She said, ‘Those of us being “re-educated” during the World Cup were allowed to watch the games on TV in the “fish tank” [where hard labour was enforced] … After watching the World Cup final in the “fish tank”, the commandant of the camp whose name still fills me with terror … came in and embraced us one by one and said, “We won! We won!” I remember feeling that if he’s won we’ve lost – if this is a victory for him, it is a defeat for us. The guards then told five or six of us to get into a car. I remember it to this day – a green Peugeot 504 – and he drove us to the centre of Buenos Aires. It was incredible.
‘There were so many people out on the street celebrating Argentina’s victory I asked the general if I could stand up and put my head through the car roof. I stood up and looked out – I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. Rivers and rivers of people singing, dancing, shouting. I began to cry, because I remember thinking if I start shouting “I’ve disappeared”, no-one’s going to give a damn. This was the most concrete proof I ever had that I had ceased to exist.’42
Such an experience is not uncommon in those countries where torture is the routine way of dealing with prisoners, especially those who are regarded as a threat to society. Most of us have experienced a milder but still distressing form of torture where our companions have a mental picture of us which bears little likeness to the person we know ourselves to be. When this happens we can feel very, very lonely. When my friend Ann Hocking wrote to me after her dog died she said,
The other evening when I was at a musical evening at the church I saw a man from Mosborough whom I used to know. I said, ‘You don’t remember me, do you?’ He said, ‘Yes I do. You’re Martin’s mother, aren’t you?’ I said, ‘No, I’m Ann.’ He shouted across to another mutual acquaintance, a woman, ‘Look who’s here. Do you remember who she is?’ ‘Oh yes,’ the woman said, ‘It’s Sarah’s grandmother.’
I hate that. When I was little my mother would never use my name. She would say, “This is my daughter, Jim’s sister,’ as if I didn’t exist in my own right. Now I’m Martin’s mother, Ray’s wife, or Sarah’s grandma. It makes me sick. I’ve got a name. Why don’t people use it?
I guess that’s why I miss the dog so much. He would never go away from me. He would never take his eyes off me while he was awake. He didn’t care what I looked like or how old I was or that I’d got no job and no money. People want you to try to merit their love all the time. The dog never did, even when I shouted at him. He still loved me. I didn’t have to give him breakfast in bed to make up for it. He just accepted me for what I am. People have a lot to learn from dogs.43
Ann as Martin’s mother, Ray’s wife and Sarah’s grandma slots her neatly into the working-class suburb of Sheffield where she lives. If her family, friends and acquaintances saw her as she really is she would be constantly confounding their expectations, thus troubling their own meaning structures. She is a mother, wife and grandma, but she is also a skilled artist, a philosopher who asks the big questions and a sharp observer of other people with a keen eye for hypocrisy and lies. I doubt if there is any society who could see her as she is and find her easy to fit in, but there would be certain societies, certain artistic societies, where her individuality would be appreciated.
Ann is a threat to her society only in so far as she does not conform exactly to her society’s expectation that she be a modest mother, wife and grandma who complains only about domestic matters and who confines her interests to gossip and television. While she does not fit that picture exactly, her existence does not threaten the image other members of that society have of themselves, as did the existence of the survivors of the Holocaust when they emigrated to Israel after the Second World War. Aaron Hass recorded,
Perhaps the fiercest blow to survivors who emigrated to this hazardous territory was the psychological distance imposed by the sabras (those born in Palestine) … Jokes deriding the victims circulated. A popular one began with the question ‘How many Jews can you fit into an ashtray?’ … Far from being perceived as heroes, they were considered reminders of all which the glorious modern Jew must shun. Even among their own, in a Jewish state, survivors were kept from speaking out. In 1949, David Ben-Gurion referred to survivors as ‘demoralizing material’ who needed to be retrained and imbued with ‘national discipline’. A few years later Moshe Sharett, the Israeli foreign minister, declared that survivors were ‘undesirable human material’…
It was not until the 1960s, spurred by the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem, that education about the Holocaust was perceived as desirable by Israeli society. (It took until 1979 for the Holocaust to be introduced as a compulsory subject in Israeli school curricula.) During the Eichmann proceedings, the witnesses whose Holocaust experiences had been silenced for the preceding fifteen years were now asked to render precise account and encouraged to disclose the most horrifying details. Suddenly, the country’s leaders realized that this newly acquired consciousness of a common destiny was an invaluable asset in consolidating a national identity and promoting Israel’s case abroad.
The primary intent of the Eichmann trial was not punishment. If that were the case, he could have simply been liquidated on Garibaldi Street in Buenos Aires, where he was abducted by the Mossad. Instead, Ben-Gurion’s objectives were twofold: (1) to remind the world that the Holocaust obligated support of the State of Israel; and (2) to impress the lessons of the Holocaust, particularly upon the younger generation of Israelis. What was the most fundamental lesson of the Holocaust from Ben-Gurion’s perspective? That Israel was the only country which could guarantee the security of the Jews …
Events six years later accelerated the humbling process as immediately before the Six Days War in 1967, Israelis felt that they were in the ghetto under siege. They felt alone and isolated and spoke of the necessity ‘to prevent another Holocaust’. An identification with the Jews who had been annihilated two decades previously was now possible.44
Perhaps, having at last been given the kind of attention they needed, some of the Holocaust survivors started to experience the opposite fear, that attention by others may be so intense that it threatens to take us over. I once overheard a woman talking about the way her family had tried to press her into an arranged marriage. Women relatives who had made arranged marriages assured her that she would have no difficulty with such a marriage. It was, they said, just a matter of adjusting. She exclaimed, ‘Just adjust! That would be to die!’
This fear of being taken over, robbed of our will, comes from our childhood, when the adults around us pressed their ideas on us, often with considerable force. We knew that if we accepted all their ideas and relinquished our own we would be annihilated. We would no longer be a person in our own right. We could not explain why but we knew that it was imperative that we had secrets and never became totally obedient.
In our fantasies these adults became figures of power whose only aim was to take us over and force us to do their bidding. We loved stories where the small hero or heroine, through cleverness, courage and daring, defeats the powerful enemy. Then we discovered that the adults around us also feared some inscrutable, powerful enemy. It might be the devil, or witches, or a force of evil, or spirits which could turn a man into a zombie. We might be told how Nazism or Communism took people over and turned them into automatons. During the Korean War of the fifties the term ‘brainwashing’ was created, as if brains could be washed clean of thoughts and new thoughts implanted. Stories about aliens from outer space abounded. Television was seen to threaten to take us over, and then computers and the Internet were expected to pose the same threat. Meanwhile popular series like Star Trek and The X-Files told stories about people who fall into the hands of some alien power and cease to be themselves. The central factor in all these scenarios is that the person cannot comprehend and relate to the thought processes of some alien power and consequently loses the power to think for himself. Survivors might have been released by the alien power, but more often have to work out the alien power’s secret before they can escape.
The fear of being taken