exactly what I’d been telling other doctors, and he immediately diagnosed me with Hashimoto's thyroiditis, a genetic disease. My mother’s mother had rheumatoid arthritis, and my sister is afflicted with RA, along with Lupus and Raynaud's phenomenon (RP) – all autoimmune diseases.  So many people I knew growing up from the same immigration also suffered from various autoimmune diseases, while diabetes and heart disease was extremely rare in this community. These people grew their own vegetables and fruits, fished and only bought meat if they knew how the animal was slaughtered. This was in the third-largest city in Massachusetts and fourth-largest in New England. My grandparents kept hens in a perch of shelves that my grandfather build into a one-car garage, grew dozens of vegetable varieties and berries, and even kept and slaughtered their own pigs. I often went fishing (at a nearby lake) and mushroom picking (at a nearby forest) with my grandfather. I picked berries from the small yard and helped collect eggs from the hens. My grandfather volunteered as a beekeeper at the monastery where he’s now buried on his vacations from factory work and brought home the equipment to keep hives in the yard.

My unexamined autoimmne hypothesis aside, there’s been even less done to psychologically diagnose these people and treat their obvious survivor’s guilt and often posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). This is an unforgivable failure of our mental health system and our society at large. America has welcomed the “wretched refuse of your teeming shore” but it has done nothing to help those huddled masses heal from the incomparable suffering of surviving war after war. PTSD and survivor’s guilt is so rarely used in conversations about anyone but U.S. military veterans. Unarmed civilians suffer far more than soldiers. PTSD and survivor’s guilt are often confused, even by trained specialists, but they are very different phenomena. While PTSD is psychopathological phenomenon, survivor’s guilt is more of an expression of a normal concern for other human beings, both as individuals and as a society.

My intention is never to undermine the struggle of soldiers. My father was a decorated veteran who served in the South Pacific and in Korea, and is immortalized in The New Orleans D-Day Museum. Many men in my family have served in numerous wars and conflicts. But when they volunteer or they’re drafted or recruited, soldiers are warned of the trauma to come, even if they cannot effectively prepare for it. Even the most distressed societies make an effort, and often a promise, to protect civilians, yet no adult or child ever is warned of the sudden terror that leads to destruction of what was a civil society. My mother also was robbed of a childhood, adding another level of stress to her guilt.

“The various effects that adults who were child survivors experience can be attributed to many aspects of their traumatic exposure. Children and adults were treated differently in the camps and consequently their emotional reactions were different. Children were likely too traumatized during the war to experience ‘true’ childhood,” writes Fara Kaplan in “Holocaust Survivors and Their Children: A Search for Positive Effects” published by The American Academy of Experts in Traumatic Stress. “Also, because the child's identity had been in a state of development, their experiences may have remained buried in their memory (i.e., unconscious). This may have impeded their ability to empathize with others and likely negatively affected their adjustment to their own offspring.”

For my mother, the survivor’s guilt from early childhood is compounded by the losses of her parents and my father, all of whom she cared for at home until their deaths from very serious illnesses. The Russians (and Eastern Slavs) I knew growing up did not sentence their sick and old to death in nursing homes. “How can I do that to my parents when they didn’t let me die?” my mother has said, or stated, many times. Of course, she was equally compelled to care for her dying husband. My grandfather’s illness was, mercifully, short-lived: he died about a year after he became bed-ridden, his wife and his daughter as his constant bedside companions. After he died, my grandmother was bedridden for nearly nine years, her (long undiagnosed) brain atrophy prohibiting her from speaking. She would, however, sometimes cry in a chanting tone that clearly signified the mourning of her loved ones, especially her infant sons.  My father was diagnosed with Stage IV colon cancer, metastasized to the liver, shortly after my grandmother died. I’ll spare the details of what such care involves, as I know most Americans lack the palate for visceral reality. But my mother completely gave up her life from 1987 until 2002. She hasn’t recovered from that trauma enough to indulge in what are very basic creature comforts for the average American, such as treating herself to a movie or a vacation – ever.

In a 1972 article in Psychoanalytic Quarterly, Stephen M. Sonnenberg, M.D., cites a case study involving a patient who felt guilty that her husband had died during surgery she authorized, after caring for him during a nine-month illness. “She also expressed feelings of guilt concerning the murder of her parents and younger sisters by the Nazis,” notes Sonnenberg.

“With (her husband’s) death, she not only felt guilt concerning him but she lost the opportunity to expiate her long-standing guilt by being a good nurse. In her unconscious, it was as if she had willed the suffering of her past loved ones in an effort to be close to them. Thus, guilt over past events became overwhelming. It would seem that this patient was a guilt-laden woman who lost a guilt-expiating object and at the same time underwent an experience that confirmed her past and present guilt. Signing for 'experimental' surgery was perhaps the final burden, and her obsession over it became clear in her treatment. While she insisted that her husband's good health had been her goal, she also felt that she was a 'murderer.’ Depression was present when anger at the lost object was conscious and when identification with the lost object did not exist. It was the strength of her guilt that made her feel so hopeless and depressed.”

Shulamith Kreitler, Frida Barak, Yasmin Alkalay and Nava Siegelman-Daniel conducted study of 195 family members of cancer patients who had been involved in the care of the patients and had a continuous relationship with them, which found that that survivor’s guilt is prevalent among the caretakers of cancer patients.

“It is distinct from the experiences of guilt and of remorse,” they wrote in paper “Survivor’s Guilt in Caretakers of Cancer” based on the study. “Survivor’s guilt is an affective response rooted in deeper layers of the personality. Most importantly, the observations about the correlates of survivor’s guilt six months following the patient’s death support the theses that survivor’s guilt exerts a pro-social impact on the person’s behavior and that it helps maintain the presence of the deceased in the life space of the survivor. Both of these effects led the deceased a kind of metaphorical immortality, thus helping the survivor preserve his or her own sense of immortality and the sense of continued contact with the deceased. In these respects survivor’s guilt contributes to overcoming death, at least on the psychological level.”

This desire to commune with the dead also plays into my mother’s religious beliefs and practices. Russian Orthodox Christians do not close the casket until it is taken from the church to the cemetery. My grandmother’s body was returned to my parent’s home where she died after being taken to the funeral home. A wake was held at home, with many non-Orthodox Christians in attendance, and kept my grandmother there until being transported 166 miles away to the monastery church. (I drove my mother’s car, following the hearse, which was nearing speeds of 100 mph. It was exhilarating.) Psalms are read over the body continuously and throughout the night until the funeral begins. In the words of the fathers of the seventh ecumenical council: “God re-created man in immortality, thus bestowing upon him a gift which could no longer be taken away from him.”

Nietzsche said Dostoevsky was “the only person who has ever taught me anything about psychology.” In Dostoevsky’s work, guilt and sin are existential conditions of man, and each of us is somehow guilty of everyone’s sins. Nietzsche began reading the work of Dostoevsky, who died in 1881, in 1887, finding inspiration in a fellow challenger of the fundamental world view of the Enlightenment. Religious belief is what divides the two. Dostoevsky ultimately believes in salvation and therefore an afterlife, a view Nietzsche boldly rejects. But they share a very similar perspective on guilt.

The confession of Raskolnikov, which leads the protagonist in Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment to prison, clearly had a profound impact on Nietzsche’s philosophy.

"Throughout most of human history, punishment has not been meted out because the miscreant was held responsible for his act, therefore it was not assumed that the guilty party alone should be punished: but rather, as parents still punish their children, it was out of anger over some wrong that had been suffered, directed at the perpetrator, but this anger was held in check and modified by the idea that every injury has its equivalent which can be paid in compensation, if only through the pain of the person who injures. And where did this primeval, deeply-rooted and perhaps now ineradicable idea gain its power, this idea of an equivalence between injury and pain? I have already let it out: in the contractual relationship between creditor and debtor, which is as old as the very conception of ‘legal subject’ and itself refers back to the basic forms of buying, selling, bartering, trade, and traffic." _ Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals (1887).

It’s impossible for me to imagine a guilt more “primeval, deeply-rooted” than survivor’s guilt.