The Human Spirit

The director of our senior hall tells us to trust that she picks engaging speakers for the monthly Life Learning Lecture Series and to come even if the topic doesn’t sound particularly interesting. I’m glad I took that advice this week. I’ve been in a ‘down mood’ lately with no discernible explanation for feeling that way so I was afraid that listening to a recounting of personal experiences about living in Nazi prison camps might add to my melancholy. But it didn’t. In fact, afterward I was intrigued with exploring the unanswered questions posed at the lecture: “How do you survive surviving something as heinous as the Holocaust? How are people able to accept the past injustices and put faith in humanity again? 

The lecturer, a medical anthropologist, wrote a well-researched book based on her mother’s personal accounts. The back cover summary reads: “Jadwiga Lenartowicz Rylko, known as Jadzia (Yah’-jah), was a young Polish Catholic physician at the start of World War II. Suspected of resistance activities, she was arrested in January 1944. For the next fifteen months, she endured three Nazi concentration camps and a forty-two day death march, spending part of this time working as a prisoner-doctor to Jewish slave laborers. [The book] A Polish Doctor in the Nazi Camps follows Jadzia from her childhood and medical training, through her wartime experiences, to her struggles to create a new life in the postwar world.”

Barbara Rylko-Bauer gave a spell-binding lecture and if you get a chance to see her, don’t shy away. She’s been traveling all over the country on a book tour and has even been invited to speak in Paris this summer. The book has won many prestigious awards, has gotten a lot of media attention and I can't believe Barbara lives close-by. The lecture was more than just another survivor’s story. It showcased a unique mother/daughter experience, of a woman who didn’t talk about her wartime years until late in her life, of the two of them going on a pilgrimage back to Poland and Germany to retrace and document Jadzia’s life including her time spent working for the U.S. Army after the war helping to treat concentration camp survivors. That's where she met and married another Holocaust camp survivor before resettling in Michigan. She was 100 years old when she died.

One thing that the author stressed throughout her lecture is how people in the camps found ways to “resist” and increase their odds of surviving and to hold on to their own humanity. For example, at a slave labor work camp the women would smuggle sewing thread they were making for German uniforms back to their barracks where they would braid it into chains that they used to crochet socks. In that same work camp she slept in a 10’ x 10’ room with thirteen other women, sleeping on a straw covered floor “like sardines in a can.” And the ‘crime’ that got her arrested and imprisoned in the first place? She belonged to a small group of friends who listened in secret to a radio which was against the law in occupied Poland. 

After the lecture I went through Mr. Burger’s take-out line to pick up some lunch. It’s green shakes season in honor of St. Patrick’s Day and after that thought-provoking lecture I needed some comfort food. (Who am I fooling? I always want/need comfort food.) I took my lunch over to a place that overlooks a contributory river to Lake Michigan. My husband and I used to go there often after he became wheelchair bound so the place weeps with widowhood memories. Its serenity made it a perfect place to reflect on how people survive surviving heinous life experiences. Where does the strength come from to pick up the pieces and go on? And if they can do that, surviving ordinary life experiences should be a piece of cake.

The ice on the river was gone, the current was strong and it carried a large fallen tree along at a fast pace. Spring is here and I realized that’s the source of half of my melancholy. I don’t even have my wintertime To-Do list done and it’s almost time to roll out a spring list. Why do I (we?) get caught up into micromanaging life to the point that not doing something like cleaning the kitchen cabinets can make me feel like a failure or lazy or old? Why do I turn stuff like that into a big, mood-alternating deal? And, for me, that’s why going to lectures like the one I heard on Thursday is important. They’re a good kick in the butt for getting lost in the minutia of life. No one is going to die if I don’t throw out my outdated vinegar or donate the biscotti pan I never use. No one cares what I do or don’t do…and that’s the source of the other half of my melancholy. Woo is me and shame on me at the same time. I’ve got some broad-brush, important things going on in my life like good health, freedom and financial security and if there are missing pieces---oh, well, I'll find them when I find them. The human spirit is amazingly renewable. ©

If anyone is interested in an in-depth review of A Polish Doctor in the Nazi Camps click this link:  The Boston Review  The author's website is here.