A Point of View A Sense of Fear Radio 4
We carry within us at some subconscious level the fear and the suffering of our ancestors. It is imprinted there.
For Zoe Strimpel in her reflection on recent quarantine regulations, the tightening of UK borders in the face of the pandemic, became very personal.
“As a Jewish descendent of German Jewish refugees, I have felt – for the first time – a sharp edge of panic and fear,” she confessed.
In this reflection on how we are shaped by our past, she tells the story of how, in August 1940 , German Jewish intellectual Walter Benjamin found himself in a small town in the Pyrenees having been released from internment in Nazi occupied France.
His Paris flat had been raided, his friends were trying to help him get out of the country.
France was coming for him but how to leave and where to go?
“I am condemned to read every newspaper as if it were a summons served on me in particular,” he wrote.
Borders were opening and closing and there was no easy route. Hope arrived in the shape of a visa for America, but he had to escape into Spain via the Pyrenees.
He had to be carried through a vineyard and on to the border.
Only to hear that the border and his escape route had been closed that very day.
That night, he took a fatal dose of morphine and died. But the next day the French border with Spain re-opened - so many lives are bound up in such irony. Only on that particular day was the catastrophe that was Walter Benjamin’s death possible.
And given Strimpel’s personal history – that constant mortal danger, both psychological and physical… hit her hard.
So that the current quarantine scheme filled her with “hysterical misery” she confessed.
Even though there is no comparison between a pandemic and World War II… there is a painful generational memory. Our bodies keep the score.
This resonates for all of us here too.
Our children may not have lived a daily life of checkpoints and army patrols, the soldier crouched with the gun on the corner, the burning bus on the street, the dull thudding echo of an explosion.
But at some level, the memories live on in our children.
Strimpel’s reflection set out a series of ripples… how the past shadows our everyday present, how our ancestors’ suffering lurks at the corners of our being.
