TALES FROM A TEACHER’S SUITCASE

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Let me tell you a story

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Let me tell you a story

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Humankind thrives on a marketplace of ideas, so diversity has a vital role. New voices and experiences enrich the debate. Intelligent humans do not fight power with power, threats with threats which risks replacing one abusive ruler with another. Instead it uses facts and evidence, tested in debate, to help the weak take on the strong.

Human race is resourceful enough to offer a fairer, more promising route to new better cleaner and more sustainable world. The world that would assert the dignity of the individual and the legal, civil and moral equality of all people, wherever they come from. The world that believes in progress though argument and debate, in which reason and empathy lift truthful ideas and marginalise bigotry and falsehood. We all have right to live in this type of the world and we all have responsibility to make sure we do.

Author Biography: Beata Stasak is an Art and Eastern European Languages Teacher from Eastern Europe with upgraded teaching degrees in Early Childhood and Education Support Education. She teaches in the South Perth Metropolitan area.

After further study in Counselling for Drug and Alcohol Addiction, she has used her skills in Perth Counselling Services. Beata has been a farm caretaker on the organic olive farm in the South Perth Metropolitan area for the past twenty years.

Beata is a migrant from post-communist Eastern Europe, who settled in Perth, Western Australian in 1994. She came with her husband and children to meet her father, who she never knew. He was a dissident and refugee from Czechoslovakia, after his country was taken over by Russian communists after the unsuccessful uprising against the communists in 1968.

As the daughter of a dissident, Beata was denied the choice of a career. Journalism was her dream, but instead she was ordered by the communist regime of the day to become a teacher of Russian Language and Russian History.

For part of her studies, she was sent to the Volgograd University, Russia by train with her classmates. Part of the study was a re-education camp for the children of dissidents, marked as the enemies of the state. From the train, the 20 year old girls experienced the apocalypse of the post Chernobyl disaster while travelling through the Ukraine a few months after the accident happened.

They disembarked a few times, unable to continue on their journey. All the students suffered health problems on their arrival in Volgograd. Many girls ended up in hospitals - including Beata. Their condition worsened, as the medical treatment was rudimentary and applied by the ill trained nurses that looked after up to a hundred patients each.

There were no washing facilities in the hospital and no food provided, except for the watery porridge in the morning. Each patient was labelled and known only by a number. After her arrival back to her own country, she was forbidden to talk about her experience of Russia, or the disaster witnessed.

Instead, she was sent to teach Russian Language and History to year 12 students and prepare them for their final exams. Beata has lived the first half of her life in denial. Silenced, following the strict regime guidelines to keep her job and her standing. She was not allowed to travel, nor have any contact with anyone from overseas. She suffered miscarriages and blood disorder problems, which continue to follow her throughout her life.

On the eve of the Velvet Revolution, Beata stood proudly with her two young children on the city square with other protesters, under the watchful eyes of army personnel with guns, waiting on order to shoot. Fortunately for them all, the communism fell apart peacefully.

After the end of communism in her country, Beata worked on new curriculum guidelines for the experimental new schools, built by an American charity in her town. Her curriculum was successfully implemented. She continued to showcase new aspects of teaching, while improving her English, until her application to re-settle in Australia with her husband and young children was accepted.

Beata wrote poems, stories and commentaries for magazines and newspapers in her own language and the Russian language, in Eastern Europe before her re-settlement in Australia. She completed a few unpublished manuscripts while studying Creative Writing for Children at university in 1999.

“For all the creative souls out here who are searching endlessly for the lost humanity and how to re-claim it because the world around us is bigger than our single threads of individual connectivity but together those threads make the world turn just the right way...”

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The Power of Forgiveness

“I'm a daughter of Germany; blonde, blue-eyed, tall, a perfect example of the master race.” Our book club member suddenly blurred out while we were discussing Bernhard Schlink’s ‘Reader: “ What do I say to the survivors of the holocaust and their children? Can I say: “I'm sorry?”

Another member originally from Israel replied: “As a member of our Jewish community once said: “We can forgive the pain that's been inflicted on us, but we have no rights to forgive the wrong done to others.”

The German lady continued: “ Can I forgive my country? Can I forgive myself? Can the survivors of the holocaust forgive me? The pain of the holocaust is deeper and more profound, than any personal pain I carry. The anguish is silent, muted, muffled. Such is the pain of the second generation. The heritage of being German. The shame of being German.”

We realised at that moment, Frieda, a pensioner living in Hobart just like the rest of us, struggled all her life in silence with her German heritage.

I took her hand in mine: ‘Only love is stronger than pain, and when the pain is immeasurable, the healing love needs to be infinitive. The rest is tears.’

Anika, the tiny Jewish lady, opened the book and read the highlighted passage: “‘The rage faded and the questions ceased to matter. Whatever I'd done or not done, whatever had been done or not done to me – it was the path my life had taken. I’ve made peace with it.’

We fell silent sipping our cup of tea on the veranda of a picturesque waterfront cottage overlooking the vast harbour for a long time. It was like we suddenly realised, for the first time, we all belong to the post war generation growing up in the shadow of our parents’ past. If not for our book club we would never have found out.

Frieda told us about her grandfather who was a guard and died in prison after the war. She told us last time back home she walked around the concentration campground until they closed and it was time to go home. She wanted to understand her grandfather’s crime, but there was no room for understanding.

She took an old photograph of her loving grandfather she was kissing as a little girl: “I am guilty of having loved a criminal. People murder out of passion, love and hate, honour or revenge, money or power, in wars and revolutions. But the people who were murdered in the camps hadn’t done anything to the individuals who murdered them. There was no reason for hatred or war.”

“But executioners don’t hate the people they execute, and you did not know, didn’t you?” I reasoned with her.

Frieda shook her head and continued angrily: “Yet he executed them all the same. They were so indifferent to him that he could kill them easily on his day of work.”

The Jewish friend hugged Frieda: “ Understanding and condemnation, sometimes it's impossible to do both”.

I sighed and took the hands of my friends around the table: “‘I'm a daughter of Czechoslovakia; blonde, blue-eyed, tall, a perfect example of the master race. What do I say to the members of my family, some dead and some still alive, all survivors, some of German blood on the perpetrators’ side and others of Russian and Jewish blood, victimized on the other side. All I heard was silence from both sides.”

Frieda nodded: “I can relate to that as a grand-daughter I remember looking in their deeply wrinkled faces all huddled closely together, I didn’t see the redemptive power of understanding, guilt or forgiveness in their eyes, just fatigue and a deep desire to leave everything behind. Can I say now: “I'm sorry on their behalf?”

I squeezed her hand, lost in my own memory: ”I always had many doubts about their past, but for me, they've always been just my grandfather, my great uncle and his son.”

Frieda looked up at Anika with tears in her eyes now wrinkled as well: “I'm not certain if my love for him has made me invariably complicit in his crimes.”

Our Jewish friend stood up and hugged us both: “I'm certain that the truth of what one says, lies in what one does. In the end you are answerable for what you do.”

We stood up and moved to the back of the house to our pottery shed we established together to pass time. Frieda with a renewed enthusiasm sat behind the pottery wheel and in her magical wrinkled hands a shape of a perfect plate appeared in no time. Anika was already busy glazing the finished dry products from yesterday and I took my little paint to finish the design with flowers, birds and loving words.

I look around on my beloved friends I end up living the rest of my life with and said quietly:

“You know it is healing for us all to reflect on the horror of our own family past, we just learn to test our own limits of forgiveness.”

“Finally, it was about time,” Anika winked at me while picking up the shiny plate: “Look it is perfect, I am so happy you introduced us to pottery.”

Frieda blew us kisses from her wheel and I quickly rushed to her to wipe the sweat from her forehead before she splattered dirt all over herself.

She picked her muddy red hands up and gave a good laugh: “Having earth in my grey hair is one of my everyday earthly tasks, I am contributing to the beautiful world that we live in.

“For sure you do Frieda,” I kissed her gently on her dirty forehead: “We all do, sharing our experiences of life while seeking the beautiful aspects of human beings.” Anika turned to us with tears in her eyes: “I love you so much.”

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