Humbled by Great Souls

When I was a freshman in college, several times I would ride a Greyhound Bus to travel home on the weekends. Most times I would hitchhike the 220 miles across Pennsylvania on the Turnpike in four hours or less to spend the weekend with my family. The bus took longer, but when the weather was cold and blustery, it was a welcome trade-off.

On one occasion I chose an aisle seat on the right side of the bus, four or five rows from the front, next to a lean and proper forty-something blue-eyed blonde woman with a distinct German accent, but whose English I could understand perfectly well. I have always been readily conversational and was especially so in my college years, always interested in all manner of topics regarding philosophical thought and psychology or education and mysticism. I have said many times that I learned more from the people who gave me rides during thousands of miles of hitchhiking than I ever did sitting in some tedious classroom. The captured attention of a traveling companion was an opportunity I would never fail to take advantage of. I don't remember much about my college classes or the professors who taught them, but I have a very clear visual memory of the woman I spent that afternoon with.

She was a Swiss doctor of psychiatry traveling to a speaking event somewhere to discuss the topics of her recent publication On Death and Dying, so much of our conversation was about the subject of her book for the four hours or so of our bus ride together. Whatever the audience would hear at her next stop was auditioned on me during the bus ride. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross was not yet the celebrity she would become, but her intense erudition and storytelling kept me so riveted that the trip seemed to pass quicker than usual. I'd like to say I recall what we talked about, but I do not. I remember her clearly, however, and like to think that something we spoke of has stuck with me and perhaps stimulated my continuing interest over the years. Perhaps she introduced me to the five stages of grief which she defined in her book, enabling me later to better understand and prepare for what one inevitably experiences with the loss of loved ones. She was one of those people you meet along the way that you never forget. Coincidence? I like to think not.

So, while reading Stephen Harrod Buhner's book on Plant Intelligence... today I came across a story (pp. 23-26) that he recorded after he had occasion to spend a week with Elisabeth Kübler-Ross when he was a wandering hippie like myself back in the 1970's, probably not long after my own encounter. The story touched me enough to copy and share it here. I can imagine her telling it. It is an account I hope to revisit again to be reminded of the humbling conclusion of the story in the words of a fortunate survivor of the Holocaust.

“Elisabeth Kübler-Ross dressed with no sense of fashion; she was plain and tall and thin. Her body was always moving, so full of energy that it quivered, constantly seeking an outlet in some comment, gesture of hands, or facial expression. Elisabeth’s face was strong and masculine and she chain-smoked and didn’t care if people didn’t like it. Her eyes penetrated everything they touched and they were the deepest blue and looking into them was like peering into some deep mountain pool that’s so clear you can’t tell how deep it is. Down in those deeps were things I couldn’t quite make out, things I didn’t understand, experiences maybe or some aware part of her that looked back, waiting for me to notice it.

“I could feel whatever it was deep inside, touching parts of me that I did not know I possessed. And those parts of me . . . I could feel them begin to stir under its touch. When she talked to me—or to anyone the week we spent with her—she was fully present; she looked back, she really looked.

“How did you come to your work?” someone asked. And she told us, her intonations filled with the thick shapes of her German-Swiss language. “I was a young doctor and it was just after the war. I had heard stories of the terrible things that had happened in the concentration camps and I wanted to see for myself. So, I went to Majdanek (photo above) in Poland. It is just outside the town of Lublin.

“The gates of the camp stood open, raggedly smashed back as if a tank or truck had burst through them. Rusting barbed wire straggled away, as far as I could see, in either direction from the gate posts. There was a feeling about the place, or maybe it was just a feeling in me, as if I were standing at the opening of a huge, dark room—a room that contained some immense presence.

“By the gates there was a table and a young woman with dark, raven hair. She had to ask me several times for my name. She carefully wrote it down in the book where they kept a list of all the visitors. Then she looked up and smiled a sad, quiet smile, and waved me in. And so, I began to walk, to see the camp, to see the truth of that place for myself.

“There were rusting railroad tracks and weeds growing up between them, and abandoned railroad cars sitting on the tracks, the doors thrown open. Inside the first one were thousands of shoes, tiny children’s shoes, quiet now from their running and laughing, no longer a part of children’s lives. I could not take it in, thousands of children’s shoes, all moldering together. Then I looked into the next car and for the longest time I could not make out what I was seeing. Suddenly I realized . . . it was filled with tangled mats of human hair, hair that the Nazis had shaved from the heads of the people in this camp, hair to be used for mattresses.

“There is a shock that comes when you see something that the world you have grown up in has no place for; the mind cannot conceive it and it feels as if the fabric of the world has torn and you have stumbled and are falling through into some in-between place that you never knew existed.

“So, in shock I stumbled back from the railroad cars filled with hair and children’s shoes and turned and began walking. I don’t know where I was going. Soon, I found myself in front of a wooden barracks. The interior was shadowed and empty and my footsteps echoed on the rough floorboards. I stood a minute to let my eyes adjust to the pale light filtering in from the doorway in which I stood and the small windows up under the eaves of the roof. In the shadowed gloom I could see the tiers of wooden bunks where the people had slept, one above the other, three in all, the last one close against the ceiling. There was still a faint odor of unwashed bodies—of fear, and of ancient grief.

“I walked down the long passageways that ran between the tiers of bunks on either side, looking around me. Then I saw—on the walls, roughly scratched, sometimes carved, into the wooden planks—hundreds of initials, and names—the last desperate messages to the living. And among those messages—I couldn’t believe it—were hundreds and hundreds of butterflies. Butterflies, everywhere. In the midst of that horror, the children had scratched butterflies into the walls!

“I still remember the pale sunlight and its touch on that room. The light seemed worn and tired, as if defeated over the course of days and years by what had been held in that shadowed building. I remember the feel of the wooden floors beneath my feet, and the smell—of wood, and people, and lost hope—and the silence touched only by the slight echoing of my footsteps—as if the whole world had stopped breathing. And the feeling, the feeling that was consuming me as I stood there under the impact of those butterflies.

“Then I felt someone behind me and I turned and found the young woman from the gate standing there, watching me. There was a sweetness about her and her eyes were calm but there was something else, too, in the lines of her face, as if a great wave filled with grief had swept across it and left traces of its touch for all the world to see.

“I, still caught under the spell of the place, did not know what to say, what to do. I had never conceived of such things happening. She saw that in my face and gestured and we walked outside. 'My name is Golda,’ she said, and then told me her story.

“She was born in Germany and was half Jewish. Her father was taken by the Gestapo in 1939 during the early arrests. She and her mother, brother, and sister lasted longer; they were taken in 1944 and, eventually, sent to Majdanek. 'After we arrived,’ she said, ‘they herded us into a line at the door of the gas chamber. My mother, my brother, and my sister were in front of me but the room was filled after my sister was pushed in, crying. They tried to force me in as well but the door would not close no matter how hard they pressed it against my back, so they pulled me out and slammed the door closed. And so, for some reason that I will never know, I survived.’ She looked toward the crematorium, pointed to the chimney. ‘The ashes of my mother, brother, and sister floated up from there that day.’

“Elisabeth looked at all of us in the room. None of us were moving. We were still, hardly breathing, caught spellbound. “I had never experienced such cruelty,” Elisabeth said, “and my heart was being crushed. But the young woman seemed oddly unaffected by it, so I said to her, ‘But you look so peaceful. How can you be peaceful when your whole family was killed here?’

“Golda looked back at me—those peaceful eyes!—and said in the most penetrating voice I had ever heard, ‘Because the Nazis taught me this: There is a Hitler inside each of us and if we do not heal the Hitler inside of ourselves, then the violence, it will never stop.’”