Category: Children and war

Artist in Agony: My Step-Father, Stefano, WWII “Survivor”‘

Posted on by kathiemm
The Falling Gladiator.Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication

by Anthony J. Marsella, Ph.D.

He wanted desperately
To roar in laughter,
Hold his sides
Gasp for breath,
Experience glee,
Know sheer hilarity!
But all manners of pleasure,
All moments of happiness,
Eluded him!
His mind was sealed by trauma!
He knew loss!
He lived pain!
He witnessed horror!
He experienced terror!
He suffered misery!
Lifetime imprints!

He wondered:
How could others abandon control?
Escape past, feel joy?
He looked at them: bewildered:
How? Why?

No answers but “destiny” came!
He recalled Verdi’s opera:
La forza del destino!
Aria: Morir! Tremenda cosa!
(“To die, a momentous thing!”)
He knew death: seen it, smelled it, touched it!

II.
Exuberance . . . impossible!
He was confined to slight smiles,
An occasional toss of the head,
“Sniffs of the nose!”
No intentional mirth.
Somberness!
Laughter with cynicism!
“What do you know?”
Do you know what I have seen?
Momentary pleasures:
Painting with oils,
Carving wood,
Sculpting clay!
Crafting a delicate rosewood mandolin!
Making guitars with no training.
An artist absent agony,
Passing quickly!

Amusement!
Sinful!
Disrespectful!
Insulting!
Demeaning,
Do they not know?
Have they not seen?

He forced a grin
For sake of others,
Nodding!
Unspoken acknowledgement!
Others tried to please him!
A good meal!
A good cigarette!
What do you need Stefano?”

Dark humor was worse!
A meeting place for pain and pleasure!
No Schadenfreud for him,
No satisfaction from someone’s pain.
Who benefits from suffering?

Empathy, sympathy, sorrow!
These he knew well,
He lived amidst them!
Images returning with ease,
Overwhelming him!
No satisfaction in revenge,
No consolation!

He tried to survive!
Sought refuge in a new land!
It was impossible!
Lived experience sealed his fate,
No changes with time or place.
Torment omnipresent!
Inscribed, carved, painted,
In body and mind!

His life caught in time:
Fixed in an artist’s fragile imagination,
Sensations crying for release,
Redemption from sorrow’s grip!
War, poverty, hunger,
Starvation, poverty, death,
Demons!

III.
He walked:
From Torino to Messina — 1943:
1381 kilometers by air!
2000 kilometers on swollen feet!
Avoiding roads,
German troops!

He pondered:
War over for Italian soldiers,
Partisans fighting!
Germans contemptuous!
Firing squads!
Sites before him engraved!
Life intaglios!

He walked:
Rome spared,
Even Nazi Generals understood:
“Do not destroy eternity.”
Destroy only human lives!
They are expendable
For grand designs!

He walked:
Before him destruction, deprivation,
Disgrace, dishonor!
Open-mouth corpses,
Sagging buildings,
Dust in every breath
Children begging,
Women – young and old –
Offering emaciated bodies,
Lira! Lira!

He walked:
With each step,
Memories!
Soldier!
King Victor Emmanuel’s Italian Army!
Spain, Libya, Italy!

He walked

Sopportare!
Bear the unbearable!
Smirk!
Hell is life!
Life is hell!
Fire and brimstone!
No escape!
No sanctuary!

He walked:
Is this what Dante understood?
Where is Beatrice?
How prophetic: “Inferno!”
Poetic words from Petrarch,
Paintings from Leonardo!
Sculptures from Michelangelo!
Carvings from Cellini!

He Walked:
Preoccupations!
What matters beauty?
What matters heritage?
What matters time,
If time can be erased in moments.

Chest-thumping dictator in balconies,
“Better one day as a lion,
Than a lifetime as a lamb!”
Ancient Rome restored.
Metaphors?
Meaningless!

IV.
He welcomed death!
Not for a glorious cause,
But to flee life!
His thoughts went beyond impulse:
He considered place, means, time!
Somber detachment essential!

He went to confession:
Begged for forgiveness,
From God,
From priests,
From self!
Why was he begging?

Priests!
Agents of god . . .
Why does god need agents?
Whose side are priests on?

Priests share confessions with bishops,
Bishops share with Vatican,
Vatican stores secrets for posterity!
Know the truth!
Hide the truth!
Vows cast aside!
Betrayal!

V.
Spanish Civil War:
Two years, 8 months, 1 day:
A lifetime of scars!
Barcelona, Madrid, Guernica:
An enduring legacy!

Prelude to WWII!
Cold-War harbinger!
Middle-East omen!
Ideologies, prophecies, grand designs!

Global military-industrial-banker complexes,
Vultures feasting on death and destruction!
New nations, faces, places,
Old wine in new bottles!
New wine in old bottles!

Factions:
Republicans! Popular Front!
Stalinists! Communists! Unionists! Socialists!
Latvian, Polish, Czech, Garibaldi, Soviet brigades!
Most volunteers, Jewish idealists!
Lincoln Brigade!
Hemingway!
Did he grasp for whom bells toll?

Nationalists! Monarchists! Dictators!
Franco! Carlists! Fascists! Falangists!
Catholicism at stake . . . in new ways!
Opus Dei! A rebirth!
Godless communists!
Jews seeking revenge!

Germans! Italians! Spanish Armies!
Ideologies!
Nations!
Countries!
Fatherland!
Motherland!
Homeland!
No Land!
Why?

Modern War:

Statistics! Maps! Reports!
Dead, wounded, MIA,
Symbols, songs, words:
INTERNATIONALE:
Stand up! All victims of oppression,
For tyrants fear your might,
Don’t cling to your possessions,
For you have nothing,
If you have no rights!

HORST-WESSEL LIED!

Deutschland, Deutschland, Uber Alles!
Sieg Heil! Bloodlines protected!

GIOVINEZZA!

Hail, People of heroes!
Hail, Immortal Fatherland,
Your sons were born again
With faith and ideals!
Warrior values!
Youth, youth!
In the hardship of life!

Realities. . .
Idealism in an age of want!
Nobility in failure!
Romanticized war posters!
Dying for country!
Blood sacrifices!

Orders!
Vodka, wine,
Charge the hill!
Futility!
Potatoes, cabbage, rats!
Minds, bodies, souls, driven by madness!
Causes forgotten!
Amid stupor!
Claw, crawl, hide!
Cry!
Primitive survival!

Bandiera Roso!
Red! Blood Red!
Round Eastern-European faces,
Stop Fascism,
Stalin’s scourge!

Republican brigades in Red Bandanas!
Men . . . women . . . youth!
Standing nearby:
Staring, spitting,
Contempt-filled faces,
No tears!
Loyalists taking notes!

Spread the new Gospel of the Age . . . Communism!
How glorious to die for cause!
Do not hesitate!
Our cause is just!

(USA supported Franco silently:
“Fear of Communism!
No profit! No Investments!
Better dead than Red!”
It never ended!)

Bodies: Headless, limbless, blood-soaked!
Priests, nuns, altar boys . . . shot!
Churches filled with people praying!
Youth, women, old men!
Burned alive!
Statues shattered!
Myths broken!

Loyalists:
You want freedom?
You want equality?
We give you equality,
But for a price!
Your life!

Stukas! Tanks! Blitzkrieg!
Cold, mechanical, precision metal!
Ordered ranks!
Goosesteps! Boots! Helmets!
Ideology no match!
Lives inconsequential!

The Artist in Agony:
Confess!
Reality blurred! Unsure!
Confess for imagined sins!
Confess for sins of others!
Confess for being alive!
Unable to remember!
“Father, Forgive them . . . !”
Forgiveness . . . for what?

Confess . . . What?
For failing to shoot prisoners!
For refusing orders!
For witnessing firing squads!
For offering water to a dying woman,
Blood-saturated blouse,
Blue eyes, blonde hair,
Conscripted for cause!
“Gracias, Senor!”
Dying in your arms!

Confess . . . What?
Madness on all sides
Massacred nuns, priests in black,
Fascist soldiers in brown and grey!
Jewish zealots avenging history,
Still fighting Rome!
Religious fanatics, Loyalists,
Protecting God, Mary, Saints,
Statues, candles, incense, mea culpa!

Confess…What?

For living!
For turning from torture,
For wanting to breathe air free of dust and blood,
For chewing stale bread,
When bread no longer mattered;
For quenching thirst,
With mud-slaked water!

Confess…What?

Confess . . . What?
Once my Stepfather told me:
“Hunger does not know bad bread!
Fame no conosce pani malo.
Manga!”

“Finish your food!
Mama worked hard to cook it.
I worked hard to place it on the table.”
I nodded in agreement: “Si Padre!”
He was right!
How could I know sources of his words?

VI.
His mind began crumbling,
Years before,
An absence of hope!
Can tapestry be weaved
From broken strands, fibers . . . burned embers?

In his life:
Mother lost to war,
Sister to disease,
Father to work,
Home to bombs!

Brother, Prisoner-of-War:
Insults and humiliation,
Barbed-wire fences,
British guards pointing rifles,
Eager to shoot,
Taunting, mocking, insulting,
Daring prisoners to run,
For rifle practice!

Post-War Italy:

Chaos! Confusion! Deceit! Betrayal!
Communists, Fascists, Socialists, Anarchy!
Fifty governments in ten years!

And from America . . . Operation Gladio!

American CIA, Italian elites, Vatican, bankers:
Communism must be stopped in Italy,
At any cost! Blood in the streets!
Assassinations, beatings, torture, prison!

Choose sides!
Choose cronyism!
Choose evil!

Escape to America!
He wrote to his brother;
He came to America!
His new land, not what he expected,
Not what he needed,
Not what he wanted,
No respite offered!
Poverty!
No opportunity!
America: Illusion!

His hopes failing!
Every word an offense!
Every day a burden!
His wife and son . . . kind and caring;
He needed more!

Escape from past,
Freedom from present!
Renewal!
Return to place!
Comfort in old habits, reflexes, routines?

VII

I once saw him laugh . . . uninhibited,
Unrestrained!
Almost hysterical
Vino et veritas!
I welcomed his joy!
It never returned!

He was slightly inebriated,
Too much wine!
In our house
A dinner party, a small gathering,
My European friends!

He told a story of a night in Barcelona,
As a soldier in King Emanuel’s army,
Amid the horror of Civil War!
He was drunk – Spanish wine!
He was unable to walk!

To demonstrate,
He rose from his chair,
Got on hands and knees!
Mimicked crawling back to camp!
Saluting gate guards from a prone position!
He laughed hilariously!
All reserve gone.
How wonderful to see his laughter!

My guests laughed less!
They were from Eastern Europe,
Family members served
In Stalin’s Communist Brigades in Spain!
Relatives lived in Post-War Italy.

No word spoken!
Glances sufficient!
He did not notice!
I did!
Endless vengeance!

What does one do?
When suffering is daily fare?
Trauma sealed in mind, muscle, bone,
Images, sounds, smells!
Puncturing soul!
No respite! Again and, again!
Freud knew: Repetition-compulsion!

Distance, detachment, somberness!

Energy absent!
Frivolity foolish!
Happiness elusive!
Life questioned!
No escape!
An artist in agony!

Meditation . . .
In the years following WWII, the USA Government was obsessed with stopping the spread of communism Greece and Italy. The CIA invested billions of dollars in Operation Gladio, authorizing any method to halt Communist and Socialist rise to power.
More than 50,000 Italians were assassinated, murdered, or killed in open protests. Many were arrested, imprisoned, and tortured. There was total social and political upheaval and chaos. Scores of governments were formed and collapsed.
As in years before WWII, Italians fought against Italians. A government, favoring ties to the USA was sought, imposed, required. CIA efforts won. Italy became a puppet state for USA military forces.
I do not know my step-father’s experiences during this post-war period. He spoke little of them. He also spoke little of the horrors of the Spanish Civil War. He was a soldier in King Victor Emanuel’s Italian Army, a different army from Mussolini’s Fascist Black Shirts. For many, however, there were no differences!
He painted scores of oil paintings, giving almost all of them away as gifts. He sculpted with clay and plaster; no one in America wanted statues of saints. He also carved wood, turning wood scaps on a lathe he made from an old motor, automobile engine belts, and rusted iron, sanded and oiled to look new. He was a creative genius, a mechanical whiz, and an artist across mediums.
My step-father, Stefano, died in my arms at home at age 66. In the days before his death, he said to me: “The great tragedy of life is so few people have an opportunity to develop their talents.” He knew the agony!


Footnote 1:
This poem was originally written in 2014 and published in Anthony J. Marsella (2016): Gatherings: A Collection of Writing Genre. Mountain View Press: Alpharetta, Georgia. ISBN: 978-163183-023-5 Amazon Books.com
Some changes have been made in the original, but no changes in the intent and purpose: to honor respect, courage, and endurance in my step-father’s life.

NUCLEAR WAR AND ME: Annihilation Inscribed Across Time and Place, Part 3

Posted on by kathiemm

by Anthony J. Marsella, Ph.D.

War Legacies

I have never forgotten the anniversary days for the dropping of atom bombs on Hiroshima (August 6, 1945) and Nagasaki (August 9, 1945). Years later, images remain in my mind. Rising, unfolding mushroom cloud.  As I a kid, and now as an adult, I try to grasp the bizarre meaning of events! A mushroom cloud.  

I became hyper-religious, reading the Father Peyton Catholic Bible sold to us by a door-to-door priest salesperson. He convinced my mother to “donate” $20.00.  The words and pictures were fascinating. I even read the Catholic Newspapers, with their list of forbidden movies. I would go to the darkened Church, sit in silence and awe at the statues of saints and Blessed Virgin Mary.  Clusters of candles were burning in red votive jars. There was mystery about it all, but I could not understand! Should I become a priest?  Annihilation!

Movies of Nuclear Catastrophes

In the 1950s there was an omnipresent fear of nuclear war. Scores of protests and anti-war organizations emerged. One of these organizations was Psychologists for Social Responsibility (PsySR), founded by Alex Red Mountain with the help of many others (e.g., Anne Anderson).  I later served as the President of PsySR, 2005-2007. Destiny!

In 1959, the movie, On the Beach, brought tears and sobs to me and others as a group of survivors from a deadly nuclear attack gathered on a beach in Melbourne, Australia, awaiting a nuclear dust cloud.  Couples and families took suicidal pills to escape the horrible consequences of surviving. The movie was a poignant reminder of horrors of a nuclear war.  I was 19 years old at the time, a college student, confused and still afraid. 

Another nuclear war left an impression on me: Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. This 1964 movie was supposed to be a dark satire of Soviet Union and USA nuclear threats.

How could anyone forget the last scene? A mis-communication resulting in the image of an rabid American soldier shouting as he rode a hydrogen bomb from orders for a first strike on the USSR. The President of the USA and his staff tried to recall the bombers to prevent a nuclear apocalypse. They failed!  (see Wikipedia, 2018, 11:00AM)

Like many others, I remember vividly where I was during the Cuban Missile Crisis in October, 1962.  The confrontation between President John F. Kennedy and USSR Premier Nikita Khrushchev! We watched and waited. No desks to hide under! We learned it was the closest we had come to nuclear war.  Both countries continued to build more powerful nuclear weapons. Annihilation!

Nuclear-War Risks Continue

I continue to have memories of total destruction and death of hundreds of thousands of human beings. I visited Nagasaki. I could not escape the guilt. I was alive, but death was inscribed in the name and place.

I still recall crouching beneath school desks as sirens blared. Classmates, giggles, and fear and trembling!  Victims in Japan below saw a circling plane; it was their last sight!  The legacy of horror of remains!

History is the story of survival!  We recall and remember! Until the time lessons are learned, we remain, as Bishop Tutu of South Africa poignantly stated, we remain, “Prisoners of hope.”

When the Absurd Speaks Truth, Part 1

Posted on by kathiemm

by Stefan Schindler

Name me someone that’s not a parasite / and I’ll go out and say a prayer for him.  Bob Dylan – “Visions of Johanna”

Dylan’s line is quoted in Dispatches, Michael Herr’s memoir of America’s Indochina Holocaust, euphemistically called “The Vietnam War” so as to keep the American public perpetually oblivious to Laos and Cambodia being sucked into the maelstrom like chickens caught in the vortex of Jeremiah’s “whirlwind,” except that Laotians and Cambodians, like the Vietnamese, were men and women, and, as Muhammad Ali observed in the unveiling of The Peace Abbey’s “Memorial Stone for Unknown Civilians Killed in War,” nine out of ten casualties in modern warfare are children.

Name me someone that’s not a parasite / and I’ll go out and say a prayer for him.  What does this mean?  Michael Herr offers a hint when he follows Dylan’s poetic genius with a line easily comprehensible: “I keep thinking about all the kids who got wiped out by seventeen years of war movies before coming to Vietnam to get wiped out for good.”

Vietnam has all too often been called the first war that America lost.  People who say this fail to recognize that all of America’s wars are bloody stripes on the flag of “the greatest country in the world”–– a country that, with each war fought, lost her heart and crucified her soul.

The Vietnam War was a march of folly from the start, but that didn’t become clear until the Tet Offensive in late January 1968.  “Anyway,” says Herr, “you couldn’t use standard methods to date the doom; might as well say that Vietnam was where the Trail of Tears was headed all along.”

Herr was a journalist whose many months in Nam were indeed a horror.  “Talk about irony: I went to cover the war and the war covered me.”  Marching, muddy, hungry, shot at.  Too often too scared for words, but not immune to the sound of screams.  And when not in the field?  No relief from the stench and the heat.  “Sitting in Saigon was like sitting inside the folded petals of a poisonous flower.”

I once interviewed a vet who’d been a medic in Nam.  It was late at night.  I asked him what it was really like.  He leaned across the kitchen table, beer in hand, stared at me with eyes like the twin barrels of a shotgun, then said: “One minute in Vietnam could be an eternity in hell.”

Herr was there.  He knew.  He spent a lot of time with the grunts, humping booby-trapped trails that put bamboo spikes through the soles of boots and blew soldiers into trees.  Herr wonders: “Where are they now?  (Where am I now?)  I stood as close to them as I could without actually being one of them, and then I stood as far back as I could without leaving the planet.”

Inhale.  Exhale.  “Waiting for release, for peace, any kind of peace that wasn’t just the absence of war.”

And the Vietnamese?  “We napalmed off their crops and flattened their villages, and then admired the restlessness in their spirit.”

Name me someone that’s not a parasite / and I’ll go out and say a prayer for him.  What does this mean?  Dylan knew, and Herr offers a clue.  “The belief that one Marine was better than ten Slopes saw Marine squads fed in against known NVA platoons, platoons against companies, and on and on, until whole battalions found themselves pinned down and cut off.  That belief was undying, but the grunt was not, and the [Marine] Corps came to be called by many the finest instrument ever devised for the killing of young Americans.”

Note from Kathie MM: Please don’t think of the Vietnam War/Indochina Holcaust, as ancient history, better off forgotten. The machine that perpetrated it is constantly on the prowl for new fodder and very effective at convincing people that  war is the answer to the fears they’ve ignited.  If you want to know who benefits from war, follow the money, and check back later for Part 2 of this post.  And while you’re online, search out peace and social justice candidates for all political offices.

Blessed are the peacemakers

Posted on by kathiemm

Lewis Randa, Rededication ceremony, Peace Abbey, July 29, 2018

By Kathie MM

They will be called children of God, by whatever name God is known.

Blessed are the peacemakers for confronting violence with nonviolence, for speaking truth to power, for persisting with limited resources against the forces of greed and destruction, for joining hands in sister and brotherhood when so many others spew hatred and harm, for being brave beacons of peace while cutthroat cowards promote war for profit,  for honoring and preserving life on earth while all around them lives are being destroyed with arrogant disregard.

This past Sunday, the Peace Abbey, in Sherborn, Massachusetts—one of the thousands if not millions of local peace and social justice organizations around the world–had a rededication ceremony at the Peace Memorial. In particular, they honored Muhammad Ali, Howard Zinn, Maya Angelou, Daniel Berrigan, Betsy Sawyer, Jeanette Rankin, Rachel Corrie, Corbett Bishop and Kenneth and Elise Boulding—courageous peacemakers, bless them all.

 

Please enjoy some photos from the event and the Abbey, and excerpts from the dedication poem by Stefan Schindler, a frequent contributor to engaging peace. If you would like a copy of the whole poem, please submit your request as a comment on this post.

 

 

 

A PRAYER POEM

by Stefan Schindler

I know that freedom is a slippery slope.

I know that children give us hope.

 

I know that rainbows bless the sky.

I know that Gandhi is the reason why

the bells of freedom ring

in the echoes of the voice of Martin Luther King.

 

And, yes, the saints and sages of the ages … will long sing praises

to the extraordinary story … of Rachel Corrie.

 

 

Hence we now recall that noble soul … whose goal was peace;

she gave her life so that war should cease.

 

Ah, Rachel, you died too young; just barely beyond

the age of 21; your life’s song … just barely sung.

 

Long indeed may your story be told; your bravery so bold.

You showed courage of conscience beyond measure.

Your life, and example, we shall always treasure.

Thus we promise to pause, every now and then,

to think of you … alongside Daniel … in the lions den.

With holy courage and conscience you took a stance,

and gave your life … to give peace a chance….

 

 

Green fields and forests the fruit of our toil;

nourished we are by earth’s rich soil.

 

With kindred spirit of animals and friends,

we trek the valleys and round the bends

of the river of time that never ends.

 

Yes, we too are pilgrims on Abbey Road.

Say, brother, let me carry that load.

 

 

United by Buddha’s Dharma-Gate tether, we frolic

in strawberry fields forever; with one who knows a love supreme,

the voice resounding: “I have a dream.”

 

Final note from KMM: if you want peace, value peace, hope and pray for peace for your children and granschildren, then work for peace and give to peace.  Please support local peace organizations like Engaging Peace and the Peace Abbey.  Volunteers and activists earn their way to Heaven, but donations help their work on earth.