Friday, January 18, 2019

Halfway into January 2019

So we're like more than halfway into this first month of 2019. How has it been going for you? Will it surprise you that it's going badly for me? I have so much frustration, anger, and (I'm going to admit this) hatred. Okay maybe dislike, but the dislike is not dissipating that I may as well be honest and say it's hatred. Annoying people stay annoying, maybe their new year's resolution is to put down other people more. Then something that I was hoping for didn't happen. In fact things are going much worse than last year. I just read my January 2018 post and damn the first paragraph last year was bad and this year is even worse. There's numbers to prove it. So really, there's evidence my life is not going well.

I'm starting 2019 shaken and again broken and there are days where I am in a state of disbelief. WHAT THE FUCK?!?! Sometime I'm still quite in a daze about the shittiness that happens. I talked to mom about how I cannot let it go. The slightest thought about it would just get my blood boiling, like right now when I'm writing these lines. Really I have nothing positive to say. Though I know if you put it into perspective, my life is great and as I say often, some people perhaps may want my life. The thing is, while I see the perspective and despite of advices from mom, I'm just spiraling down and down into the darkness. Mom is saying that perhaps these are trying times, that I shouldn't hold on to anger, that I should let it go, but damn I'm just so pissed off. It makes me realized that purging hatred away from you is perhaps the hardest thing emotion wise that a person can do. I'm not doing good in that as you can read.

On a mundane note, finished reading book 0, The Tattooist of Auschwitz by Heather Morris. It tells the real life story of a Slovakian Jew who ended up as the tattooist of Auschwitz. I was reading that book as I'm getting further down in my dark hole and I can see how far blessed and wonderful my life is compared to the people who ended up in that concentration camp and yet I couldn't find my way to gratitude and happiness. I am a bad person. Anyways, I learnt new things reading the book. I have heard of Auschwitz before reading the book, but I have never heard of Birkenau which is part of the greater Auschwitz compound. Lale, the tattooist of Auschwitz in the book, often had to walk between the compounds and it was quite a distance. I didn't know that the Nazi also imprisoned non-Jews like the gypsy or Romani people. In the book Lale talked about a whole block of gypsy that shared his block were all killed in the crematorium - men, women, children. There will always be things that make no sense in the Nazi history. It's hard to believe that all the Nazi SS in the camp were on board with what's going on. Surely there's one or two who saw that all that is beyond wrong. Were they promptly killed too? Or I just haven't read or heard their story. Another thing that was strange to me in the whole scheme of things were how detailed the Nazi kept record of the people who came into the camp. So much effort. Names and dates of birth were typed in. What was the purpose I wonder. Though they didn't treat the prisoners humanely, on some level they did think these people matter enough to be recorded? It's strange. One big thing that I learnt that I didn't know before was that it's the Russian who liberated the camp. My holocaust knowledge is truly limited. I blame it on the fact that in schools we don't learn a lot about it here in Asia, Indonesia especially. Somehow because of the many war movies coming from America who put them as the heroes, I always thought it's the American. So it was the Russian and it seems they contributed a lot in fighting the Nazi. That's Russia in the right side of history.

The book has so much suffering in them, obviously that being the holocaust and all. The main character, Lale, survived and ended up with the love of his life who he tattooed at the camp. It felt like a miracle that they survived and were reunited after the difficulties that they still had to endure when they managed to leave the camps separately. So that's a happy ending for them and yet there are so many other people in the book that I wish I could learn more about their fates. There are definitely so many stories in Auschwitz - Birkenau. Each of the people there had a story, but sadly for so many of them we will never know what happened. Now the book that I am starting is The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton. It's a thick one and the chapters don't seem to have a lot of sections or separators, kinda make it hard to pause. Anyways as always, I wish you glorious days.

:) eKa @ 10:30:00 PM •