Tamara Eidelman. Is it easy to build bridges?

Is it easy to build bridges?
Bridging the Gap. Storytelling as a way to work through political and collective hostilities / Edited by Dan Bar-On in cooperation with Susanne Kutz and Dirk Wegner. - Edition Korber-Stiftung, 2000

Tamara Eidelman

Publication date: August 29, 2000

“Of course, I hate Palestinians because I live in this country,” my uncle, a kind, caring, good man, told me as we were drinking tea with him in the kitchen of his Tel Aviv apartment. To be honest, this didn’t surprise me at all. Except that it reminded me of the words of a completely different person - my classmate, who now also lives in Israel. About twenty years ago, when we studied together at the history department of Moscow State University, he was engaged in freestyle wrestling and once admitted to me that in his sports section there was a very nice German, but when German words escaped him during classes, it turned out to be very difficult to cope with with his hatred of the “fascist”.

Both of the above phrases refer to people who were not personally harmed by either the Palestinians or the Germans. What should people who have gone through bloody trials experience? And what feelings should their children have? This is precisely the question that Dan Bar-On, a professor at the University of Beersheba, has been studying for many years. His studies in psychology led him to work therapeutically with children of Holocaust survivors. It turned out that the heavy legacy left by parents: terrible memories, loss of family, sometimes silence behind which unspeakable horrors are hidden - all this distorts the life of the new generation, who grew up, it would seem, in completely different conditions. If Dan Bar-On was only involved in helping people who survived the Holocaust, this would probably already be a great thing. However, the psychologist went further, based on the completely reasonable assumption that the bloody past disfigured the families of not only the victims, but also the executioners. For several years, he interviewed the children of Nazi criminals, trying to understand the impact of terrible memories on their lives. This is how the books “Inherited Silence” and “Fear and Hope - Three Generations after the Holocaust” arose.

In 1992, Dan Bar-On decided to do something that few people had even thought of before. He brought together nine Jews from the United States and Israel, whose parents survived the Second World War, and nine children of Nazi criminals. This is how the TRT group (To Reflect and Trust) was created. Over the course of five years, from 1992 to 1997, these people, despite the surprise and sometimes indignation of their loved ones, met six times in Germany, Israel, America - and simply told each other stories about their lives. The results, judging by their own admissions, were amazing. They managed to overcome many psychological difficulties that did not allow both the children of the victims and the children of the executioners to live in peace, and by the end of the five-year period they realized that they were already able to help not only themselves, but also others. In 1998, the TRT group organized a new seminar in Hamburg, where people who were trying to peacefully resolve bloody conflicts in their countries were invited. Now blacks and whites from South Africa, Catholics and Protestants from Northern Ireland, Palestinians and Israelis are at the same table. It was no coincidence that the meeting took place in Hamburg - the headquarters of the Kerber charitable foundation is located there, which for several decades has been supporting a wide variety of humanitarian initiatives, united, perhaps, primarily by the fact that their participants initially proceed from the plurality and diversity of people's lifestyles, views, and beliefs. The Kerber Foundation is investing huge amounts of money in German-Turkish educational projects, in the sociological study “Youth and History”, which showed how different assessments of the past are among teenagers in different countries, in a historical competition that is already taking place in many parts of Europe. It is perhaps worth mentioning one more feature of this foundation - despite the fact that it has a huge amount of money at its disposal (about 720 million marks), amazingly kind, modest and selfless people work here. The TRT seminar, of course, fit perfectly into the general policy of the Kerber Foundation. Dan Bar-On, together with several assistants, took a long time and carefully selected the people who received an invitation to Hamburg. The task was not simply to find the children of the victims and executioners. These were supposed to be people who would then be able to transfer to their country the therapeutic methods developed over the five years of work of the group. The search process is described in the book “Building Bridges,” and I must say that reading about it is no less interesting than reading about the seminar itself.

However, the main content of the book “Building Bridges” consists of the stories of the seminar participants about their lives, experiences, and how their short four-day meeting in Hamburg changed them. These rather simple texts read like detective stories - here are biographies of the children of Jewish immigrants in America, stories from the life of kibbutzniks, the confession of the son of Martin Bormann, the story of the grandson of one of the creators of the apartheid system in South Africa, a description of the complex experiences experienced by Palestinians in Hamburg, and much more. . Some wrote rather dryly and restrainedly, others, on the contrary, enthusiastically claimed that after this meeting a completely new life began for them. Some episodes of the seminar are described by different participants - and this makes the narrative even more dramatic. Thus, the story of how a Palestinian participant, after several days of conversations with Jews, finally asked to explain to her whether the Holocaust actually happened, was told by both Israelis and Palestinians. What can I say, even the biographies of the meeting participants attached at the end of the book make me want to read without stopping.

TRT members and their guests admit that participation in the seminar was very rewarding, but it required a lot of effort. Dan Bar-On, summing up the work, admitted that although he hopes to disseminate his experience, he understands how difficult it will be. Many readers may doubt the very idea that severe long-term conflicts can be resolved not only by global action, but also through the mutual assistance of several suffering people. And yet, I would like to follow Ludwig Wittgenstein, following Wolf Schmidt, one of the leaders of the Kerber Foundation: “The whole world cannot mourn more than one soul.” This is probably why the book “Building Bridges” is impossible to tear yourself away from - it is about how people overcome their suffering and help others overcome it.