A Primeval Forest of Guilt

A little girl lost in a forest, bewildered, in peril, not knowing when she’ll find a clearing. Such a quintessential and universal image would have been a fantasy for my mother, who watched the forests burn along with houses, as loved ones, friends and other children ran screaming usually to be greeted by death elsewhere. Survival seems like a way out. And for her there was an escape, but not to some idyllic land rich with frisky wildlife, ripe berries and fragrant flowers. Instead her path out, a forced one, was paved with the stench of death and not so much as a crumb to eat. The harsh environment wasn’t the worst of it. Losing others when she, for no good reason in her young perception, made it out alive came with a lifelong condition: guilt that ran deeper than the Dnieper River and stung more than a bullet wound.

Belarus was effectively flattened in World War II, leaving little of historic interest for tourists who flock to monuments and battle sites. But within those thick primeval forests and picturesque villages is buried a history of death and destruction.

Between 1937 and 1938, Stalin's NKVD secret police executed more than 1,000 people per day, most with a shot to the back of the head. As many as 1.6 million people were killed in Belarus during the Stalin-era purges, according to historian Ihar Kuznyatsow, even as officials claim only 600,000 Belarusians were killed. By any account, it’s a staggering number. Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko has downplayed Stalin’s reign of terror, claiming that mass graves don’t contain the NKVD’s victims. For parts of modern-day Belarus, little has changed. The country still has Soviet-style collective farms and there has been very limited privatization.

To the best of her recollection, my mother was born June 21st or 23rd by the Gregorian calendar (now internationally the most widely used civil calendar) in either 1936 or 1938. As a Russian Orthodox Christian, my mother observes holy days, or moveable and immovable feasts, by the Julian calendar, a reform of the Roman calendar introduced by Julius Caesar in 46 BC. The Julian calendar served as the civil calendar in some countries until as late as the 20th century. But her birthday, for all practical intents and purposes, has been July 5th since she immigrated to the United States in 1950. It has nothing to do with the differences between the two calendars. “When my father was interrogated, when we were prisoners in Germany (circa 1946), he had made a mistake about (some other fact) and he got scared and that's what he gave as my date of birth,” she explains.

Whether she was born before or just as Stalin unleashed his murderous rampage is irrelevant because her earliest memories would be of a world ruled by this evil beast. As today’s evil dictator, Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko (who was born in Vitebsk Oblast) continues to undermine the magnitude of the country’s losses, such historic events become mythical. Without any records of births and deaths and no markings on mass graves, it’s as if those who perished never existed outside the memory of survivors like my mother. Most of my mother’s close relatives, including all three of her brothers, and childhood friends were denied any burial ritual, all becoming lost in the very soil they identify with using a term zemlak (or zemlachka for women), literally meaning those from the same earth. For my mother’s parents, there was a culture to identify with before all the bloodshed. For my mother, there was nothing positive until she made it to a displaced persons’ camp in Germany.

My mother has no truly youthful memories. Her memories from youth don’t include any childlike whimsy that lends to the lighter side of fairytales. She didn’t learn many of these tales until she was older. As a little girl, these tales were passed down to me, both orally by my grandparents and their friends, many much older and from vastly different villages and cities, or in various tellings and translations. It’s unsurprising that my mother identifies only with the tales of the church, as her first happy memories are tied to hearing and singing liturgies.

Had my mother’s brothers lived, their story could have been more like the classic tale “The Metamorphosis Of The Dnieper, The Volga, And The Dvina,” of which the first and third run through Vitebsk Oblast.

The account recorded by 19^th century Russian scholar and translator William Ralston Shedden-Ralston, a close friend of Ivan Turgenev, begins like this:

The Dnieper, Volga, and Dvina used once to be living people. The Dnieper was a boy, and the Volga and Dvina his sisters. While they were still in childhood they were left complete orphans, and, as they hadn’t a crust to eat, they were obliged to get their living by daily labor beyond their strength. “When was that?” Very long ago, say the old folks; beyond the memory even of our great-grandfathers.

Well, the children grew up, but they never had even the slightest bit of good luck. Every day, from morn till eve, it was always toil and toil, and all merely for the day’s subsistence. As for their clothing, it was just what God sent them! They sometimes found rags on the dust-heaps, and with these they managed to cover their bodies. The poor things had to endure cold and hunger. Life became a burden to them.

One day, after toiling hard afield, they sat down under a bush to eat their last morsel of bread. And when they had eaten it, they cried and sorrowed for a while, and considered and held counsel together as to how they might manage to live, and to have food and clothing, and, without toiling, to supply others with meat and drink. Well, this is what they resolved: to set out wandering about the wide world in search of good luck and a kindly welcome, and to look for and find out the best places in which they could turn into great rivers—for that was a possible thing then.

Depressing to most, this would have been a far brighter outcome for my mother’s siblings. For her, along with a childhood stolen, all hope is lost.

Reliving Trauma by Mourning "Bad" Deaths

It was something like: “Ooooowhoawoahoooo!” The exact sound is impossible to convey in writing, but I can still hear it.

“Ooooowhoawoahoooo! Ooooowhoawoahoooo! Ooooowhoawoahoooo!”

My grandfather – my beloved Degushka -- the strong, stubborn, handsome, well-coiffed, impeccably attired, intimidating and often-argumentative man who I admired and idolized despite his prominent character flaws, was bellowing.

The chaotic chorus of “Ooooowhoawoahoooo!” was thunderous yet muffled. I called for him. In quickfire Russian, he warned me to hide, too. “They are coming! They have killed my sister and my mother! They will kill us all!”

Terrifying, but not delusional. His mother and sister were brutally murdered some seven decades ago in Belarus. Though on a quiet street in a Western Massachusetts suburb in the mid-1980s it would have struck any other passer-by as the ranting of madman, even though nobody else understood what he was saying.

As a tween and young teen, I volleyed between my parents’ house, about a mile-and-a-half away, and my grandparents' house. I forget why I was headed there, that day at that time. It was an otherwise mundane day that had gone -- by any middle-class suburban American standard existing at the time -- mad.

Deugshka was hiding under his car parked in the driveway, supine, legs straight, right arm crossed over left as if he were preparing to accept communion or his body readied for funeral and burial in the Russian Orthodox Church.

It was one of those moments. When I first learned the term posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) on the TV news, it referred to soldiers in the Vietnam War. As I came to understand it, I realized my grandfather was having a flashback, another term that had taken on a very different meaning in my social education. It wasn’t the first time I’d witnessed something like this, and certainly not the last. But feeling exposed on the driveway, even though nobody reacted, made me self-conscious. Already I was an outsider in this world of WASPs and other people who had no connection to the generation of their family that first arrived in America. Now this.

I was frustrated, scared and worst of all helpless. What could I possibly do? Get the keys and attempt to slowly roll back the car, hoping he didn’t budge? Attempt to drag him out? None of this was feasible. The episode, like all others, passed, but the impact was forever imprinted.

In the last years of her life, my Babushka, my mother’s mother, entered trancelike states where she would moan in a somber, steady stream of cries of and gasps for breath. The sound was similar to her husband’s “Ooooowhoawoahoooo!” but heavier and more sorrowful. In a PTSD flashback, she was mourning the deaths of her three young sons and countless close relatives and friends who died during my mother’s early childhood.

In all the years my maternal grandparents underwent tests for various medical conditions, not a single doctor ever mentioned PTSD.

With my mother, there also is no talk of PTSD, no mention of survivor's guilt or survivor's syndrome, which clearly is the root of her anxiety and stress related to what might otherwise be considered normal circumstances or situations. My mother feels guilty for surviving when her three brothers and peers perished. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, published by the American Psychiatric Association, removed survivor guilt as a specific diagnosis and redefined it as a significant symptom of PTSD. Regardless, my mother clearly suffers from both yet has never been treated for either.

So much of what is relived in these PTSD flashbacks manifests in concert with Russian Orthodox rituals and traditions and/or superstitions surrounding the complex mourning process.

Both the deliberate practices and the flashbacks play out like a dark fairytale. As a child I felt that the mourning in these PTSD episodes was a call back for the dead, as if somehow reliving the traumatic experience might reverse the outcome of the tragedy that claimed their lives.

In Russian folk tradition, death can be reversible and is related to sleep, a state in which one can experience the "other world" and return to tell about it. A couple of years after finding my Degushka bellowing under his car, I witnessed what my grandmother described as “crossing over” after a near-death experience. She called my parents’ house in the days of landlines, her voice muted and fading. I knew something was wrong. “Come quickly,” she said calmly. I stormed into the patio and ran into the house. The door was unlocked. She was nowhere. I rushed to the basement, where another time I found her laying in a pool of blood after she cracked her head in a tumble down the stairs. She was nowhere. I panicked. I ran back into the patio. She was laying on a sofa, still but faintly breathing, I think. In shock, I sat there, holding her hand. She awoke, describing how she’d walked through a green meadow and saw her mother, siblings, sons and others who told her “It’s not your time yet, Alexandra Dmitrieva.”

Russian folk tradition considers it a “good” death or “their own” when someone dies in old age surrounded by family, and a “bad” death or “not their own” when they die early, generally from murder, suicide, sickness or in war. My mother and her parents lost nearly every loved one to “bad” death during her early childhood at the hands of Stalin, The Nazis and the Belarusian Partisans. In Russian folklore, the soul is depicted as small and childlike, and sometimes as having wings and flying. It’s unsurprising that mother claims to have seen angels singing above her brother’s body during his funeral.

Flashback: The Trauma of Survival

"Miss Goo-rell?" the nurse called, tapping me on the shoulder as I circled the cramped family waiting room at Baystate Medical Center, focused on the surge of pain from tearing deep into my cuticle creating a little pool of blood, a practice I'd honed for coping with hospital-wait anxiety.

I jumped to face her. "It's Gur ..." I stopped myself from needlessly correcting her pronunciation.

"Yes, I'm Natasha Gural. Luba (LYU-bah) Gural’s daughter. Is my mother …”

The nurse looked at me strangely and carefully, as if my face had been replaced by a Magritte apple. This constant discomfort I feel in my birth city, where I over-analyze every action of people who choose to expend as little mental energy as possible to get by, particularly at this hospital, is compounded by fear of what she will say next.

“Your mother is fine, medically speaking. The procedure went well and she is awake,” despite what sounded like good news, her troubled expression intensified.

“OK … So can I see her?”

“Well, normally we do not let anyone into the recovery room immediately post-op, but she is calling for you. We don’t know what she is saying, but we think she is calling for you.”

“OK! She’s OK?”

“Yes, medically. But she is awake, and I suppose alert, but she seems to be in some kind of shock and she seems to be calling for you. We cannot understand how or why she is awake. She should be sleeping for hours …”

My mother’s hyper-sensitivity to sedatives and narcotics is bested only by her ability to remain awake on any dose, even as she experiences every other known side effect. I suspect it’s a defense mechanism.

I follow the nurse through giant doors clearly marked to fend off non-staff. I hear my mother. It sounds like a little girl, a voice I’d never heard, but one I’d imagined.

“Natashenka! Natashenka! Natashenka!” she half-cried-half-screamed as she alternated between English and Russian, both in that haunting childlike voice.

“I’m here, Mom,” I said, holding her hand.

“They are trying to kill me,” she said in what must have been an attempt at a whisper. “You have to get me out of here. Look: All the other people are dead! They are laying here dead!”

Every other patient was sound asleep on a cot, some young, some old, all attached to monitors and stuck with needles. All were expected to survive after a few hours following their operations, or else they’d have been whisked downstairs to ICU. But to my mother, the pale, motionless faces were corpses, on their last earthly journey from gurney to grave.

To the typical Baystate employee, my mother’s behavior was irrational, beyond their comprehension and control. That’s why they called in the expert: her daughter, the only one who might be able to perform where Valium conked out. Save for the odd orderly who experienced combat, nobody passing through those daunting doors could possibly understand how terror triumphed over IV-induced catatonia.

Though I had no means of calming her, I could at least empathize. Was I better off pretending she was correct and promising that I was going to get her out before they killed her, or should I try to draw her back to the start of the 21^st century in the United States?

I knew exactly what she meant about the dead bodies destined for a mass grave. As a young child, I had recurring nightmares of a death camp where I, too, lay in limbo as others had already gone cold and rigid. In my dream, I made every effort to appear dead as guards in long, tailored coats and peaked caps, circled around my intended deathbed. My horrific visions originated from the stories my mother’s parents and other Great Purge and World War II civilian survivors shared in sharp detail, supplemented by my fascination with the dark side of my family’s history.

My nightmares were born from my mother’s real-life experience. I could only imagine how horrifying it was for her to relive that trauma, held captive in a cold, soulless depository of patients who were expected to lay lifelessly for a few hours offering the staff a respite from any interaction aside from gossiping about doctors, barking fried food orders to subordinates and creating a patient-less world through insufferable banal banter.

The nurse came by a few times, mainly to grumble that it’d be best if I could get my mother to sleep. “It’s the best thing you can do for her.” The countless shortcomings of the U.S. medical system are second only to its complete failure to recognize and identify the psychological needs of patients who were asked to fill out dozens of pages of paperwork, none inquiring into the unique background of a human being. There I was, the de-facto shrink-crisis manager-untrained Girl Friday left to deal with what the system isn’t willing to address.

If I sound bitter or resentful, it’s because I am. This is the same hospital where I was called upon to fill in where staff had failed, most notably when as a young teenager I was whisked from an ambulance that picked me up at school into an operating room and ICU with my mother’s father, translating orders on how he breathe during a lucid trauma procedure following as car crash “it’s a miracle he survived.” That nurse tapped me on the shoulder in the same room where I learned my father was dying from undiagnosed-despite-all-the-right-tests Stage IV colon cancer metastasized to the liver. This is the same hospital my grandfather once escaped before discharge. The same hospital where both my mother’s parents spent the cruelest of their dying days. I knew every hallway, every exit and every supply closet (since staff often don’t bother with the basic needs of patients who can no longer speak).

No wonder I was treated as unpaid personnel. Besides being called upon to assist with my own family member’s care, I’d once served as a translator in a language I barely claim proficiency when the emergency room supervisor said she couldn’t find a German translator for a Polish man who had apparently broken his leg. Before I came along, they’d suspected he’d suffered a heart attack.

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.

Sole Surviving Sibling: The First Four Years

My mother’s mother, Alexandra Dimitrievna (Dimitrieva) Grishaev, was born March 3, 1913, in Dubrovka, a village in Vitebsk Oblast. My mother’s father, Grigori Ustinovich Grishaev, was born Nov. 18, 1907, in Lagi, also Vitebsk Oblast. Both villages are located near the Russian border, and my maternal grandmother would walk to Russia's Smolensk Oblast to attend services at the closest Russian Orthodox church. The oblast (which means administrative region) borders Russia, Latvia and Lithuania, and is a major railway center with stations for lines between Russia and Ukraine, Russia and Poland, and Russia and Lithuania.

Her maternal grandparents were Dimitri and Matrona, and her paternal grandparents were Ustin (Justin) and Natalia. She only recalls that they were born “in Russia someplace.”

My mother was the oldest sibling, the only girl and the only survivor. Her brothers all died as infants, and are still remembered as such in daily prayers. She doesn’t recall exactly when or where her brothers were born.

In her words: “One of my brothers was born a year or so later than me. His name was Pyotr, which is Peter in English. And my mother had twins; they were probably like two or three years younger than me. One of them was Michael (Mikhail) and one was Ivan, which is John. And actually one of them didn’t live that long. And I, for some reason at that time, liked the name John better. And when they were lying on a bed or something I used to switch them because I thought my mother and father wouldn’t know the difference. [laughter] (My parents)  said something that one of them was weaker, and probably wouldn’t live too long, but they knew (I was switching the babies).” 

All the boys shared names with tsars from the House of Romanov: Michael I, ruled from July 26, 1613, to July 14, 1645; Ivan V (jointly with Peter I) ruled from June 2, 1682, to February 8, 1696; Peter (I) the Great ruled from June 2, 1682, to November 2, 1721. My babushka (mother’s mother) had predicted that Mother Russia would rise again, and would be ruled by a Tsar Michael, the first tsar. My mother told us this after my husband Mike and I named our son Michael Alexander. In the 18th and 19th centuries, three Alexanders ruled Russia as emperors. Grand Duke Michael Alexandrovich Romanov (married to Natalia Brasova) was the youngest son of Emperor Alexander III of Russia, and at the time of his birth, his paternal grandfather (Alexander I) was emperor of “All the Russias.” Michael was fourth in line to the throne following his father and older brothers Nicholas and George. After his grandfather was assassinated in 1881, he became third in line. When his father died in 1894, he became second, and then the heir to the throne when George died in 1899. The birth of Nicholas's son Alexei in 1904 would have edged back Michael one spot, but Alexei was a hemophiliac and was expected to die. When Nicholas abdicated on March 15, 1917, Michael was named as his father’s successor, but he refused the throne until ratification by an elected assembly. He was never confirmed as emperor, and he was sent to prison and murdered following the Russian Revolution of 1917.

I’m not a historian and have no authority here, but people in general have very strong opinions about the Russian royals and often present passing and erroneous comments as fact. An older woman (with no trace of a foreign accent) I’d encountered in a Manhattan elevator informed me that my son “has a regal name.” “You know,” she said. “Alexander was tsar of Russia.” I smiled and said, “Yes, and Michael was the first tsar of Russia.” She grimaced, bowed her head, and informed me, “No, dear. I don’t think so.”
 
The births and deaths of the tsars are widely, if not always accurately or consistently, documented. Any evidence beyond memory of my mother’s brothers may exist only in their unmarked graves, which may or may not remain today.

Says my mother: “I don’t know how my brother Peter died. I don’t know anything about that. He was an infant. And John died when the war was almost to start, it was like 19 … I don’t know … when the Second World War was starting. And John died soon after that. And Michael … we did not have any, hardly any food, to eat, and he got very sick. There were no doctors. He had pneumonia. And he was 2 ½ when he died.” 

My mother says her brothers were buried in the tiny of village of Lemnitsa in Vitebsk Oblast, some 158 miles northeast of Minsk. There is nothing online but serial maps of Lemnitsa, searching in English or in Russian. It’s as if it exists only as a tiny pinprick on the massive expanse of a geographic region and only in the memory of the few survivors like my mother.

For my mother, Lemnitsa serves literally and figuratively as a giant grave, where nearly all members of her family perished along with all its other inhabitants. “That's where also my father's mother and sister were harshly killed, and his sister was 16 at that time,” my mother says. “That's where they are buried, too.” 

When asked for earliest childhood memory, my mother bites her lip as tears trickle down her cheeks, chin and neck. She’s able to compose herself enough to reveal this rare moment when she was about three years old. 

“Afterwards, when we moved into this house that was built, and I was very little, we didn’t really have that much food, usually, always, you know. And the people across the street, they had these … they made them for me… it was like hamburger meat or  meatballs. Just a little bit of meat and potatoes. And they gave me some. I thought that was the best thing I ever had.”

“And the other thing that I remember myself -- I really don’t remember too much of my childhood at all -- I do remember someone giving me candy one time, and ironically, I must've really wanted the candy for some reason, but 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 had let open some churches, and my brother Michael was still alive at that time, and that's when he was baptized in the church when it opened.” 

She doesn’t recall the name of the church or the priest, but she speaks of a mystical experience, which punctuates her lifelong passion for Russian Orthodoxy and guilt, even now, over her tardiness to liturgy, even when she’s ill. The girlhood hunger for faith was as intense as the need for food to survive. My mother still thinks this way. It’s an inescapable passion. 

“Oh, it was beautiful, big church,” she boasts, the tears drying, her eyes glistening with delight and a smile spreading quickly across her face. “And I think, in my opinion, I saw angels singing on top of the church, but when I was telling someone they said I probably just heard people singing, and because there were probably paintings (of angels), so it was like a very large church. Yeah, to me it looked very good.” 

She doesn’t remember anything about the cupolas, or onion domes, whether they were wooden or gilded. “I don’t remember the outside. I just remember the inside of it. And, oh yes, there were a lot of people!” Most were strangers, bonded only by faith in Orthodoxy or at least a transfixion with the church itself, finally erected, open and serving a safe place to seek refuge for the soul or body. “I was too little. I didn’t really know anyone there. The church was full.” 

My mother’s memory shifts suddenly to retrieve another visceral early childhood experience, one she’d likely repressed. 

“And then I do remember something which I'm very upset about. When my little brother was sick, Michael, I was a little bit older, and well, actually, before he got sick, the reason he got sick is because there was this one room where four or five families of us lived because we all lost our houses and everything. But it was not where I was born or where I lived, it was somewhere farther. (Possibly closer to what is now the Polish border.) And what happened is, my mother, she was in quarantine because she had typhoid fever, and my little brother was still breast-fed at that time, and because she wasn’t with us and the two of us were left there, and this one woman that had a cat in there, 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 a T-shirt, some kind of an undershirt on, and she threw him outside, and I wasn’t able to pick him up or anything because I was too small yet, too. And then that's when he got very sick. And he had to leave late in the night. I don’t know if it was like a crib or something like that, for a long time he was very sick, and there was another girl that was my age that lived in that house, and we were playing cards with her, and my little brother would cry, and I would get very angry at him because he was disturbing me, and so that actually to this day tortures me. That I did that.” 

I hate too push my mother when she tells this story, but I am compelled. If I don’t ask now, I know it will be forever lost, existing only as the pain she felt compounded by all the other pain that she endures every second of every day. I ask her about the woman with the cat.

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

I push mother more, even though I can sense from her curt response that it isn’t something she wants to elaborate. I ask her about the daughter, her age, her name. 

“Well, I don’t know. She was a woman at that time because she did have a daughter, I think. She was not a young girl. She was probably in her twenties. No. No, I don’t remember that woman's name. And then at the same time, 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 actually living at that time where the German soldiers were, but my grandmother, my father's mother and his sister that were killed, they were in a killed (by the Partisans) in a place that in the daytime, the Germans would be there at night. The Partisans were there, or vice versa, I don’t remember. But anyway, somehow, I remember, I do sort of remember going to the cemetery, and they were all, as far as I know, all killed and just buried in one grave. And but it was the cemetery, where we lived before the war started.” 

My mother says they were killed by the Belarusian Partisans, resistance fighters who fought the Nazis and collaborationism during World War II. 

“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 this house, and they had a list of people who they were told to burn down the 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 would go and take 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, so they didn’t want to waste the bullets, I guess.” 

At this point, we pause during an emotional discussion so my mother can collect her thoughts. 

“And so they used the other part of the gun (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 – [sobbing] 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 would 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. That, I think, I just made up. No one was able to tell me that. I think that I remember myself.” 

My mother pauses again. 

“I think I do remember, I saw when the fighting was going on between the Germans and Russians -- I'm not sure if it was Partisans or the or the, Russian Army. I don’t know, I never asked my parents what army it was. But I know at that point I just saw the Germans afterwards because they're the ones that took us as prisoners after, so I really didn’t see any Russian soldiers after that. And there was a wagon full of stuff and we were walking on one side, and this other girl, about my age, was walking on the other side, and the grenade was thrown, and she was very close to me, and she got killed, and I didn’t. And of course there were other people that were killed but I remember her because she was a friend of mine, you know? And that was very, very tragic.” 

Perhaps a combination of the survivor’s guilt and the desire to block out such a traumatic childhood memory made my mother forget the girl’s name. 

“And then, after that, Germans were moving us from one place to the other. And I remember we lived in Poland for almost like nine months. In Lublin, which was going back from the Russians to Poland.”