Quote:
Originally Posted by Starry_Night
In that generation is was common to not talk about how hard things were or what you had been through. Life was rough all over, as my grandmother said, there was no point in talking about it. My other grandparents and great grandparents used to say similar things. You just didnt talk about such things.my grandparents all lived to be at least 90 years old, and i never heard any of them complain about a thing they ever went through, even abuse and losing their homes and such. They were just grateful to be alive.
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Yes, exactly.
There was a huge movement after WWII (in Europe anyway) about the idea that people had suffered, now it was over and let's move on. Let's not ever talk about the past because it's too painful.
A lot of people had suffered: lost their home, lost relatives, were starving, etc.
People were traumatized. And rightly so. But that meant that they didn't want to hear about suffering. They wanted to focus on the future, which is of course understandable but is also very problematic because it brushes aside the exerience of people who went through hell.
There was also a lot of guilt mixed with this, the idea of "How could we let this happen?"
My grandfather was sent to a concentration camp (Bergen-Belsen), he wasn't Jewish, he was a communist. When he returned, he told my grandmother that as soon as people heard he had been to a camp, they'd get uncomfortable and quickly change the subject.
People didn't want to know. So survivors learnt quickly that they had to shut up.
Even those who didn't shut up and spoke up were met with an overwhelming silence: Primo Levi's book published in 1947 (If This is a Man) detailing his experience in Auschwitz and his return to Italy all through Eastern Europe from the camp was not a best-seller at all.
It was too soon.
It's only in the seventies with the next generation that people were ready to hear about what had happened.