A Teaching from the Ancestors for our Times: Death as an Ally

In honor of Yom haShoah, I share the following with you. The heartbreak, even 80 years after the liberation of the death camps, is no less unspeakable. But there are miracles like this one that help to restore our faith.

Over the past two years since publishing Wounds into Wisdom: Healing Intergenerational Jewish Trauma, I have received countless accounts of ancestral healing, trauma recovery, and family legacies reimagined. I am especially grateful to be able to share a particularly moving account from Nyati Evers here as both a video account and her written story.

In Awe of the Great Mystery Mother

By Nyati Evers

Joan Borysenko, the woman who leads us through her ‘Spiritual Memoir’ course, asked us to draw a River of our Life, mapping out different segments of our life. My first segment was called ‘Born into Death’, the last one ‘Reconciliation with the Dead’. After I was done drawing, looking at the picture from a distance, I realized that the river I had drawn was really me as a ‘mermaid’ and above my head I was holding the ‘Hidden Stories of my Ancestors’.

The next day, in my morning meditation, I asked Spirit that if It wanted me to bring this book into the world, if that was part of my mission in this life, to please give me guidance and support with bringing it forth. When I opened my eyes, there was a message on my phone from Jan, my late father’s third wife:

“I sent you an email,” it read, “it’s super important that you read it right away and that you sit down when you read it and make sure Robert (my partner) is with you.”

The email turned out to be on behalf of a 92-year old Dutch woman named Henne, who had just published the first ever memoir (at age 91!) about living in Amsterdam during Nazi occupation, written through the eyes of a teenager who wasn’t Jewish. The email said that “Henne had a close Jewish friend during the war, named Beate, and that they went to school together. She knows Beate is deceased, but she believes Beate had a daughter named Leonie and she very much wants to connect with this person.”

Beate was my mother. Leonie was my birth name.

I was gasping at my laptop. This wasn’t possible. It was the Final Frontier. The one thing I have searched for my entire life was to be able to talk to someone who had known my mother and remembered her and wasn’t dead or too traumatized to talk. Someone who could tell me things about her, about who she was and what it was like for her during those terrible years of war and persecution. But that was never going to happen, and I had made peace with the fact that this was a hole I just needed to live with. I have found her love letters and I discovered the documents that lead me to finding her hiding place and those were miracles in itself. But to talk to someone who could give me a sense of what kind of person she was in real life, that was never going to happen.

And then there was this.

The book Henne wrote is called “As if everything was still normal.” She has a photographic memory and as soon as she started to write the book, the memories came flooding back like in a movie, hence she was able to write it through the lens of that teenage girl and how she experienced it at the time. “Why are the neighbors being murdered and not me?”, was the burning question that haunted her as a girl. It turned out that my mother is one of the main figures in her book. I looked up her website and found a book excerpt. And there it was, on the screen, my mother’s name:

“In the summer of 1941, Beate stood on our doorstep. I’m not coming back to school after the holidays,” she said.”

A tiny fragment of war. Two teenage girls, 13 years old, used to going to the same school, sitting in the same classroom, having playdates together. And suddenly, one of them is ‘no longer human’. (Beate went to a public school and one of the first Nazi decrees was that Jewish children were no longer allowed to attend public school. They all had to go to Jewish school – for as long as there were any Jews left.)

Henne told me that in the middle of the war, after yet another razzia in Amsterdam she went back to Beate’s house to look for her. Just at that moment, the company Puls, famous for looting Jewish houses, was carrying their furniture out. She ran away, sick to her stomach.

When I asked Henne how Beate and her reunited, she said that soon after liberation, she found a crumpled note in her mailbox. “Dear Henne”, it said. “I am still here. Please come visit me soon! This is my address… Love, Beate”

“I am still here.”

Words that kept ringing in my ear. Words that feel true on multiple levels. Yes, she was telling her friend that she was still alive, she had escaped, they hadn’t succeeded in murdering her. And also, she is still here. My mother gave me a way to feel her. A way to know her in her most vulnerable moment, in her worst time of suffering.

I knew from the documents I found that my mother was forced to leave public school. But now I have an image, real life image, of my mother as a 13-year old girl on a doorstep, telling her friend she’s not coming back. I have an image of Henne and my mother on a playdate in the early days of the war and how Henne was warmly greeted by two gentlemen with thick German accents (my grandfather Siegbert and his brother Max). I have a picture of my mother nodding a silent no, looking shocked and terrified after Henne carefully probed about the whereabouts of Beate’s mother, my grandmother.

I see the girl my mother once was, the terrified girl, the girl who survived, the girl who only a few days after liberation went back to her old friend to connect with her, to invite her to her home. I hold her in my arms, and I stroke her hair, I cry for her and I tell her she’s safe now. And just like that, without any planning or deliberation, I know that I have finally forgiven my mother for dying. All that remains between us is the Tender Heart of it All.

It happened just like the river had shown me: surf the hidden stories like a mermaid and the stories themselves will carry you towards Reconciliation with the Dead.

I guess this is how it is when you invite the Ancestors into your memoir; you never know whether you are writing the book or whether the book is writing you.

Niyati Evers is a process-oriented therapist and facilitator whose methods integrate Jungian psychology with the wisdom of spiritual traditions.