This is the
foulest piece I’ve written. Normally when I have a non-mainstream, critical perspective
– often some objection to cognitive therapy or the escapist intellectual life –
it is an offshoot of my feeling-centered regressive paradigm which is not
universally agreed on but which can’t be considered inhumane: Our past remains
our roots, we are dysfunctional because we’ve been hurt, and focusing on
symptoms not causes is at best superficial help.
Today’s
argument comes primarily from mood, which then seeks its reason. I just read New York Times’
Bret Stephens’ article* on Luis Stillmann, survivor of concentration camps and two near-executions by Nazi soldiers. He suffered, no doubt, all the personal and witness horrors a prisoner of hell could endure. Stephens’ theme seems
to be how buoyant, if not untouchable, Stillman remained from beginning to now.
Along the way,
at night, he is stopped at gunpoint by an S.S. officer.
“Here we go
again,” Stillmann tells himself.
“You are a Jew,”
the officer says.
“I am not a Jew,
I’m Portuguese,” Stillmann replies. He produces a falsified passport obtained
the previous summer thanks to a family relative working in Lisbon’s embassy in
Budapest.
“Swear that
Germany is winning the war and I’ll let you go,” the officer says.
“Germany has
already won the war,” he answers. Between 60 and 70 percent of Hungary’s Jews
have already perished in the Holocaust. The officer puts away his gun.
He survives, the
camp is liberated. “The date is Friday, May 4, 1945. Prisoners, half-crazed
with hunger, crawl toward their liberators over ground that is a putty of mud,
urine and feces. Stillmann, with an infect leg wound, makes his way to a nearby
American field hospital. He weighs 83 lbs.”
He returns home
to Hungary, digs up his family heirlooms the location of which he saw in a
dream, finds that “Russian troops are quartered in his family home. He slips
across the border to Austria, where he shuffles between displaced-persons camps
while looking for a country that might take him. A visa from Mexico comes
through, and Lajos becomes Luis. There he meets Buba, also a Hungarian refugee
and an Auschwitz survivor. Together they raise a thriving family. In time he
becomes a pharmaceutical executive and a pillar of the Mexican-Jewish
community.”
Stillmann “cherishes
his grandchildren and great-grandchildren, slips effortlessly between cultures
and languages, dispenses sound medical advice to his friends, propounds
historical counterfactuals, has an endless stock of anecdotes (some
heartbreaking, many hilarious), and is always good for a joke. He’s the most
positive man I’ve ever met.”
Spoiler alert to
the most foul: I am not pleased. There is something amiss. How does a man who suffered
like this, the constant threat of murder, losses, and others’ deaths, come out whistling a positive
tune, enjoying the conviviality of community, making robust career choices, having a stockpile of laughs, growing
a magnanimous life and a legacy? Where is the tragic or pessimistic sense of
life that would not only be appropriate but pretty much requisite under these
circumstances? How does a man facing the world’s most evil and banal monster
say “Here we go again”?
And – what are
people loving, what is each and every reader-commenter feeling inspired by? It
is not the man’s ability to not die, which could certainly be impressive. It is Stillmann’s
mordant resilience, which is the only personal quality suggested in
Stephens’ article. Stillmann is not bent or amputated or enraged or lost or even
clinically depressed by complex trauma, by a world that ignored evil’s greatest victims. I believe that if readers set aside
their childlike need for sentimental stories, they would know that survival against
odds is not a character virtue. It is not moral, not benevolent, not redeeming,
and not a “lesson for us all,” as no one should feel a failed person for being unable
to match his example, for being unable to come out of hell more or less chipper. Yet somehow, somehow people smell the perfume of heroism and goodness in Stillmann’s air. His story is an illusory plucker of our heart strings that evaporates
upon inspection.
Did Stephens write a deficient encomium, describing only instinctual resilience when there was more to the man? Was there something lacking, rather than present, in Stillmann
that enabled him to survive on the bright side of life** through all these trials? I would like to see his heart. But for that, we will have to
wait for the memoir. Which he is writing. At age 98.
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Comments are welcome, but I'd suggest you first read "Feeling-centered therapy" and "Ocean and boat" for a basic introduction to my kind of theory and therapy.