I was sixteen and trying to establish my independence from my family which brought a lot of conflict with my father who was a WWII veteran. He committed suicide the first weekend that I spent away from home. The event bifurcated my life between before and after. I don't think I would have survived had it not been for my family, and even with that, I've had a tremendous amount of anxiety and guilt. When, many years later, I saw the opening scene of Saving Private Ryan, when the old Ryan falls to his knees in the cemetery and begs his wife to assure him that he is a good man, I saw my father and myself. I've felt for a long time that all of us in the Baby Boom generation were raised by Holocaust survivors of one degree or another and that the trauma of that war and all the wars and cruelty of our history are reverberating through our world today. Life has been challenging but I felt called to be a special education teacher and I worked at it for forty years. I learned that what I went through was negligible compared to that many if not most of most of my students experienced.
On May 17, 2023 Mack wrote: