I am a 50 year old woman who was born to a protestant family in Louisiana. I am an only surviving child. I had two sisters who died before I was born. Both of my parents are now deceased. I was a child of older parents. My mom was 38 when I was born. We basically have no personal experiences of the holocaust. I would not have know about it before I was probably 12 years of age. It was just not a topic that was ever discussed. World War II was discussed but in my parents circles since no one we knew lost any family in Germany or Europe in WWII I would have had no knowledge. Also, we did not even have a television set till I was almost 3 years old so I could not have been influenced by the media in any way shape or form. Here is my story.
I have had this recuring dream all of my life since I was able to remember anything. The only thing I remember earlier than this is I can remember people looking down at me and saying oh what a beautiful baby and I can actually remember looking up into peoples eyes as I am being handed from one person to another. I never really made the connection until just about 2 years ago when I started my job that I have now that deals with American History. The dream is short, but it reoccurs quite frequently.
I am about 9 or ten years old. I am living in a foreign country. I remember living in a room that had darkened windows. It was in a city, but our house was not on that crowded a street. I can remember that I could see somethings out of a whole like either a window or a wall. I had been there for a while. I remember that we had to be quiet. I remember that something had happened to my parents. I remember that in order for me to get to this room I had to go through a bathroom that was painted blue. I crawled under a sink. The sink had two legs on it like they were supports. The room was what I would call an Alice Blue kind of a bright pastel blue. I think there might have been a sink skirt around the sink. I can remember that there had been other people in that room. But at this point I am the only one left. I seem to think that a friend of the family was caring for me.
I know that my appearance was thin and that I was very olive in complexion and had quiet curly hair. I can remember one day my care taker told me that a nice gentleman would come and get me and that he was to take me to a play park. I think that everyone in the neighborhood must have been threatened with violence if there were any Jews hiding out. So I awaited this gentleman eagerly. I had not been out in quite a while. I was dressed in red shoes which now have become too snug as my feet had grown. I carried a purse that had been my mothers and I wore the coat that I had been given by my mom. In my purse or actually it may have been like a small suitcase kind of a hat box was a picture of my mother. I felt as long as I had that I would be safe. The gentleman came and got me. He held my hand as he put me in this big black car. He was a very nice gentleman. He was quite attractive I knew that I was going to have a good time. I think we drove for about 10 minutes. We came to a road that on the right hand side was the play park. It was behind a barbed wire fence. There were also posts with sirens there which happened to be going office as we went that direction. For some reason I was not afraid at all. I was just excited to be out of my dark room. Also, it was dark. I don't know why I thought not to be afraid, but I wasn't. We came up to this large gate that was made of metal. Now that I am older I realize that it was an Iron gate that had kind of an arch upwards in it. It was opened by two men in uniforms. On the otherside of the gate there were big smoke stacks. I remember going through the gate and that is all nothing more. I also remember at some point someone calling my name. I believe it was something like Helene or Helaine or Helena. Now here comes the rest of the story.
Back in 1987 I converted to Judaism. For some reason I had this huge drive to be Jewish. I don't know why. The harder I tried to pull away the harder I was pulled to it. Like I said I never equated it with my dream until about two years ago when I was telling someone about it. Now here is the real clincher. Also about a year and one half ago I started studying Wicca. I have been studying with a teacher a very wonderful woman who I have the utmost respect for. In these studies I asked her to give me a reading. This story is one she did not know as not even my own daughter knows nor my husband of 29 years. She basically did a reading on the energy from my hands. It is an old thing that is done in the south. I no longer live there as I live in a big city in the east. Anyway that is what she got from my energy was this story. I still can't believe it. She even told me about the man and the big black car and one part I had forgotten. He had really soft gloves on. She is not the only one who has picked up on that either. I have a coworker who also said that he could see it a mile off. I thought that I was the only person who had had such dreams without explanation but it appears that I am not.
In late 1978, I had an extremely vivid dream. I was not Jewish at the time and I had no knowledge of Hebrew. I had been attracted to Judaism from an early age and converted in May of 1980. In the dream, I was in another body and I was hiding from men in long gray coats. I hid behind a barrel that was beneath an arch with flowers painted on it. They found me and picked me up and threw me on a railroad car. I caught a glimpse of the lock on the railroad car and for some reason it stuck in my mind. The next thing I remember was pulling a wooden cart filled with what my mind interpreted as wood. I don't think it was wood however. I collapsed in the mud which was very black. Someone picked me up and threw me on a pile of bodies beside a red brick building. I woke up from the dream saying "SHEMA!"
I am a 24-year-old woman who grew up in the upper midwest without any particular religious instruction, and only minimal exposure to Judaism. My parents were lapsed Christians, and we celebrated the "Solstice" on December 25th. The first knowledge I had of the Shoah was through a PBS documentary my parents were watching one summer evening when i was seven. I had never been so scared in my life as I was at the sight of those photographs and that film footage, and I cried uncontrollably for hours, sitting huddled in my bed before it was even dark outside. I just had a feeling of such awful sadness-- it was like an outpouring of things that had been pent up for a long while. My parents explained to me some of the details of WWII and the fate of the victims of the Holocaust. From then on if I heard even a word about it I'd get an awful sinking feeling in my stomach and my heart would start to race. Around high school age my curiosity got the better of me, however, and I began to read both fictional and autobiographical accounts of this period. My nervousness about the subject never abated, however, and I often felt my skin crawling and had to fight back tears as I read. However, I was driven to learn all that I could.
I did not actively pursue any more to this end in the coming years, but when I was twenty-one and in college I began having the dreams. A t first there were slight variations on the same theme: I was a young woman, seeing things through my eyes rather than "seeing myself". The most memorable and complete of these: I was in a dank, cavernous and decidedly institutional maze of rooms. There were filthy toilets without stall doors, and communal showers. It was rather like in a high school or dormitory, except for the black scum on the floor and walls, and the peeling paint and sagging plaster. It was nearly dark, with one or two bare bulbs sometimed mounted to the wall in cages. I was hurrying through the showers and looking in all the toilet stalls, searching for another young woman who I felt very close to, who I sensed I had been friends with for a long time. All around naked women, most of them young and very pale and slender were shivering. At the end of one of the rows of toilets I stopped before an opening where there had been a door at one time, and looked out over a field of perfectly white, unbroken snow, with a few large buildings black in the distance. Then I woke up. I have had several versions of this "searching in the institutional bathroom" dream. These dreams were very disturbing to me, and felt significant somehow.
I also began having "house" dreams, which were mostly about hiding in different buildings. Some were empty and broken-down, and others were inhabited. the odd thing about these dreams was that I never dreamed about the main part of the house-- it was always the attic or basement. In one dream, i actually went up a slanted, twisting staircase to a tiny trapdoor I despaired of being able to fit through, at the same time knowing that I had to do it. At the top of the little staircase was a small window, and I looked out over green fields, feeling that I was not in the United States but not knowing exactly where I was. The house was very old, with timber framing. In the other most notable dream, which was very terrifying, (and the most recent of all my dreams) I was in a low, whitewashed stone building on a large estate. This time I had the definite feeling of being in France or Belgium, and I was with several other people at the outset, running into this building, which seemed to be some sort of cold-storage for foodstuffs. There were built in, shelf-like tables and sacks of root vegetables here and there, and also many empty baskets. We were definetly being persued, and I ran into the darkest part of the building and secreted myself behind some baskets beneath one of the tables. I could hear commotion outside and was scared to death, realizing that although I could not be readily seen, i was also in the deepest recesses of the building, with no escape route. I awoke at that point.
About a year after this began I had the dream I think of as "part two". I had just arrived home from visiting a sick friend for a few days, and had fallen asleep after the 8-hour train trip. In this dream, I saw myself, but I looked quite different. I was a woman in my late 30s, in the living room of a small Cape-Cod style house, in what I instinctively felt was Florida. It was neat and clean, but certainly not affluent. From the style of dress and furniture, it was obviously the 1950s or early 1960s. I was olive-complected, with wavy dark hair teased on top of my head, and black cat-eye glasses, and was wearing a plain blue dress. I was stocky and rather plain, just very average-looking. But in the dreamI was very upset, because I had just set out some objects on the sideboard--it was time for the evening meal-- I can't see them clearly, but I remember a ceramic bowl and two stout white candlesticks-- and my husband was very upset with some detail of the presentation. He was a heavyset man with coarse reddish hair, and glasses also, dressed in a brown suit as if he had just come home from an office job. He was at least ten or fifteen years my senior, and he was screaming at me about how I was good for nothing because I could not remember how to prepare this paricular meal and the objects on the sideboard. I had the feeling that I was not devout enough for him, and sensed that he and I had come from the same place in Europe after the war, but had not known each other until we reached the United States. I felt that I had had a lover when I was a young girl who I had lost during that time, and ahd married this man for reasons of security and was now desperately unhappy. At that point, my husband began to shove me around, and smack me. I remember falling onto the couch directly in front of the uncurtained picture window. I ran into the kitchen and grabbed a carving knife out of a drawer--Seething with anger, almost not caring what happened to me-- I turned to confront my (much larger) husband with it, and then awoke! My heart was pounding and I was dizzy. It was, and still is, the most "real" dream I've ever had. I woke up crying and calling out, greatly distressing my friend who was in the room with me.
It was at that time that I began to seriously consider that I might be having a reincarnation experience, although i'm still not sure what I think about that. My lover at this time --we have known one another for several years-- believes in reincarnation, and is from a Jewish background. At times I wonder if he fits into my past as well, because when I met him I felt an immediate sense of trust and intimacy , and although we only said a few words at our first meeting, I knew we would be figure in one another's lives from then on, and that has come to pass. He too believes that we have known each other for a long, long time.....It is fanciful perhaps but at times I wonder if he is the young man I felt that I lost during the war as my past self. I still experience symptoms of physical nervousness when\ discussing/thinkig intently about the Shoah, and the idea of doing something like visiting the site of a camp or even a Holocaust museum fills me with horror. I'm not sure I could handle that, for whatever reason. Maybe someday i will be able to.
I am a female age 45 -- I'm not Jewish, and I have NO interest in learning anything additional about the Holocaust (actually....I AVOID Holocaust information where possible). However, from my early childhood I can still recall a particular recurring dream that was ALWAYS a precursor to my being ill. �In this dream I was always standing behind a chain link fence, alone, yet aware of a group of adults on the other side of the fence. �The fence would begin humming and the links appear to pulse--swelling then reducing. �I would look closer and closer at the fence until the humming and the appearance of the throbbing links would result in my waking from the dream just in time to "toss my cookies". I was never aware of my gender in this dream; only that I was pretty young.
I grew out of this dream as I grew older. After learning about the Holocaust in school, I just assumed that this dream was probably a brief glimpse into a short lived experience of a past life.
I grew up in England and am Jewish. In the first house I lived in I used to think of dying and become so frightened of my own death that I used to go downstairs to my father and tell him I had a headache and ask for an asprin. In reality I needed to say "Dad I need a cuddle because I'm afraid that one day I'm going to die and that will be the end of me".
When we moved houses for the first time, I was seven. In this new house I became afraid to walk downstairs at night because I was scared that I was actually going into the gas chamber. I never spoke to anyone about this.
We moved to Australia when I was 10 and a half. At some point and for a number of years I had a recurring dream. It was in the house that we were living in. SS soldiers would come to the front door and bang on the door. I knew that I was discovered and that they were coming for me. I'd climb out of my bedroom window, jump over all the fences. They'd follow me in uniform and rifles. I would get to this one street and be running down the street and each time I'd get to the same spot in the street they would fire and shoot me in the back and suddenly I'd find myself flying. I haven't thought about this dream for a long time, but I think that although the spirit was me, the form was of someone else - as thought I was playing someone else in the play.
In the last twenty years I have come to believe in re-incarnation and often wondered if this dream was of how I died in a past life.
I left my Jewish community and became assimilated however recently have joined a Klezmer band. Singing Yiddish songs has re-opened a whole chapter of my life that I thought was closed. Learning unfamiliar songs, I realised that I could understand some of the Yiddish, and recognise words that I remembered from my childhood. My family migrated from Lithuania to England to escape the pogroms however growing up in England I identified with being English.
I took my husband and son to the Jewish Museum in the Maccabean Hall in Sydney. Through revisiting my past I re-identified with my Eastern European roots. It is an emotional time for me as I realise that I have a heritage that is much broader than I've ever realised before. Unfortunately my parents are both dead so I can't find out more.
I'm a young college student in PA, and I have no connection to the Shoah. I am, however, a religion major and beginning the long journey that is conversion to Judaism.
I've had a reoccuring dream throughout my life during times of stress. Itbegins with this concept of my hair. I'm a redhead, but I have this image
of thick curly black hair. The next thing I know, it's being shaved off of me, and I'm crying. Then, the next thing I know, I'm in this large room filled with people, mostly old and children, and we're all nude. Some are crying, others are whispering prayers that I have only lately come to understand. There's this sense of shame and anxiety hanging in the air, and some begin to claw for the door as a loud hissing noise fills the room. The door's steel and this horrible pea green colour with a security window, impossible to break and too high to reach, and our nails scrape at the door, but never manage to claw it open. I never find out what the hissing noise is, because someone crushes me in panic as she tries to get through the door.
There's never any real sense of understanding, and I think I'm too young to truly wrap my mind around the events, save that I've lost my hair, and this seems very, very important for some reason. In reflection, I cannot help but think that this is the shower/gas chamber well documented in various concentration camps. What it means, I don't know, but it only comes when I am very afraid or very worried.
My dream group recently spent a lot of time trying to analyze the reasons that I have what I call "concentration camp" dreams. I have had them for about as long as I can remember. I had them before I had read actual experiences or done historical research on the subject.
I often dream about running or trying to escape from a muddy camp with barbed wire. I have dreamed about trying to hide with others in a large dark pipe, about trying to keep others (strangers) safe.
Obviously the Holocaust can be a strong metaphor for life experiences not directly related to the historical event itself. I, however do not have any extreme childhood experiences or abuse that would fit this
scenario. I am not Jewish, although there might be a Jewish branch of
the family several generations back. My first memories about the subject come from early childhood before I knew anyone who had survived or had
read any literature. Back to Top
Dream 40
I am a survivor and I have nightmares every night, they will be with me probably as long as I live.
I see fires burning, people running and me flying above the ground, I don't know what that means. It is repeating again and again I wake up in sweat very scared.
I have some friends survivors they said they have scary nightmares too. My grown up children have nightmares to, even the grandchildren are affected. Back to Top
Dream 41
My obsession with the Holocaust began when I was 11 years old and watched The Story of Anne Frank in an RE lesson. I felt as if this had happened to me personally and it began a thirst to research the subject, which I have done now for the past 16 years. I do not have any connection with anyone from the Holocast and am not Jewish. I have a real need to tell people about the Holocaust and I get angry and upset when I read articles about the subject which are historically untrue. I have never understood why my interest in this subject is so strong, or why I feel that I am personally responsible for making sure that people I come into contact with know the truth about this dreadful period of time. In acual fact, I am now in the Army as a Military Policewoman and a big part of the reason I chose this proffession was because I could not bear to think that if it happened again, I would not be able to do something to help.
I have had a number of very vivid dreams about the Holocaust over the years. The main one was of me stood in a train station. I can recall that I was wearing a brown jacket and skirt. My hair was shoulder length and I had 2 combs in the sides. I wore stockings and brown shoes. I was a young woman of about 20 years of age. I was panicking running up and down the platform, where a train of boxcars was about to pull out. I was worried because I knew I shouldn't be there and could be in grave danger. I could actually feel the tears welling up, making my throat sore. Then, the doors of one of the carriages was opened. It was full with clothes. I began pulling at them frantically. Once the car was nearly empty, I pulled away some more clothes and there sat a little boy with blond hair in a shirt and trousers. His arms were stretched out to me and he looked scared, but smiled when he saw me, his mother. I grabbed him and began to cry. I hugged him tight and can remember how his hair felt silky. The relief I felt was overwhelming. I can remember thinking that I might never have seen him again. I then woke up. But the real sense of relief when I found this child did not leave me for days, it was so real. In fact, I found it difficult to concentrate at work for a couple of days because the dream disturbed me so.
Often, smells and sounds of music disturb me for no apparent reason. I cannot smell burning hair without thinking of the Holocaust.
My main interest is with the Polish Jews. Often when I read books and see pictures of Poland, the names of towns and roads and faces do not look unfamiliar to me, even though I have never been there.
Lately, I have become acutely aware of my sprirtal surroundings and I know that I lived this time before. I do not know for sure whether I was persecuted or if I was a perpertator in these evil times, but I do know, that for some reason, somewhere out there, someone wants to remind me of my time in this era, and I have a lesson to learn from it. Back to Top
Dream 42
I was born in 1956 in the midwest. My mother was in Plaszow and Auschwitz and my grandmother and my mother both survived which is quite rare for those in Occupied Poland and not in hiding for the entire period of the war. Also, my grandmother was 42 at the time of liberation which is on the old side to have made it through.
When I was three or four, staying at my grandmother's apartment and sleeping on a hideaway bed, I had a dream that my uncle (who I had been told only was "killed in the war,") fell dead into a pit. I dreamt he was an adolescent boy who sort of slumped over with bent knees and fell into a hole. Although I was not with him in the dream I had a sort of outsider's view from the base of the pit so it was like I saw him fall on top of me although I "knew" in the dream I was not actually there.
As I said, at the time I had no idea of the specifics of how my uncle died in the war. Then when I was 7 or 8 my grandmother told me that her son, my uncle, was shot for violating curfew.
So I assumed he was shot on the street.
But it turns out my grandmother "sweetened" the story for me as a child because years later, when I was in my thirties, my mom and I were stopped at a red light and I happened to mention the curfew story. She suddenly choked back tears (a rarity in itself), and said "what curfew? He was forced to dig his own grave with others when the Plaszow men's camp was being cleared out and he was shot."
So he was shot and fell into a pit, just like I dreamt when I was 3 or 4. Odd, I thought.
THE SHOAH DREAM PROJECT
