Do we meet our destiny or does destiny meet us?
Some of my family members were Czech Jews and Holocaust survivors
They fled the land of their birth in 1968 at the time of the uprising against Russians.
They came to Australia long before me and passed away before I had a chance to meet them.
I knocked on the door of their childhood's house in an attempt to come to grips with their personalities, the enigma of their suffering and the poignancy of their passing.
Their books and mementos left behind hold the sense of absolutely devoted love and the separateness that human identity involves.
I traveled far to find their last house they occupied in Australia by the urgency of my quest to understand and, through understanding, re-create their lives.
Some of my family members, some deceased and some still alive, living in Austria...
in Hungary or...
Slovakia watched Nazi crimes happen or looked away...
The concept of collective guilt...I looked through the same window they used to see the Jews to be rounded up and...
I certainly felt the sense of my grandparents' silent suffering of shame but I could not love them less because of that...
I visited the remains of the church where my Grandmother's sister was burnt alive.
I walked through the forest they used to hide and nearly starved.
I climbed to the Jewish Memorial and asked myself: "Does that then make it easier to understand why they did not help?"
I found my Grandmother kneeling in a church lost in prays. I sat next to her knowing that it is not up to me to point the finger and blame...
I left the city of my childhood aching with sadness and love. I have done my own excavations of historical and personal holocausts.
I have been away when my Grandmother died. I just got her message: " I didn't choose that life. I just wanted to survive."
It meant a laying to rest of ghosts of the holocaust and an attempt to normalize my grandparents' guilt and shame of the past.
When I think about my deceased family, I feel the strong tug of love and death.
Meanwhile, I am on my own, left to live my comfortable life and to ponder: "What would I do in their place?"
The truth is, indeed, so fragile and yet so devastatingly lethal just like life itself. But far more frightening is the notion of dying with a heart full of regret and shame.
My family members had no choice but I have. I can not change where do I come from but I can change who I become.
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