When I first came to France, in 2007, I did not have any clou about veteran day.
Seriously.
As Italian girl I have been raised near Rimini, by the Adria Coast. My history books were censored, I realize now. Our programs rarely treated WWI and WWII as we should have do (instead we knew Hannibal and elephants roaming the Trasimeno Lake on Marche region by heart!!!). Real photographs were maybe too horrific and scary for children or teenagers. I just wonder. I would have been shocked for sure if I saw a “hand” in the mud on a Verdun field.
I have personally caught up with the past two wars with books from Primo Levi, who survived Dachau concentration camp to tell his stories of survivor in his books: Se questo é un uomo and La Tregua.
My history teacher was a great mentor. He wanted me to learn anything about Holocaust Survivors. He suggested me Primo Levi as lecture (Turin, 1919 – 1987). I was 8 old when I had already Ann Frank on my drawer near my bed.
My grandfather was reading all military books about the leaders’s greatest war mistakes in the other apartment, and daddy cheered me up with his drill’s stories. Daddies like to bragg their military stories to your girls, don’t you?
Do they listen? I did. Every inch of it.
“Forty years after surviving Dachau and Buchenwald, he committed suicide in a way that seemed so mundane and senseless that people still argue that it must have been an accident.He woke up, went about his regular morning routine, picked up his mail, and then leapt to his death in the stairwell of his apartment building. It is not that he committed suicide that is so striking, but when.
That Levi had survived for so long makes the act seem inexplicable. Why forty years later and not sooner? Why after forty years of successful survival, of struggling to heal, was suicide appealing? How does Levi’s suicide reflect back onto his life? Does it mean that he did not really heal from his trauma?”
https://medium.com/@emze/the-weight-of-things-2ed55f0984af
#primolevi #vetereanday #restrictions #holocaustsurvivor #suicideawarenessindepression
My question is did he take any treatment for depression? Which chemicals for a chemist?
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