Preparation Pilgrimage.
“Every act a ceremony, every place a shrine, every word a prayer, every walk a pilgrimage.” - Charles Eisenstein
I carefully place the map inside the A4 plastic sleeve. It’s already folded. It doesn’t know how to unfold given that it’s been folded in four for 79 years. Age old parcel tape is still (mostly) stuck down the back of its folds. If it were a box it would say “handle with care” on the front in large letters. It’s fragile, and it tells the story of escape, trauma, and lost opportunities. Every road, river, and border line tell the story war, suffering, and separation…of hiding, and of life…and death.
According to its’ top right-hand corner, the map was printed in Austria in 1942. The same year my grandfather was transported to, and sometime later, killed in Auschwitz. Three years after, my father and grandmother were given this very map by a farmer’s wife who had been providing them with shelter, food, and invisibility as they made their treacherous escape from Czechoslovakia into Germany. Only they didn’t know what had happened to their husband and father (my grandfather). They never knew what happened to him. They both died not knowing how the fucked-up world blew them apart, ignorant as to who lived and who didn’t and how and where and why.
And sometime after this map had sat in a drawer for a quarter of a century, growing yellow and trying to forget where it had been and what it had seen…somewhere running off the page down the cracks of its’ broken heart…is the story of how my sister and I came to be, growing up also not knowing this story, such was the vow of silence in the spirit of ‘drawing a line’ and ‘new beginnings’. But this repression led to all of that trauma steeping into their veins and cells and infusing their DNA which created all the ingredients for a couple of supersize dollops of inherited trauma which my sister and I had no choice but to receive, just like the supersize dumplings that our grandmother dished up in the name of love, which we had no choice but to receive whether we were full up or not. We were raised on a diet of trauma, love and dumplings.
That’s the story of my ancestral family, but somewhere in it is your story too. Keep reading and you’ll find it, somewhere amongst the cracks and crevices of this map that tells this tale. A map that had its coloured lines inked into it 82 years ago in a factory somewhere in an Eastern European country occupied by Nazis. Just as I had my lines inked into me by both my parents, and just as you had your lines inked into you by yours.
The map that I am now packing into my Wizz Air must-fit-under-the-seat size mini-suitcase, as I prepare to fly to Prague and travel overland all the way to Auschwitz…just as my grandfather would have done almost 8 decades before, except his journey would have been rather different to mine, and as much as I might be lacking some leg room, it can hardly be compared to the unimaginable suffering that he would have endured on a cattle truck reeking of the terror of hundreds of other human cargo, crammed head to armpit, unaware of the fate that lay down the sleepers and tracks.
And that’s why I’m making this trip. Because nobody talked about my grandfather. Ever. He wasn’t acknowledged. He didn’t exist, and that, in any family constellation context, is fucked up. Things need bringing back into balance, because the ripple effects of these traumas have trickled down like the lines on this map into our veins and the veins of our children, and that needs to stop before it bleeds into the next generation, and the next.
So, I’m taking this map and all that it bears, and I’ll be meeting my sister on the way. We need to do this together. This acknowledging, this healing… this pilgrimage.
To be continued…