Elegies to Failed Revolutions: Tasting Ashes
Elegies to Failed Revolutions: Tasting Ashes
Notes on Grief, Trauma, Suffering and Loss
A brief introduction:
Writings on grief are relatively sparse. There are few reasons why anyone ought to write about something this deeply personal. The poetic vision of suffering is certainly one of them and it, among others, has driven the majority of the Romantics throughout the long 19th century. A long repressed trauma is another. In our world the word trauma has undergone a bizarre rebranding. Anything and everything seems to fall under the definition, erasing any gravity the term once used to represent. It is perhaps the sign of the deeply troubling times in which we live, where words and language become the subjects of game theory, mystification and obscurantism, a soft civil war between increasingly balkanized and ideologically isolated, yet strangely realigned groups of people. To write about grief and trauma isn’t so much about personal courage as it is about the need to externalize the emotions tied to the events which had heretofore acted as the agent of repression. Any attempt to rationalize or explain the process and effects of grieving is already effectively useless. Everyone grieves and processes trauma in a different way. What writing about grieving does however, is that it cracks the door open into the darkened room where very difficult emotions and the human spirit reside. It is up to the individual whether or not to make the hard decision to walk into that the room and look around.
The Slow Burn
The book ‘Under a Cruel Star’ by Heda Margolius Kovaly is a first hand account of what it feels like to stare into the abyss. Margolius Kovaly was the wife of Czechoslovak economist Rudolf Margolius, a highly positioned communist functionary, who was entangled in the Slansky Trial, the country’s, and perhaps history’s largest show trial and executed in 1952 with 10 of his ‘co-conspirators’ for crimes against the state. In Margolius Kovaly’s life, this had been already the second most devastating event in her life. The first was being separated from her husband and family at the beginning of the Second World War and shipped to the Lodz Ghetto in Poland and then transported to the Nazi concentration camps from which she managed to escape with the help of a few friends. Margolius Kovaly was persecuted both under the Nazis and eventually, when it was opportune for the state apparatus, by the Communists. Her life was a see saw of ups and downs, living the high society life of expensive luncheons with dignitaries, to wiping shit off the floor in a stalag. Coping with such massive losses had become a wrestling match of epic proportions, because in a constant state of heightened anxiety that the 1930s, 40s, and 50s Czechoslovakia offered, suffering was plentiful, but the time to grieve and to reconcile with the past was almost nonexistent.
Margolius Kovaly’s story and the way it is told, illustrates in great detail the way that grief works and the way it is processed or repressed. Grief is one of the most powerful emotions that gets very little exposure in western society. The reasons for this are unclear. Grief work is primarily done alone by those who experience it. Sharing grief with others is usually done in a funeral setting, or one on one, often in a therapy session, but grief itself is not confined to the external experience of death. Grief over break-ups, divorce, loss of employment, moving, conflict, all the way up to the extremes of war, is usually tamped down. It becomes in the words of Freud ‘repressed.’ To witness a close friend die in a car accident or to say good bye to a loved one at the airport may or may not have immediate effects on the body, but the cumulative effects will eventually have to find a way back out in another Freudian concept ‘the return of the repressed.’ All that has been tamped down in the process of repression, all the emotions that are held back, will at some point well up in a torrent. In my personal experience the body is only a repository for human emotion. Just as much as we’re not truly in control of our bodies, we’re not in control of our emotions either. The clichéd ‘ghost in the shell’ can be better thought of as the mind-body-soul triangulation, each one independent, yet entirely dependent on the others. Repression of difficult emotions such as grief is the mind’s attempt to gain dominance over the body and the unconscious or soul for the more religiously oriented. For many years I have been trying and failing to hold back the grief and loss of my home, friends, family and much later of my son, who died during childbirth. I have moved almost a dozen times over the last 30 years, never staying in one place too long. The longest stretches were 8 or 10 years with a period of quick succession of moves in between. Some moves happened over thousands of miles requiring massive emotional and physical effort, during which notions of loss and grief were totally repressed. The loss of my son came as a shock, but in the moment there was no time for extended grieving. I had to attend to my wife who was at that moment in a lot of distress and physical pain. There was only the experience.
During the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia Margolius Kovaly, along with her family members, was picked up and shipped to the Bergen Belsen concentration camp in Poland. Almost immediately she was marked to be ‘saved’ by the bureaucrats. This meant that she was not going to be a gassed, at least not right away, but due to her young age and ability, be kept as a forced laborer. At Bergen Belsen she, along with a small group of other women, was able to escape during one of the transports and managed to cross the border back into Czechoslovakia, losing some of her compatriots along the way. When she arrived in Prague she slept on street benches, often a few hours at a time, moving from place to place to avoid contact with the police, the source of constant danger and anxiety. Had she been found she would’ve more than likely be shipped right back to the camps and most certainly executed. Margolius Kovaly would grieve in the moments when time was still, when she was resting on those park benches in between bouts of intense activity.
The body has an immense ability to repress emotions during fight or flight modes, but not so when the much needed rest comes or when it is confronted with other similar situations that bring up images of loss. These images are powerful, non-descript, almost image-less images, the way one would describe a ghost with no physical features, just a black or white formlessness floating in the room. Just as in a dream when we often visit places like our childhood homes that feel but don’t look like the actual home. These mind images are quick flashes and projections, something between subliminal messaging and a two hour film compressed into a nanosecond. The emotion doesn’t need the real images, it just needs the impressions and imprints of past trauma to start coming back.
The Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia turned millions of people, if not into outright communists, then at the very least into sympathizers with the communist cause. During World War II Soviet Russia lost 23 million people, or to put it into perspective, half its male adult population, in its struggle against Nazism and Fascism. Not only this, but during the Russian Civil War that coincided with the First World War, Russia had lost half its male population even then. In no other nation in the world had the devastation and trauma been so total as in Russia during the early to mid-twentieth century. What happened under Stalin’s purges only intensified the trauma already present in that society and exported it beyond its borders to countries that have begun the difficult recovery from the War. Rudolf Margolius became a communist during the War. He, like Heda, was deported to the Lodz Ghetto and then to Auschwitz and Dachau. He escaped Dachau and upon learning that his parents and relatives were all murdered in the camps he officially joined the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia. His belief in a brighter future would drive him to become the party’s Deputy Minister of Foreign Trade. In time, his and Heda’s home became the center of the Communist Party’s intelligentsia and, by Communist standards, frequent high society parties. All the people that have turned Heda Margolius Kovaly away during her escape have now become her secret admirers, or, most likely, envious usurpers. Rudolf Margolius, a lawyer and economist, wasn’t necessarily a deeply political figure in the sense that the other Communist Party apparatchiks Klement Gottwald, Antonin Zapotocky or Rudolf Slansky were. Gottwald likened himself to be the Stalin of Czechoslovakia, though he was a deeply anxious and paranoid man who instigated the trial and murder of his friend and colleague Slansky in which Margolius would also be implicated. Zapotocky was a one-time capo at Sachsenhausen concentration camp and deeply hated Slansky, second in command to Gottwald, who spun elaborate conspiracy theories he believed were at work all around the seat of power, unaware that there really was a conspiracy brewing against him and Gottwald, but that Gottwald would later join the conspiracy, while Slansky himself would be arrested, tortured, forced to sign a false confession, cast in the largest show trial his country ever witnessed and hung for his ‘crimes.’
The Czechoslovak Communist coup d’etat in 1948 was an elaborate political scheme, supported by Stalin from afar. It was later rebranded as a popular revolution with Gottwald in the style of Lenin as its figurehead, despite the fact that only a few thousand supporters managed to get out in the streets to support the new government in the middle of a freezing February. The Czechoslovak Communist coup d’etat was always a bureaucratic revolution of the few, planned, orchestrated and executed from within. Rudolf Margolius though largely apolitical in his role as economist, dealing primarily with issues of currency and trade, was put on trial for treason, because he struck a trade with Great Britain, to the chagrin of the Party’s nomenklatura, whose orientation was strictly toward the East. In the highly conspiratorial atmosphere of the times any dealings with the West were immediately suspect. Margolius’ antipolitics did not help or ease his burden, rather they made him an easier target. Politics was at this time considered as integral to communist life in Czechoslovakia as faith is to politics today. His Jewish background was also an added ‘bonus’ to the Communist apparatchiks, who believed that Jews were indeed the cause of the conspiracy against the Party, dredging up prejudices and traumas from hundreds of years of European history. Rudolf Margolius was arrested in the middle of the night, as was customary for the Communist secret service, on January 10, 1952 and taken to Pankrac, the most notorious Czech prison still in use today. Heda would not see her husband again until he appeared on television, visibly distressed and reading his false confession extracted from him under months of physical and psychological torture. Heda Margolius Kovaly became destitute once again. Shunned by everyone, from the non and anti-communists who saw her as the wife of a high-powered Party apparatchik, to the Communists who avoided her for being married to an ideological traitor. Her fall from grace was swift and hard. Being the wife of a husband convicted of high treason condemned her to walk the streets again looking for compassionate souls who would pity her enough to put her up for a few nights.
Grieving is not a depression though it can easily slip into one. While grieving is a sign of the body under stress, it can nonetheless be a healthy process. Letting go and acceptance are some of the hardest emotions to achieve during a heightened stress situation. While we may all be familiar with the stages of grief as written by Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, what is not so well known is that the stages she describes – denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance – can take a very long time, from weeks to months, even years, to just a few days, and that they do not necessarily occur in the same successive pattern. In my personal moments of grief I’ve experienced several of the stages seemingly all at once, experiencing guilt and shame, worrying and ruminating on the past and future as part of the bargaining process, to frustration, pessimism, irritability, argumentation, and other emotions associated with anger, but also avoidance and confusion, trying to keep busy in hopes that the grief will disappear on its own, part of the denial stage. These stages may occur rather quickly, sometime in succession, but more often than not all at once. Anger and resentment over past actions often give way to depression over having actually taken them and then worrying about taking similar actions in the future.
The move to acceptance is marked by clear thinking, the body no longer responds with anxiety and tightness in the chest and limbs. Though peace might not be achieved easily or quickly – it often lingers but shows up when one is truly without negative emotion – there are moments of relative calm that can be achieved in between bouts of anger and depression as the mind-body-soul triangle undergo realignment. For Margolius Kovaly these moments came when she was briefly housed with her friends who let her use their couch for a few days to escape the freezing cold of the Prague winter. It was there that she was finally able to go through the grieving process, alone, that would eventually give her enough strength to pick up and move into the next stage of her life. Battered by the senselessness of war and domestic political and social oppression Margolius Kovaly eventually made it to the United States in 1968 where she lived for almost 30 years before retiring back to Prague with her second husband in 1996. 30 years without a country and without a home, during which she was able to publish her book as a kind of memento in order to reconcile with the ghosts of the past.
