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142 Sonja Pos to avoid depression and sleeplessness. It is so easy to traumatize a person in a short time. But a hundred years of understanding and comforting are not enough to undo it. At best, the pain can be dimmed. I was, and remain, a witness to their suffering, and I have tried to understand over the years the full meaning of what was said to me time and time again: that I was so lucky not to have been in a camp. Indeed I was. As a student of the French language and of literature at the University of Amsterdam in the ’60s, I started reading the first publications about the Holocaust that I encountered. I was unable to answer my perennial questions: why was it that my kind grandfather, aged 72, my intelligent aunt Judith, aged 36 (who could never realize her dream to go to the university and study psychology), and my bright and lovely blond-haired cousin Ronnie, six years old, my first love, had to be killed like vermin, like rats? I will never forget the moment when I read, in Le bouc émissaire, René’s analysis of Le Jugement du Roy de Navarre. Since the Jews who were murdered could not have caused the plague, he understood that the famous medieval poet Guillaume de Machaut, a child of his time, had succumbed to the illusions of the murderers. In a flash, I understood the projection of evil onto the Jews who became scapegoats. Why had no one before Girard understood the complexity of the madness that made murderers of the plague-stricken inhabitants of the town of Troyes? The Germans had likewise been unable to perceive that the kind, sad old man who was my grandfather had harmed no one. He had struggled for long years to accept the death of his beloved wife Sara, and, from the age of 44, had raised his five young children on his own. Neither had the Germans been able to see that my aunt Judith, whom they had thrown into a cattle car, in the dark, deafened by the sound of the rattling wheels on the way to Auschwitz, had tried to overcome her despair and had scribbled with a pencil on a piece of paper: “To all my loved ones. They threw me in here. I do not know what will happen to me. Be brave, Judith.” A farmer had found her note in his meadow and brought it to the minister in his village, who then secretly brought it to my mother, way back in the spring of 1943. At our dining table, they whispered about the little piece of crumpled paper with the last precious message of Judith. More than forty years later, I was able to write a poem about her life and her last message that contained no words of hate. Faithful to Judith’s wish, we have been brave. Years passed. News of the publication of the latest book written by René became for me a regularly repeated joy. I could visit the yearly COV&R conferences, where I met so many bright and enthusiastic men and women. Some became friends. I had the honor of meeting René Girard himself and The Way to More Insight and Freedom 143 speaking with him. I was very pleased when I was invited to become a member of the René Girard Studiekring linked to the Blaise Pascal Institute of the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam. We come together four times a year to report on our personal work based on the application of the insights of René Girard. Meanwhile, I had been able to find words for the experience of the little girl I had been, surrounded as I was by the victims of war, victims who, without understanding what they did, had traumatized me. Without perceiving clearly what had happened to me, I had struggled for years to escape their world. Slowly, I became able to write down the essence of what my grandfather, aunt, and cousin and the world that had vanished in 1942 had meant to me. I could describe the distorted world of the survivors. I published this book, Daglicht (Daylight), in 1993.1 I also described the scene with the German soldier, but, to my astonishment, no one reacted especially to that page. After reading and rereading René’s first books, soon followed by other publications of his as they became available, I could find words for my situation : I, the...

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