his sexuality and identity. I gave him all of my compassion, but he was
stuck, he was angry, caught in the quicksand of his loss. I felt
powerless to help him out. e more I tried to love him back from the
pit of despair, the deeper he sank.
As a last resort I decided to try hypnotherapy. I regressed him back
to the war, when he was a bomber pilot, when he was in control,
before he came home and lost it all. In his hypnotic state, he told me,
“In Vietnam, I could drink as much as I wanted to. I could fuck as
much as I wanted to.” He got red in the face and screamed, “And I
could kill as much as I wanted to!” In the war he wasn’t killing people;
he was killing “gooks,” he was killing subhumans. Just as the Nazis
weren’t killing people at the death camps; they were eradicating a
cancer. e war had brought about his injury and altered his life, and
yet he missed the war. He missed the sense of power he gained in
ĕghting an enemy, in feeling himself to be in an invulnerable class,
above another nationality, above another race.
None of my unconditional love did any good until I gave him
permission to express the part of him that he was grieving, the part
that was both powerful and dark, the part he could no longer express.
I don’t mean that he needed to kill again in order to be whole. I mean
that to ĕnd his way out of victimhood he needed to come to terms
with his impotence and his power, the ways he had been injured and
the ways he had hurt, his pride and his shame. e only antidote to
brokenness is the whole self.
Maybe to heal isn’t to erase the scar, or even to make the scar. To
heal is to cherish the wound.
* * *It is the middle of the aernoon when we reach Kraków. We will sleep
here tonight—or try to. Tomorrow we will take a cab to Auschwitz.
Béla wants to tour the Old Town, and I try to pay attention to the