Do we meet our destiny or does destiny meet us?

Do we meet our destiny or does destiny meet us?

30 years back when I first migrated to Australia, looking into the clear waters of the peaceful lake near my house, I thought about the past.

 

Some of my family members were  Nazi sympathisers and some Holocaust survivors who fled the land of their birth in 1968, at the time of the uprising against the Russians. Our family was split in half from the start, divide by politics and hate.

 

The survivors came to Australia long before me, passing away before I had a chance to meet them. Back in our shared homeland I knocked on the door of their childhood house in an attempt to come to grips with their personalities, the enigma of their suffering and the poignancy of their passing. The books and mementos left behind hold a sense of devoted love and the separateness that human identity involves.

 

I travelled far to find the house that they last occupied in Australia. The urgency of my quest was to understand and, through understanding, re-create their lives.

 

Some of my family members, some deceased and some alive, are in Austria, Hungary and Slovakia. They watched Nazi crimes happen or perhaps, looked away. So there's a concept of collective guilt. I've looked through those same windows where they saw Jews rounded up. I certainly felt the sense of my grandparents' silent suffering of shame. But I couldn't love them less because of that.

 

“Hitler gave us our first Slovak Republic,” my grandfather used to mutter in his old age: “All we wanted is to have our own state, to be independent.”

 

I visited the remains of the church where my grandmother's sister was burnt alive. I walked through the forest where they hid and nearly starved. I climbed up to the Jewish Memorial, asking myself: "Does this then, make it easier to understand why they didn't help?"

I found my grandmother kneeling in church, lost in prayer. I sat next to her, knowing that it wasn't up to me to point the finger of blame.

 

I left the city of my childhood aching with sadness and love. I've done my own excavations of historical and personal holocausts. I was away when my grandmother died. I received a last message from her: "I didn't choose that life. I just wanted to survive." It meant laying the ghosts of the holocaust to rest, in an attempt to normalise my grandparents' guilt and shame of the past.

 

When I think about my deceased family, I feel strong tugs of love and death. Meanwhile, I'm on my own, left to live a comfortable life, and to ponder: "What would I have done in their place?"

 

The truth is, indeed, so fragile and yet so devastatingly lethal, just like life itself. But far more frightening is the notion of dying with a heart filled with regret and shame. My family members had no choice but I have. I can't change where I come from but I can change who I become.

 

Looking into the clear waters of the peaceful lake near my house, I begin to think about the future.

 

Today I look into the algae polluted  waters of the nearly empty lake near my house and I am scared to think what future brings.

 

The world is divided as once my family was and the war is taken place again on Eastern European front.

 

Here in Australia where I live people fight over the right to give the Indigenous people voice or leave them be voiceless which suit mainstream Australia better. The verbal abuse against our Indigenous people is out of proportion and racism is on the rise again.

 

Putin and his Russian Mafia managed to infiltrate Hungarian and now  Slovakian governments too,  which will now do his bidding to support his war against Ukraine.

 

My family in Slovakia is more divided than ever before, my own mother and godparents cheer up to Russians who once invaded our houses with tanks and took our freedom away.

 

“Fico with Russian backing will give us our independence back,” my godfather muttered when I visited his rundown village house this year: “We do not want to be puppets of America, Russians are our Slav brothers.”

 

I stood up and left. He told me I do not understand, I live too far away for too long. He is right, I'm on my own, left to live a comfortable life, and to ponder: "What would I have done in his place?"

 

The truth is, indeed, so fragile and yet so devastatingly lethal, just like life itself.

 

Russians took my father away when I was three years old, they made my grandmother to lose her mind when secret police was checking on us, because we had a dissident in family, they nearly took my life when I was forced to move to Russia as twenty years old and I live with health consequences as well as my children do to this day. Would I ever give a vote to Russian backed political party in my country?

 

There is no point for me to go back home to search for the answers in the past as there are none. All I can do is to live the best I can here in democratic beautiful land of Australia and use my voice to keep that democracy in place and fight for the voiceless to give them voice because our Indigenous people truly deserve it too…

 

 

 

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