A cautionary note:  This blog post covers some difficult terrain, including war, specifically the Holocaust, and trauma, which I can only hope to have done with care and sensitivity.

I’ve done yoga for a dozen or more years, on and off, more off since having children, but, I’m happy to say, fairly regularly of late. I’m certainly not very good in any technical sense and can’t get near some of the older ladies in my class in terms of flexibility. Some of them have been practising for dozens more years than me.

One of these ladies I’ll call Liliana*. I’m drawn to her. She has a beautiful face framed by perfectly arched eyebrows and a stylish bob. She always wears a pop of colour on her lips and matching toe polish. Just recently, she looked to be in such a trance doing a very difficult pose that I thought she might levitate. I sense she knows her value. About a year ago whilst doing a twist on the mat, I jolted – visibly I’m sure – upon noticing a tattoo composed of six digits on the inside of Liliana’s left forearm. It had slipped out from beneath her three-quarter sleeve. Sloppily, carelessly scratched into her skin, I was so startled by its existence/appearance that I had to rapidly compose myself by re-focusing on the posture lest I involuntarily blurt out, “Is that what I think it is”? I hasten to add that no-one else seemed to notice, disconcerting in itself. Next, I launched into some mental gymnastics that went something like this: “If she’s in her 70s and WWII ended in 1945, then she must have been a very young child in the concentration camps”. Auschwitz actually, because tattoos weren’t issued by the Nazis in any other camps.

I wanted to talk to Liliana about it after class, but wouldn’t have known how to begin. And how could I presume? Anything at all. About life. About her life. I barely know anything about her apart from the type of car she drives (and that she’s partial to orange lipstick). Some weeks later, I thought about mentioning it to my teacher. About the impact it had on me. About my interest in the Holocaust and the incongruity of the reminder of such human horror here in sunny beachside Melbourne. I mean, I studied German at school; I’ve travelled to Berlin and have a piece of the Wall; I worked in a neighbourhood dappled with synagogues and yarmulkes and had several Jewish clients; an old neighbour’s Polish father lost his 12 brothers in the war – either executed or perished, he was the sole survivor; I have a Polish friend…but never before have I actually set eyes on an “ID tattoo”. I feel decidedly queasy even using that term: It seems euphemistic at best and fails to capture the sadistic intent.

A friend naively asked, “How did you know what you were looking at”? To which I think I thought in response, as opposed to outright saying, “What do you mean how did I know what I was looking at? How could you not know”?

I memorised those six digits and set about doing a bit of research. Prior to tattooing, prisoners of war in the Auschwitz camps were mostly “identified” (dehumanised) via serial numbers, with accompanying shapes, symbols and letters delineating status, nationality or religion, sewn into their uniforms. There were various number series issued, evolving over time, with men and women having separate numerical series. Tattooing was introduced in 1941, with the influx of Soviet POWs. It was initially done using a metal stamp with interchangeable needles attached to it. The stamp was impressed into the left side of the chest and dye rubbed into the bleeding wound. Proving cumbersome, a single-needle device superseded this method, with tattoos being applied on the outer side of the left forearm. Relevantly, prisoners from several transports in 1943 had their numbers tattooed on the inner side of their left upper forearms. Additionally, each new series of numbers introduced at the Auschwitz camps began with the number “1”. Snap.

Despite the fact that the yoga I practice is about non-competitive striving, I almost immediately reverted to a sort of judgemental comparison – called “social comparison” – about the state of my own body and mind:

Lord, I may have had two car crashes already this year (not my fault, although my yoga teacher insists “there are no accidents”!), still can’t work out what I want to do when I grow up, still wondering when I will feel grown up, will agonise for all eternity over which high school to send my son (who, as a tweenie, is probably more emotionally mature than I’m ever likely to be…I’m happy for him!) and am now lame after attempting a string of jetes down the hallway with my bendy pretzel ballerina daughter. Not only that, it took me two separate runs over the floorboards to realise I’d hurt my Achilles, because the first time I just thought “ouch” and then promptly forgot about it, destined to repeat the mistake…

 And I have the audacity to feel sorry for myself, when it seems very likely that Liliana has been to hell, or has glimpsed it through the eyes of another; quite close enough. How can my pain compare? What a feeble and sorry thing I am.

The Holocaust is evidence of Sartre’s dictum that “Hell is other people” (or can be). It is difficult to fully fathom, let alone measure, the extent of the creative cruelty inflicted by a group of human beings upon their own kind (of course, Hitler’s utopian Aryan race was all about the other and a disavowal of our essential sameness) and the generational devastation wreaked. The TV movie The Wave, novelised by Todd Strasser and based on an actual classroom experiment carried out by Ron Jones with high school students in the mid 1960’s in Palo Alto, California (seen/read in my adolescence and to be highly recommended still), goes some way towards capturing the dizzying effects of power bestowed by group belonging combined with cronyism. I recently dusted off Lily Brett’s Too Many Men, which had been sitting on my bookcase for some time, a gem of a find in the local second-hand bookstore at just $1. I couldn’t put it down, all 714 pages of it; a mammoth and oft deeply wrenching, part fictional, part historical treatise on the “transgenerational transmission” of trauma (you’ll probably hear me use that family therapy-coined phrase a lot) bestowed by war and human hatred.

Psychologists have historically concerned themselves with the impact of life events on well-being, rank ordering experiences like death and bereavement, divorce, family relocation, birth of a child, etc., in terms of stress and I think this perspective is still useful and relevant. (I do consider that a cat getting run over by a car, although sad for its family – feline or human – and a horrible way to die, is intrinsically less awful than murder). However, I am also reminded of the existential notion (also a basic premise of CBT) of Victor Frankl, former Austrian psychiatrist and Auschwitz survivor, that it is one’s interpretation of life events or circumstances, and capacity for grace under fire, that ultimately determine one’s inner experience and outer lot. He says of human suffering:

…a man’s suffering is similar to the behaviour of gas. If a certain quantity of gas is pumped into an empty chamber, it will fill the chamber completely and evenly, no matter how big the chamber. Thus suffering completely fills the human soul and conscious mind, no matter whether the suffering is great or little. Therefore the “size” of human suffering is absolutely relative.¹

I despise the condescending finger pointed at ostensibly lucky others: “What does he/she possibly have to be unhappy/depressed about”? I’ll never forget a friend’s wondrous declaration about another friend and her cheating partner: “I don’t know why she’s so upset about finding out he’s having an affair, when he’s a total creep anyway”! What a gross injustice of imagination and empathy. I’ve never met a person who wasn’t miserable or distressed for a perfectly good reason, when considered from within that person’s own frame of reference.

Conversely, sometimes when we revert to thinking others have life sorted out, whilst we’re bumbling, sometimes quite ungraciously along and often in the dark (a phenomenon referred to as “upward social comparison”, i.e., comparison with others deemed superior to oneself), it pays to remember that everyone has pain. Everyone suffers. Up to 50% of people have thought about suicide at some point in their lives. Up to another 50% have a mental health diagnosis of some sort or another. (This seems less surprising when one also considers that there are a lot of diagnostic categories.) The point is, we don’t always know what the person next to us in yoga, or the vet’s waiting room, or our kids’ school assembly has gone, or is going, through. At times when our own vulnerability presents itself, we might take heart in knowing that someone else, somewhere, has felt this too. And next time we’re in a queue, we might just wonder about the person next to us. It wouldn’t cost one anything to offer a smile, just in case…that person happens to be copping his or her share of the confusion or uncertainty or plain old crappiness that life inevitably throws up.

When I next saw Liliana’s left arm free of ink, I thought briefly that I might be going mad or otherwise had concocted a very elaborate fantasy. But I couldn’t have imagined such a specific sequence of numbers. Surely? I decided not. I now think the numbers were written, not indelibly, on her arm, perhaps in remembrance of her mother or older sister, maybe as an anniversary tribute or ritual. Rabbis disapprove of the practice apparently, but it’s not uncommon, say, for a grandson to get a replica tattoo of his grandmother’s war number. Ultimately, I just don’t know about the meaning of the number I saw on Liliana’s arm, and am never likely to. But in the middle of a group trust exercise with which I was struggling, when she gently persuaded, “Don’t worry, I’ve got you, I’m strong”, I suddenly felt very lucky and in that moment knew her words to be true. They resonate with me still.

The beauty, of yoga, for me, is that it’s a (mostly) wordless space that enables one to just be. It’s a level playing field. One’s background, one’s profession, one’s role as a mother or partner, etc., etc., etc., one’s ego-based “conditioned” identity (or any other imposed ID), ceases to be relevant. We’re in the moment. Right here, right now. No matter one’s age, or the injuries or wounds one is carrying. And when one drifts as one inevitably does, into the past or the future, into plans about preparing dinner or a reverie about some improved version of oneself (“If only I could get my leg higher up the wall”)…the aim is to come back into the room, again and again…back to one’s senses, back to one’s body, with some care and kindness. And we could all extend a little more of that, towards others and ourselves.

In the words of Iggy Pop, and I remind you he’s almost 70 so he’s matured somewhat, “We’re all gonna die, so let’s be nice”!

1.  Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning, 1959, p. 43.

Postscript: *Not her real name. Also, bendy pretzel-ness is by no means unique to my young daughter, but, I’ve observed, a common attribute of most determined six-year-old girls who seem intent on spending their lives upside down in the form of a cartwheel or handstand. Middle-aged women, with no prior dance experience, probably should NOT attempt the jete on floorboards, or any other surface for that matter.