Remembering millions through two different Holocaust survival journeys (Poland, early 1930s to after the end of WWII; Maryland and Connecticut, late 1940s to late 1990s, & afterwards): The world needs saints and miracles.

Here’s how Mother Teresa explained the psychology of numbers – how monumental catastrophes in the millions don’t affect us like individual ones:

“If I look at the mass I will never act. If I look at the one, I will.”

Is that why we’re in a golden era of memoirs? If we share our personal Herculean hardships, the world might be more compassionate?

Today is Holocaust Remembrance Day. Anna Salton Eisen in her first-hand account of her parents, especially her father’s, Holocaust stories in Pillar of Salt, and Rebecca Frankel’s second-hand telling of the story of the Rabinowitz family’s Holocaust survival in Into the Forest want us to never forget what happened to six million Jewish people humiliated, terrorized, tortured, and murdered in the darkest of times.

You’ll feel emotionally pained by both, and praise both since greater awareness can lead to increased activism and public outcry. Unknowingly, they also intensify the world’s shared pain aghast at the emptiness of the “Never Again” chant watching in horror the atrocities perpetrated on the Ukrainian people by another brutal dictator. Putin chillingly seems hell-bent on doing what Hitler did to millions – wiping Jewish people “from the face of the earth.”

As we remember the millions of lives lost that we cannot fathom but do so through the lives of two Jewish families, Eisen wants us to also remember another five million more wiped out: non-Jewish people, including ethnic groups like the Romani and Slavic peoples; religious groups like the Jehovah’s Witnesses; essentially anyone they deemed “socially aberrant”; and enemies of the State.

Poland is the country where the greatest number of Jewish people were erased: three million. Poland is also the Holocaust setting of both books. In two small villages and two ghettos near each, and concentration camps spread out.

One, Zhetel, was “once a very happy little Jewish town” in northeastern Poland where Miriam, Morris, and their daughters Rochelah/Rochel (Ruth in America) and Tania (Toby) happily lived (surrounded by their large extended families) until they were driven out to live under intolerable conditions at the Zhetel ghetto. The other, the Salton family (Eisen’s father George, brother Manek, and their parents) lived in southwestern Poland in Tyczyn, the region known as Galicia (which extends into western Ukraine including Lviv), until they were forced into the Rzeszów ghetto.

Ghettoization was the first collective step towards dehumanizing the Jewish people. Many families crammed into the same tiny living spaces, never knowing when the Nazis would come and deport them to concentration camps: six extermination camps and over 1,000 labor camps. It’s from the ghettos that the Rabinowitz and Salton stories dramatically diverge.

The four Rabinowitzs run into the forest. George Salton’s parents are sent to the “death camps.” He also got separated from his brother, never seeing his family again. Being with your immediate family during horrific trauma and upheaval provides inner strength, but hiding out in a forest for several years and surviving is remarkable. Also stunning is that without any family George Salton endured TEN labor camps. (He hadn’t met Eisen’s mother Ruth until after the war; she was sent to Siberia.) Both family survival stories are mind-boggling.

The forest is the Białowieża Forest. “One of the earth’s last remaining primeval woodlands,” split between Poland and Belarus, today a UNESCO World Heritage site. They managed to survive in an “underground village” dug four feet into the ground called zemlyanki, a Russian word that means “dugout.” Morris Rabinowitz had been in the lumber business so he knew woods, so many people followed him there. Who, though, could prepare anyone for the massacres and living-on-the-edge with barely anything? Miriam was resourceful too, having owned a drugstore that carried a little of everything. Still, it’s a miracle their daughters sustained a “remarkable amount of childlike wonder in the brutal forest reality.”

As a whole, Holocaust survivors didn’t talk about what they went through. The Rabinowitzs also stand out because they “talked about it all the time,” whereas Salton Eisen lived in a silent home with “undercurrents of mourning” sensing her “gloomy heritage” but not being told. Until one day in her twenties, she cries out, “For G-d’s sake, Dad. What did they do to you?”

Which may help to explain why Eisen’s childhood, adolescence, and adulthood come across as more psychologically devastating than daughters Ruth and Toby. By the time Eisen was about eight, she’d internalized the silence and pain she saw in her father’s eyes into nightmares, fears of “separation” and “abandonment,” and “isolation” as she didn’t know any family like hers. Although her father rose to a senior position at the Defense Department, and her homemaking mother was an extraordinary cook making sure her family was always well-fed and turning her skills into a catering business – fitting the sixties and suburban Maryland – when she discovers something of her father’s (no spoilers) in his nightstand she confirms his sinister wartime experiences. Instead of acting like a typical middle school kid, she delves into researching the Holocaust but tells no one. Her memoir tracks her awakening, deepening, and growing activism that continues today.

So much stuns in these memoirs, including discovering that Eisen is the founder of the synagogue in Texas (where she lives now) in the news a few months ago when an anti-Semitic terrorist held four members of the Congregation Beth Israel including the rabbi hostage.

We may want to look away from all of this, but how can we? Eisen points out these stories must be told “for the sake of history and the future of humanity.” Morally and existentially, she continues to say that “with freedom comes responsibility.” Her memoir may be spare on words (less than 200 pages), but she doesn’t spare the emotions. Frankel’s approach consumes more than twice as many pages (374, plus another seventy pages of detailed notes), describing relatively unknown history that also emotionally affects us.

Another difference between the two memoirs is that Frankel’s is a second-hand account told to her through daughters of Holocaust survivors who survived with them. How she connects with them is fascinating and miraculously coincidental, along with another amazing coincidence. Into the Forest, then, reads more story-like in the sense that there’s a Prologue, a before the war, a during the war, an after the war, and an Epilogue – the full arc of a novel in that respect. Frankel’s lyrical descriptions of the beauty of the forest are so discordant with what happened in the forest.

Eisen’s memoir of the during-the-war years would have been blank had her pleas to her father gone unanswered. He not only opens up but returns to Poland for the first time with his family. Her prose is more sorrowful in its rawness, less embellished although sometimes she expresses her profound emotions poetically. (Her Holocaust poems have been published.)

Into the Forest describes two relatively unknown underground resistance movements in the ghettos and after the war. Eisen makes reference to these but she concentrates on, “how it must feel to carry so much pain”? Today she’s a mental health therapist specializing in trauma. Her activism continues as her memoir is being adapted into a documentary planned for release this summer, In My Father’s Words. No doubt her father’s memoir, The 23^rd Psalm, will also feed into it.

Both memoirs exemplify Eisen’s dedication. How vital for history and humanity is “the importance of memory.”

Lorraine

When words aren’t enough to express acute grief (New Jersey, present-day; 1980s Touran, presumably Iran): Not all time travel plots ask us to interpret the protagonist’s dreams to more potently depict the emotional devastation of profound loss as The Almond in the Apricot exquisitely does.

Two universes – different countries, different time periods, one real the other imaginary – are used to portray the penetrating grip of the death of a best friend – roommate and soul mate – suddenly ripped away, dying instantly in a car crash. Emma and Spencer are domestic partners. If he wasn’t so intent on finding a male lover, they might as well have been married. He may have joked about that, but the sense we get is she would have regardless of their platonic relationship.

“Emmabelle, if I were going to the moon – Luna, help me – and I could take just one person, woman or man, it would be you.” … “Emmabelle, will you pretend to be my wife, for now and forever?”

The Almond in the Apricot is Emma’s story, mostly what happens to her when her soul mate is gone. As opposed to her relationship with Spencer’s friend Peter, her boyfriend. The threesome worked beautifully, no jealousies. Easy flow that enabled Spencer to come and go as he pleased balanced by times when Peter preferred to opt out of whatever they were planning to do – generally Spencer’s plans since he was drawn to the stimulation of New York City, particularly The Village, whereas Emma gravitates to order. Peter misses his friend too but still sees Emma as his girlfriend.

When the novel opens, her heart isn’t in it anymore but she hasn’t said anything to Peter. How their relationship ends isn’t at the heart of what consumes this story. What’s at stake is Emma’s sanity. How a twenty-nine-year-old deeply grieving Emma from suburban New Jersey (probably New Brunswick area near Rutgers University where she studied), a senior engineer who designs wastewater sewer systems (not a particularly sexy job or typically seen in novels), weathers the trauma.

“It actually doesn’t get easier as time goes by. It gets harder,” Emma says. After her initial “strange sensations and visions,” she began to have bad nightmares, finding herself in the bathroom sick, not knowing how she’d gotten there. “The fear and the uncertainty felt too great for me to grasp,” she admitted to her closest friend and colleague at work, Tina. An interesting storyline as Emma, and the reader, aren’t so sure she’s a friend versus taking advantage of her inability to function exceptionally at work (and socially) like she’d always done.

The intensity of Emma’s grief is too much for her to grasp. The nightmares continue and evolve into something else. More dreamy, familiar, and nostalgic. They’re not normal, because they don’t just recur the same way each night. They progress like you’re watching a “television series with every episode” evolving.

Sara Goudarzi chose to open her thought-provoking, speculative novel in Emma’s dreamscape. These chapters are titled Touran, but it’s not clear if the setting is real or fictional. Born in Tehran, Iran where there’s a region called the Touran Biosphere Reserve, presumably this is or was inspired by her homeland.

It’s Emma who tells us she thinks her dreams are from the past, the 1980s. Which fits the storyline of an eleven-year-old girl, Lily, and her parents hurrying to the basement in the middle of the night when sirens go off alerting them to take cover as they’re living near a war-zone with missiles being shot in the air in Iran, a country at war in 1980 (the first Gulf War) and then ten years later the Second Gulf War lasting another eight years (https://www.history.com/topics/middle-east/iran-iraq-war; https://www.britannica.com/list/persian-gulf-war-timeline; https://www.britannica.com/event/Iraq-War).

Reading the novel eight years after Ukraine fought Russia in Crimea isn’t lost on the reader; it feels far-seeing invoking how Emma tries to make sense of her unconscious nighttime experiences that are frightening, life-altering, and surreal and yet as they develop we also see that Lily’s childhood was happy. So, we think Lily is, in part, a reflection of Emma’s past and present when Lily becomes attached to a boy, echoing Emma’s can’t-live-without-Spencer kindred relationship. 

Emma’s story gets even stranger and more complex as her dream world starts bleeding into her real one. That’s when we realize how carefully thought out Goudarzi’s novel is. Even the title’s stuffing an almond in a dried apricot tips us off to we’re in for something out of the ordinary. A strong sense that each word is as precise as can be, and as poetic as possible. In fact, the author is an award-winning poet. She’s also someone who’s lived in three diverse universes, if you will: Iran, Kenya, and the US.

There’s something else Goudarzi brings to her novel: a nimbleness with theoretical physics and Einstein’s theory of relativity in which “space-time” provides a fourth-dimension to helping us make sense of the world. Could there be another universe out there we could cross over to that would be happier than this one? This epiphany of sorts happens when Emma turns on the TV and hears a theoretical physics professor from New York University expound on these dense concepts.

Professor Kerr Jacobs tells us that “The idea of time travel and parallel universes has mesmerized people for centuries.” He goes on to say, “Newer ideas about how the universe is built puts forward the possibility that there could be more dimensions than the three dimensions of space and the one dimension of time.”

The thirty-something speaker with gorgeous green eyes mesmerizes Emma. Is it because she’s obsessed with understanding the meaning of her dreams? Or, because the professor has the same emerald green eyes as Spencer’s? Same head of dark curls? You can almost guess what happens next.

How long do you think it takes to grieve the death of someone who’s part of you? Are you thinking how dare we put a timeframe on the grief process? What if the sadness is so severe the bereaved person is unable to move on, because the hole is so big inside of you it cannot be closed? At one point do your feelings and behavior become abnormal?

In 2021, the mental health community decided to put a time limit on what’s considered normal and not. The bible of psychological diagnoses, known as the DSM or Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, recently added Prolonged Grief Disorder to their fifth edition. 

It’s not surprising not everyone agrees with this decision, which sets a one-year timeframe on moving on IF the patient is diagnosed as meeting “some” of eight identified symptoms, such as “identity disruption (e.g., feeling as though part of oneself has died), difficulty with reintegration (e.g., problems engaging with friends, pursuing interests, planning for the future),” and “feeling that life is meaningless.”

Emma exhibits all the symptoms on the DSM list.

Consider also psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s Five Stages of Grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. Will Emma move through the five stages? Reach the stage of acceptance? In one year’s time?

Putting aside the artificial timeframe, does she sound mentally ill when she asks: “Must there always be something? Why can’t it ever be easy?”

Lorraine

What happens when you dig into your father’s Argentinian past? (Buenos Aires 1998; backstory 1973 – 1976): On a Night of a Thousand Stars is a title that evokes beauty and peace. Yet starry skies also illuminate darkness. Passionate and terrifying, colorful and bleak, are the two contradictory themes wrapped up in this emotional moving, dual timeframe, historical novel.

Set primarily in and around Buenos Aires, the capital of Argentina, Andrea Yaryura Clark mixes politics with romance, a heady combination. In 1998, the country was governed by a President. From 1973 to 1983, the Republic was overthrown by a military dictatorship that sponsored terrorism against its own people. Brutal political conditions we may not be familiar with, intensified by passionate love embroiled in both timeframes.

Who better than Clark to tell this story? She lived in Buenos Aires during the ‘70s and the ‘90s. And she, like her feisty and compassionate protagonist Paloma Larrea, now live in Brooklyn, New York. Both also cherish their homeland and its diversely rich culture.

When Clark wrote the novel exposing the dark side of Argentina’s Dirty War, she had no idea how piercing it would feel in 2022 when nearly the whole world is aghast seeing what genocide looks like, standing united for peace, not war.

If Argentina is a country you don’t know much about, after reading this sensuous novel balanced by a clear-eyed view of rising up against the worst of humankind, you’ll come away better informed about its lively culture, landscapes, and 20^th century history. Clark’s objectives.

Buenos Aires is the second largest city in South America, with a multitude of varied neighborhoods that make up the metropolitan area. Recoleta, considered the domain of the wealthy, is where Paloma’s family owns an apartment. One of many.

Paloma is twenty-four when the novel opens in 1998. She’s about to embark on a trip from New York to Buenos Aires as her handsome, charismatic father Santiago will soon be sworn in as Argentina’s Ambassador to the UN. The 1970 chapters begin when he’s a law student at the University of Buenos Aires.

The Larrea family also owns a ranch, El Pinar, situated on century-old land two hours from Buenos Aires in the “Humid Pampas” region. Touting “some of the most fertile soil in the world,” one of the most productive agricultural regions in the world in the twentieth century. Like other grasslands today, the habitat is considered “endangered.” It’s here that Paloma developed fond memories of her grandparents. Still close to her grandfather (her grandmother has passed away), and to a gaucho (cowboy) who’s been attached to this ranch and the family for a long time. The ranch and the Pampas introduce us to another perspective on Argentina’s history and its world-class beef grown on plains covered by fertile pampas grass called cortadera. The country’s history, then, is also tied to its love of horses, which is tied to its world-class polo.

Santiago made it big on his own on Wall Street. The Larreas own a second apartment in Manhattan, and two beach houses, one in the Hamptons on Long Island, New York, the other in La Paz, northeast of Buenos Aires. The plot quickly takes off at a party in which Santiago, his brother, and their Argentinian polo teammates have flown in to the Southampton Polo Club to celebrate their country’s proud tradition as the “Mecca of Polo.” At the beach house, guests are treated to a “traditional asado, an Argentine barbeque,” with tango music playing, conjuring the steamy dancing we associate with the country, which also has a long history of folk music.

Nothing in the novel moves slowly. At the polo party, Paloma meets one of her father’s old university friends, Grace, who makes a curious comment to her triggering the plot: her search to find out about her father’s past when Paloma arrives in Buenos Aires. “I had always believed my family, like many of the Argentine elite, had not had their lives disrupted by the dictatorship,” clueing us in by page nineteen that this probably wasn’t true. Is that why he hasn’t spoken of his past? What does her mother Lily know? 

The secrets Paloma uncovers fit the expression Be Careful What You Wish for. Her research deepens quickly, magnified by how little time she’ll be in the country. Enough time, though, to kindle a delightful romantic relationship with Franco Bonetti. Their paths cross when she attends a meeting of an activist group called H. I. J. O. S – The Sons and Daughters for Identity and Justice Against Oblivion and Silence, and the Mothers and Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo.

The story swiftly moves into telling us about the children of H. I. J. O. S. who disappeared starting with the short-lived presidency of Isabel Perón, who essentially turned her government over to the right-wing Argentine Anticommunist Regime. To a disgraced era of arresting, interrogating, torturing, and killing some 30,000 people hidden in “detention centers,” and to ripping newborn babies away from their mothers in hospitals. Terrorism that coincided with Santiago’s university days that didn’t end until a new President took back the country, Raúl Alfonsín, “father of modern democracy in Argentina.”

While the writing took Clark seven years, On a Night of A Thousand Stars took longer. First she envisioned a political and social justice documentary, and a nonfiction book. Then a screenplay — deservedly because her fictional characters are ripe for the screen. The last came first: historical fiction.

Both timeframes are romantic. The past centers on a more feverish love story with a woman whose name personifies her mystique – Valentina – with growing tension between Santiago and his best friend, Máximo. There’s another man in Paloma’s life besides Franco, Juan, a polo player. Her parents know and approve of him. But there’s no heat in their relationship, no competition with alluring and tender Franco. All the love stories link to complicated political history. Clark has worked out the complexities so that we understand how the past is ever-present.

Cultural objectives give the novel so much richness and pleasure. Scenes in cafés that seem everywhere; others that take Paloma’s search with Franco to other parts of the country, such as central Córdoba with its beautiful Spanish colonial architecture and the stunning village of San Martin de los Andes in southwestern Patagonia.

Literature is as very much part of Argentina’s culture. Jorge Luis Borges (1899 – 1986), whose body of work is enjoying a boom today, is mentioned. Fictionally, very much alive in 1998 is Martin Torres, a professor, activist, and memoirist so realistically depicted I kept googling his name and his memoir Death by Exile but couldn’t find any references that he exists, despite thinking I missed finding him.

Torres plays an important role. Through him the author has a vehicle for relaying tortured history as he explains to Paloma “the system for disappearing people,” and the National Commission on the Disappearance of People established by the new President to keep searching for the vanished. “One day, she was sure, they would live in a society where human misery would be eliminated.” Hopeful words in our hearts and prayers today. Let’s hope “unified people could never be defeated.”

Ultimately, peace is the novel’s overriding objective. Paloma will also have to make peace with what she discovers.

Lorraine

Risking everything to help repressed people escape for freedom (East and West Berlin; 1961 – 1989 & afterwards): There’s not enough ways to tell and retell one of the 20^th century’s greatest escape stories. Tunnel 29 was made into documentaries, a movie, a ten-part podcast, and most recently, this non-fiction book by British journalist/producer/broadcaster Helena Merriman, who created the BBC podcast watched by some six million viewers who clamored for more.

In telling the daring story of a tunnel dug from democratic West Berlin underneath the Berlin Wall into East Berlin’s terrorist regime, the book reads like an historical spy thriller. The brainchild of three university students attending the Technical University in West Berlin who had their freedom, the formidable undertaking was carried out at “unthinkable” risks in a “mud tomb.” The enormity of courage, obstacles, backbreaking exhaustion, perseverance, creativity, and fears far exceed what anyone could have imagined possible given East Berlin during the Cold War was “one of the most repressive police organizations in the world.” 

As gripping as Tunnel 29 reads, released August 2021, reading it in March 2022 when a Russian dictator seeks to spread authoritarianism the likes of which haven’t been seen since the Soviet Union collapsed, two years after the Berlin Wall – the “Wall of Shame” – came tumbling down. The world has been inspired beyond anything imagined by the courageousness of Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky and the Ukrainian people, defending their freedom and their beautiful, historic country, making this book even more chilling and electrifying.

If you want to see what Freedom looks like to people deprived of it, take a look at this roaring scene when the “wall of all walls” was torn down in 1989, echoing President Ronald Reagan’s Tear Down This Wall Speech delivered in 1987:

Merriman asks many penetrating questions:

• “How do you dig your tunnel when you can’t use machines in case you’re heard?”
• “How do you buy tools when you have no money?”
• “How do you avoid hitting a pipe and not drowning?”
• “How do you see in the tunnel when there’s no light?”
• “How do you breathe when the air runs out?”
• “And if, somehow, you do all this, and you get to the other end, what if the secret police are waiting for you?”

The book brings you right into the story, so much so that a major newspaper’s review questioned how Merriman could have possibly known some of the details she provides. Tunnel 29 is not historical fiction, but the fact it feels like it is is why it’s so widely appealing.

As for its authenticity, the answer seems to come from consulting many sources, starting with first-hand interviews with the original three diggers: Joachim Rudolph, ringleader, and two of his university friends who came to West Berlin from Italy to study: Luigi/Gigi and Domenico/Mimmo. Rudolph was a twenty-two-year-old engineering student, around eighty when Merriman met with him (and his wife) at their Berlin apartment. See:

This is Joachim Rudolph – escapee, digger and inventor… the star of the show. I spent many days interviewing him in his apartment in Berlin – he was a wonderful man to spend time with, with a forensic memory. pic.twitter.com/OsFvZd6552

— Helena Merriman (@helenamerriman) April 22, 2020

She also interviewed some of the escapees, including two married couples. One crawled through the narrow, dark, airless, “clay-like soil” with their baby. The other had been separated, arrested and tortured by the Stasis, “one of the most powerful secret police forces on earth.” Fashioned on the KGB, both were brutalized inside a “crystal coffin” named for its “enormous glass roof” – the Brandenburg Prison.

All the diggers and escapees, as well as the Stasi leader Erich Mielke, architect of “mass surveillance,” and his “productive” spy Siegfried Uhse, can be seen in thirty-five, black-and-white images. These are some of the real people who dug, escaped, and fanatically surveilled the “death strip.” 

The authenticity answer can also be found in information we’re told has been released for the first time. Merriman also provides twenty detailed pages citing the resources she used and specific references in the book – chapter by chapter, quote by quote, comment by comment. She delved through those resources, “oral histories, maps, memoirs, court-papers, declassified CIA and State Department files,” with the assistance of translators.

Better questions might be:

• How long did the research take?
• How difficult was it to organize a massive amount of information into a coherent whole?
• What was it like to find yourself inside the Stasi Archives “trawling through reports, interrogations, photos and videos”?
• Considering the records of the “informant” Siegfried Uhse consumed 2,735 pages alone, how did Merriman choose what to focus on?
• How much had she already worked out by writing, producing, and delivering the Tunnel 29 podcasts that aired on BBC Radio 4 in 2019? Each of the episodes runs about 14 minutes each. You can listen to the full podcast here: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0000nfh/episodes/player. Or, this preview clip: https://vimeo.com/371849580.

The world first learned about the sensational tunnel escape in 1962 when the revolutionary and highly controversial NBC documentary The Tunnel was released on TV. Delayed months as the timing was on the heels of the Cuban missile crisis, the two bold newsmen who made the film (in return for funding the underground operation at the cost of $12,500) didn’t think it would ever be shown: Reuven Frank, “a father of broadcast journalism,” and Piers Anderton, the pioneering NBC executive’s correspondent. You can watch the documentary here:

Merriman opens the story in 1945 to provide context as to why Soviet-controlled East Germany built a “twenty-seven-mile-long internal border” separating West and East Berlin, “the most heavily guarded in the world.” In 1961, a barbed wire unrolled overnight dividing Berlin into two. Then the over ten foot high wall was built before everyone’s shocked eyes.

The heart and soul of the underground story takes place from ‘61 to ‘62. The wall, though, remained until ’89. Two years later marked the end of the Soviet Union, ending the Cold War. An Epilogue, Afterward, and “What They Did Next” chapters fill us in on what happened to the key historical characters and the postponed documentary.

Woven throughout is the inhumanity of the Stasis, as well as “tens of thousands” of VoPos (local police), the Stasi mastermind Mielke, and his unlikely yet earned-his-trust spy Siegfried, who had been a hairdresser and was gay. Merriman analyzes what motivated him for so many years. Homosexuality, a chief factor, as he was blackmailed by the Stasis who thought nothing of killing, locking up, and torturing people for doing anything deemed subversive.

As unbelievably harrowing digging fifteen-foot down into enemy territory was, Joachim says “never knowing who to trust” was worse. That the “personal betrayals” caused the most anguish. Up against “masters of psychological torture,” also referred to as “operative psychology,” the Stasis perfected “decomposition”: the “disintegration” of families and friends until they broke down.

Information about JFK’s role in agreeing to let Berlin be divided is characterized as “one of the biggest ‘what-ifs’ in the twentieth century: what if Kennedy and the West had done more?” Disturbing yet gratifying when JFK came to West Berlin after the Berlin Wall was erected keeping East Berliners “locked” in and after his administration’s Berlin Airlift, greeted by cheering crowds even he hadn’t expected.

The Tunnel documentary wasn’t intended “for the mind, but for the heart and gut.” Tunnel 29 gives us all three.

Lorraine

From the depths of sexual violence to the heights of climbing the Mother of all mountaintops (Mt. Everest Himalayas bordering Nepal/Tibet, 2015; backstories Lima, Peru & San Francisco): Can you fathom what it would feel like to stand at the “top of the world”?

Even seeing images of mountaineers climbing Mt. Everest – at 29,029 feet (5.5 miles) the highest peak in the world – in “The Death Zone” where there’s not enough air to survive without an oxygen canister, the “surreal, hyperreal” experience Peruvian-American Silvia Vasquez-Lavado reached in 2015 is still beyond the grasp of most of us.

Vasquez-Lavado has certainly earned her membership in the international Explorer’s Club, part of an elite group of female adventurers who made it to the Everest summit (688) compared to 5,000+ men. Fewer have climbed the seven highest mountain peaks in the world – The Seven Summits – like she has.

The question of imagining how a survivor of four years of childhood sexual violence distinguished herself in a feat dominated by men in which she had to put her trust and life in the hands of men is astonishing. Made even more dramatic knowing she’s openly gay and that the men’s lives depended on her supreme level of physical/mental strength and endurance that had to equal or exceed theirs.

Vasquez-Lavado’s story is even more striking when she tells us in emotionally raw prose how she’d reached rock bottom before she attempted the climb. So when she says the “whiteouts” on the ledge of the Himalayas weren’t as awful as her “blackouts” from a long history of self-destructive behaviors, you gain a new appreciation for a disease that can take everything from you.

The memoir is gripping in both time periods. Vivid awesomeness in the present climbing she puts us right into, and in the alternating chapters of the horrific raping of a young girl from the time she was six to ten years old growing up in an affluent home yet a silent, menacing one in Lima, Peru. Terrorists on the street dramatizing the terror inside. Confused by a perpetrator’s cruelty that made his brutality even worse by telling her that her parents knew what he was doing to her. He is “J,” the twenty-two-year-old housekeeper her mother trusted to watch over her (and her brother).

Devastating trauma takes root deep in her soul and yet she moves on. Carrying it with her to America where she attends a college in Lancaster, Pennsylvania as a Fulbright scholar. From there she moves to San Francisco, where she now lives. The drama continues, because we learn she’s a Type T personality, which goes way beyond the bounds of being a Type A high-achiever. T for thrill-taker, risk-taker. We see that first play out in the thrill of her first job at a vodka company, where alcohol and wild parties flow – the origin of her reckless, out-of-control, dangerous descent into an addiction to alcohol and indiscriminate sex with women until she finds a woman she loves. Again, the prose is sharp and intense. Vasquez-Lavado doesn’t sugar-coat anything.

How remarkable that she becomes one of Fortune magazine’s “Heroes of the 500 List,” and the technology site CNET’s one of the “Twenty Most Influential Latinos in Tech” in Silicon Valley, where she did pioneering work for PayPal and eBay. 

In the Shadow of the Mountain is a stunning survival story. Most important to the author is not who she’s become but how she can use the lessons of her journey to help others heal the trauma and pain of sexual abuse.

In 2014, before the climb, she founded a non-profit: Courageous Girls. Its purpose is healing together: “Survivors of violence and abuse realize they have the power to heal.” But not alone. “If you want to go quickly, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.” It’s stated vision and mission is Healing Through Adventure. On the website’s home page, you’ll see pictures of seven women, the author and presumably the six courageous girls she mentored and braved the Everest climb with her – up to the Base Camp. When you read what develops between them, you’ll feel the author’s angst at having to leave them behind to meet up with her all-male team to climb higher and higher. To Camp I, II, III, IV, into the Death Zone.

The abuse stories of the courageous girls are also sickening. Some, victims of sex trafficking in India. How that criminal exploitation system takes place is explained. Unbelievable they managed to escape. On this mountaineering healing adventure, through their combined courage, they become “daughters, sisters, friends. We are Mexican, Peruvian, Indigenous, Columbia, Nepali, Indian, Hindu, Buddhist, Catholic, Atheist. Young, old, queer, straight, nonbinary . . . Everest, the mother, is knitting us together.”

Among the author’s gifts are her literary talents to bring us right on the mountain with her and the other courageous girls, as well as into the shattering of a little girl’s innocence and selfhood. On top of being molested for years, her father thought nothing of physically whipping her with a leather belt, while her mother kept disappearing. By the time she learns where her mother went all those terrifying years, it’s not bitterness she feels towards her but a realization that her shame goes back generations and “how fragile love is.” Her love for her mother is dear. She carries that love with her too, all the way to the mountaintop.

The author found the right words to tell this soaring, searing, physical, poetic, cultural, philosophical, emotional story like we’re watching a movie of a woman’s many lives. Precisely why you will see a movie based on her life. Selena Gomez will star in Hollywood’s film adaptation of the memoir, predicted to be “her most inspiring yet.” How could it not be? A formidable acting role for any actress playing a woman “running on adrenaline, running from myself since the late ‘90s.”

The Everest climbers cannot even attempt the climb without their guides: the Sherpa people. The legendary explorer who first climbed “Chomolunga – Mother of the World” (the title of chapter one) in 1953, Sir Edmund Hillary, is seen in this picture with his Sherpa guide Tenzing Norgay:

The Sherpas emigrated from Tibet to Nepal about 500 years ago, so their bodies have physically adapted to altitudes higher than an airplane flies. They practice the “oldest form of Tibet Buddhism,” which means the climb and the memoir is part spiritual. It’s impossible not to think of the mystical when Vasquez-Lavado takes us deep and detailed into the belly of her journey. It starts when she enters the “spiritual entrance” to “a sacred hidden valley of the Sherpa people,” with its Buddhist traditions, chants, and prayer stones, flags, and wheels. There’s beauty in their beliefs as “the spirit of those blessings gets scattered across the earth.” The Sherpas respect the mountain with “humility” not “bravado.”

The memoir stands for so many things, including a mountaineer’s vocabulary and utmost mastery of technical skills in which every movement must be “rote,” because you cannot lose a second of the intense concentration demanded by an “obstacle course of ice towers,” “massive chasms,” and “giant crevasses, some over 150 deep.”

This is a must-read for anyone feeling alone, powerless, in need of healing, or seeking inspiration. Might they be all of us right now?

Lorraine