Hugo Marom - February 8, 2008
How War Experience Affects Present
Let me ask one, one last question. How do you think the experience of the war affected you then and does it affect you now? For example, are there daily...are there moments in uh, regular places where you remember something, something triggers a, a memory that, that makes you remember something in the past?
I think that uh, I think that we...during the war A., because of education, because of our experience and because of being alone, we considered ours...ours...considered ourselves...and I think if you put that question to a lot of people...I think the experience that we went through during the war...for being in England on our own contributed to our development enormously so when I married Martha when I was twenty years old, I felt...compared to other twenty year olds that had lived throu...in Czechoslovakia through the war...non-Jewish...that I was at least ten years older than they were. So, that's, that's the contribution there at that time and I felt it...we f...we all felt it. And um, we were much more involved than the English children in what was going on uh, on the fronts whether it was in Russia, in North Africa...much, much more...we kept maps and the progress of the armies and so forth so we were much more involved. They were involved in sports, we were involved in sports and, and the war. After the war and to this very day I think that I can say one thing...I don't believe uh, in praying to God. In other words, I think that having prayed the entire war...every day and every evening as we were taught at home...before going to bed and getting up in the morning a few words, right? ??? and so forth. And that the prayer was accompanied by a wish for our parents to, to come to us as soon as possible...I'm not talking about surviving because nobody knew about concentration camps. So, first of all, post war period is a decision that there is no God...that there certainly is no almighty God that can do all these things that we were taught to believe that he could do. And secondly, I don't think there is a day when I don't see a relationship between parent and children that it doesn't remind me of the...of what we didn't have.
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