Laughter After Auschwitz

The other night Dave and I stayed up late to watch an hour-long show on PBS titled "Swimming in Auschwitz"; it was a compilation of interviews of 6 different women, and since it ran without commercials, Dave and I were sucked in until the end. Each of the women lost one or more family members in their stay at the camp; all had an admirable composure and dignity in retelling their stories, and one of the women was even able to recount some of her memories there with laughter. Laughter.

Something I have been learning to appreciate more and more lately are the loving and good-tempered elders in the world. You know who I mean, the people one or two or three generations ahead of us who care about others and are genuinely good-natured. I think they are so precious because they seem to be markedly rare. In my growing appreciation for such people I also have been obtaining a growing knowledge about how hard living is; that gratitude, of all the disciplines, gets more difficult with time; that a playful spirit can so easily be shriveled up by daily responsibilities; that as personal injustices heap up over the years the temptation to turn inward and care only for oneself grows in strength; and that as you see more of your dreams clearly slip through your fingers your hope and imagination can easily fade.

Early in the show the women were describing their arrival to Auschwitz and the process of their individuality being taken away. First their luggage was thrown into a pile and they were told they would never see it again. Then came the 2 lines everyone was filtered through, the able-bodied to the showers and the grandparents and child to the chimneys. At the showers, they were separated into men and women, and then were each instructed to take off all of their clothes including their underwear. Naked, their heads were shaved and then they were thrown a different unfamiliar set of clothing. One of the women ended up with 2 left shoes; one of the mothers ended up with a stranger's ballgown thrown at her to wear in this dismal muddy place. As one of the women relayed the memory she began to giggle as the ridiculous image came back to her, their heads shining and bald in these ludicrous outfits that made each of them nearly unrecognizable. She said all the women in the shower were howling with laughter, partly to relieve tension, but also because they all looked so silly. "It's not really funny," the old Jewish woman chuckled as she wiped away tears of mirth.

Amazing. She laughed in innocence before she knew the suffering she was about to endure. And decades later, after living through those years of dying and starving and shivering and injustice, she was still able to laugh. She was not only able to laugh after 50 humdrum years of paying bills and mowing lawns and going to work, she was thriving and laughing when life had given her the worst. With every reason to be destroyed by bitterness this woman had kept a precious sense of humor. 

This gives me hope. Working at a grocery store for 3 years, I've had enough run-ins with old people who've grown up to be grouchy to know that I don't want to be that way when I get to be their age. But is it just an unavoidable side-effect of age? You have to wonder when you bump into enough bad-tempered grandparents. This woman's laughter, however, gives me hope that there's a choice in the matter...and it's no secret that it's not an easy choice. Life does what it can to beat you down, and sometimes its blows are bone-breakingly heavy. But the fact that among those who suffered the very worst are women who have come out yet laughing can lead me to no other belief than their remarkable power to choose against destructive bitterness.

Watching these women tell their stories, I wished that I would be able to make the choices necessary to mature me into a lady as graceful and good-natured as those 6 women.