Irene Sobel - September 8, 1998
Memories
Um, apropos of this...
Yeah.
...past...
Yes.
...I asked you before when you ate peanut butter...
Yes.
...if it brought back the memory of the first taste of peanut butter.
Yes.
Is there anything else that...
Uh.
...touches things off in your mind? Triggers...
Yes, there are things that trigger of my mind. For many years when I would go to a supermarket and see that enormo...that plenty, I would think of my war years. Seeing the shelves stacked with anything that person might wish to, to eat, I thought of, of my war years. At times I look into my closet and see all those business suits or dresses, and I think of the nothing that I had during the war years. Uh, when uh, I see children in Africa--remember the Biafra situation, those big extended bellies and skinny legs, I think of my war years. So while I--it is not consciously with me, there are a lot of things that trigger it off. Uh, I remember the Cuban Cri...Missile Crisis in the United States here. And the climate in which we all feared that a war might break out. I was petrified. I had two young children. I was petrified. I was thinking of the war that I experienced in Poland and I was thinking, "God, will my children have to go through that?" So while I have not thought of myself as a survivor, and thought that this was a closed door, it comes up in many, many situations. It comes up when I meet someone who doesn't have any depths or who is flippant and whose values I totally disapprove or, or they seem to me so insignificant. I think to myself, "What does that person know about people's suffering? What do they know? They make a issue over such insignificant things. What do they know about what others went through?" And I'm one of the others.
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