It sounds as if she needs someone to bear witness to her, says Annalisa Barbieri, but it doesn’t have to be you
My parents are from eastern Europe and experienced great trauma as teenagers. In 1941, the German army invaded my father’s home; his father was taken from their house and shot in the street by the Nazis. My father was 16. Two years later, he was conscripted into an SS division and fought on the eastern front.
He is now dead, but I kept in touch with him throughout his life, despite his horrible behaviour towards me. I always felt this wasn’t really who he was, but something the war had made him. None of my other siblings made much effort to see him. In the final years of his life, I saw a lot of him. It was extremely traumatic, as he told me about some of the horrors he had been through.
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