WIT Voices

“A Past in Hiding” - Memory and Survival in Nazi Germany by Mark Roseman

“The rain is streaming down, but still how beautiful it is: camping by the lake. How one lives when close to nature, to weather and time, to the animals and the sounds of solitude. I can’t tell you how beautiful it is! At first I was worrying about the weather and thinking I could enjoy it and feel happy only if everything were bathed in sunlight. But now I realize that’s not true. Everything, including oneself, is more alive when the clouds and the rain and the wind are all about. I feel like the grass and the leaves, exposed, utterly open to the elements. It’s beautiful! Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful.

To be totally oneself, without distortion, without a mask, without qualification. To open oneself fully, to forget oneself and only then to find oneself.

To be all senses; feeling, seeing, hearing. And to want nothing, to just take what comes; to taste and enjoy it.

Waking up in the dawn after an astoundingly warm and good night in the tent; bathing in the reservoir in the morning surrounded by the mist as it moves across the water. And then hiking through the puring rain; woods, fields, meadows. At one point a rain-drenched cart, otherwise no sounds, no evidence of people nearby. The path led across a hill through wisps of cloud, then through a wood rich with the fragrance of wet pines. At one point, a horse out to pasture whinnied happily at the unexpected interruption of its isolation. It sniffed me up and down, chewed at my sprig of broom and walked with me to the end of the pasture. Elsewhere, I surprised a couple of cows. Behind a gorse-covered hill two farms squatted together, like children huddled in the rain. A thousand good thought wandered with me through mist and rain, above all the strong desire to have a friend by my side, someone to share the experience with me.

Sometimes on the way you explore a stretch through the woods and then have to retrace your steps to the main path. You must erase this detour from your memory so that later you don’t lose your way home. And it occurred to me that life’s often like that; you can take a wrong path and so easily lose sight of your goal. It’s so good to be able to plan out the mistake until you can find the right path. Then you can look at your mistake, evaluate it, and above all, learn to accept it…”

A handwritten excerpt from Marianne Ellenbogen’s diary from June 2nd, 1944, while living underground in Nazi ruled Germany.