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Is there more?

You are here: Home / Trauma-Healing / Is there more?

August 15, 2017 By Janneke

Always afraid, always needed to talk, but didn’t.

The recoil from pain is instinctual. For a long, long time survivors do not wish to talk about the past.

The need to be heard, is why I can still find so many stories of World War II survivors who share, who still need to share. Sharing is therapy. Sharing is walking through times of deep loneliness, and knowing that talking creates an as-if. It is an as-if your friend’s love was there all along. And if a friend can love so much, the possibility that maybe God was there after all too.

In my family my mother recalls my father’s nightmares early in their marriage.In the terror of nightmares, again he would be starving, trapped, imprisoned, performing slave labor over useless rows of growing food that never went to the civilian prisoners.

In my family my mother remembers my father happy in the early ears of their marriage. Yet every supper for a long time he had to ask, “Is there more?”

Eventually, he didn’t need to ask as much. Yet my sister and I remember the question, so it never totally left.

Is there more? Is-there-more lingered.

Now POW’s and civilian survivors of the Japanese concentration camps of World War II, still provide for each others’ Istheremore. This Istheremore is the one of words.  Is there more to say? Yes.

I think my father perhaps gave himself only one opportunity to say, “There-is-more, (to say)” and that is when he was experienced severe PTSD, during my teen years. It turned out the others with PTSD were Vietnam vets, and they wanted to say their own Istheremores. I hope that he and the Viet Nam veterans did tell each other more.

When were  you always afraid? How is it when you talk of fear? Do you have enough in your life today? Is there more now? Is there more to tell? Tell me.


 

 

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Filed Under: Trauma-Healing, War's Family Tagged With: Anniversary End of WWII, Dutch East Indies, Dutch-American, faith meaning and World War II, Japan Surrenders, Japanese Concentration Camps, Jappen Kampen, Psychological trauma, PTSD recovery, World War II

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Meet Janneke

Janneke Jobsis Brown
Following Shadows is inspired by my own story. As a survivor of an international childhood with parents who were World War II survivors, I know the generational after-effects of starvation and slave labor in Japanese concentration camps for my father, and the terror of Nazi occupation for my mother. I know the challenges of struggling to feel at home across three countries: The Netherlands, Iran and America.

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