From a young age, I felt an inexplicable pull toward the darker corners of history — the Holocaust, and the treatment of those who deviated from societal norms. This curiosity was a whisper in my childhood, a topic avoided by those around me. They denied its existence or quickly changed the subject. Little did they realize the profound impact of their avoidance on me.
Around the age of twelve, my fascination with the Holocaust deepened, and I couldn’t explain why. It was as if it called out to me, beckoning me to explore its depths. Years later, while working with a Reiki master in Ireland, a revelation struck me. She believed I was helping the trapped souls of Jewish individuals from the Holocaust find their release. Unbeknownst to her, my own family history was entwined with this tragedy.
It was a remarkable moment of closure for these souls and an overwhelming sense of relief for me. Many survivors of that dark period had carried a heavy burden, feeling like living corpses themselves, while the souls of those who perished remained trapped in the horrors of concentration camps.
I recall a transformative experience during my time at the Osho studio in Berlin, where I embarked on a 21-day Dynamic meditation journey. In those initial days, I faced the second phase of the meditation, which I came to call the “madhouse” phase. It allowed each participant to release their inner chaos for 10 minutes. I often found myself in a protective corner, covering my ears and eyes, as the noise and energies around me felt overwhelmingly intense. To truly see what I needed to, I yearned for silence.
During those 10 minutes, I had two profound visions that illuminated the interconnectedness of everything. In the first vision, darkness enveloped me, accompanied by a foul stench. Faint sounds of a train pierced the air, and as my eyes adjusted, I saw the grim reality around me. I felt stuck amidst a chaotic sea of bodies, holding each other up, with weeping and cries echoing. Children, women, and men were all intertwined, and whoever I was in that vision, I couldn’t tell, but I knew I was incredibly thirsty. The heat was unbearable.
Suddenly, I was pulled out of that vision and found myself outside, blinded by the midday sun. I was hot and drenched in sweat, wiping my forehead with my arm. It was then that I noticed the hat in my hand — a soldier’s hat adorned with a skull emblem. I looked down at my military boots and uniform and realized I was surrounded by other soldiers with barking dogs. We stood on a train platform, and before us, a cattle wagon. My prevailing thought was about my own thirst and a deep curiosity about how those inside the wagon felt. It was an unbearably hot day.
The meditation timer reminded me that the 10 minutes were over, and the meditation continued.
These visions persisted throughout the first week, until a breakthrough occurred, and they no longer frightened me. On the contrary, they offered profound insights into how easily humanity can encompass both darkness and light while retaining its essential humanity.
Indeed, delving into such a somber subject is not for the faint of heart. I did so not because of any mental illness but because of a gift that had long been concealed, even by my own birth family. They saw me as fragile or overly sensitive, perhaps because of their own history or the truths I could uncover.
It wasn’t until my early twenties that I discovered a hidden layer of my family history: my grandmother, my mother’s mother, was half Jewish and survived Nazi Germany through the kindness of a man who took her in as his own child when her mother abandoned her. The war had separated them, and my grandmother never knew her mother had been in Leipzig during that time.
The man she regarded as “the only good German” remained in England after his imprisonment, where he eventually remarried and started his own family. Yet, it was she who never forgot him, and it became evident that he too must have held memories of my grandmother close to his heart. This became apparent when, sometime in the 1960s, he made an attempt to reconnect with her. Regrettably, fate did not grant them another meeting.
It’s intriguing how humanity often chooses to remember the good but conveniently forgets or denies the bad and the ugly when everything is interconnected. We are all part of the same whole, and within goodness resides its counterpart, badness. Balance and wholeness demand the acceptance of both light and dark.
My journey of self-discovery led me to acknowledge my own dark side. I learned that my grandfather, my father’s father, had been politically involved during the Nazi era and that he treated his own sons poorly. I vividly remember how my own father distanced himself from me when my mother left him, seemingly attempting to wash away his responsibility towards me.
This background undeniably shaped me, but I made a conscious choice to break free from its shadow and craft my own narrative — a narrative rooted in empathy.