HelplessDancer - Oda

[HelplessDancer]

For what seemed like a very long time, I had nightly nightmares, the exact same nightmare each night, in 1983 (I was three years old and not only are those nightmares among my earliest real memories, I can remember them as clearly as if they happened yesterday despite being over twenty years ago now).

One part of the nightmare was desperately trying to get out of a burning building, which I feel was a school. The other more terrifying part of the dream I much later realised was a concentration-camp.

Years go by, it's late December 1994, I've just turned fifteen, and I start having eerily familiar dreams, of this old school I've often dreamt of, combined with xenoglossy. I can only read a bit of German when I'm awake (and back then I could understand even less German than I do now), yet I understood and spoke German perfectly in the dreams. Over time I've grown to not even be aware that I'm dreaming in another language when I have the dreams, so used to it am I.

At the time I began to have the dreams again, I instinctively knew they were past life dreams, and connected them to the nightmares I remembered so well. I learnt a relaxation/meditation technique which ennabled me to learn the names of some of the most important people in that lifetime, and because of one of the many dreams and nightmares I had then, I recognised my dearest oldest friend as my older sister in that lifetime.

Because of these dreams, I was able to convert to my original religion at eighteen years old, though my lifelong pyrophobia is still there. After all, in that lifetime I nearly died during Krystallnacht and then had to stand by as my 13 year old friend Mikhaila was burnt alive when we were in the camp together.

I've never determined it for sure, but I believe my name in that incarnation was Oda von Estermenn. (I know the last name from my past life meditation exercise, but not the first name; I just gravitated towards it the moment I first saw the name Oda in another book.)

I believe she died in 1953; though she survived, her heart and soul were dead in a way after she'd lost her older sister, her younger friend Mikhaila, and her best friend Lorelei, who died in 1947 also of a broken spirit. However, since then, since I've resolved and come to terms with the nightmare of before, I haven't had as many dreams of Oda's lifetime as I had when I was younger.

I'd really like to dream of her more, to get to find out things she never showed me, like her earliest childhood and more of her years after the war, like a free membership expired and I want all of the benefits. I know I vindicated her for what she went through, but I also miss her.

 

[HelplessDancer]

How we lost Mikhaila

I know I was not in a Russian concentration-camps because Oda was German and in a Nazi concentration-camp. However, she was friends with a Russian boy named Igor (whom I recognised in my past life dreams as my first love, Ivan, even though Oda married their friend Mark and never had feelings for Igor), who came to Germany with his family from Russia in 1933 to escape Stalin.

When they were finally captured by the Nazis after years of hiding in various places, of course they were separated by sex when they got to the camp; Igor was counting on her to take care of his little sister Mikhaila, who was barely thirteen at the time, but lied she was sixteen to get to live.

Everyone was warning Mikhaila to stop acting like she were free to do her own thing instead of a prisoner at the Nazis' beck and call, but she continued to act up. They sent a desperate wooden "postcard" with a message carved in it to the mens' side of camp, telling them to deliver it to Igor, saying this Nazi was threatening Mikhaila for what she was doing, and he came running over as she was being burnt alive, as everyone had to stand and watch how she was being punishing for acting like a normal mischevous thirteen year old girl.

Igor and Oda never really got over this, even though Igor knew it wasn't her fault; shortly after the liberation and returning to Germany with their friends, Igor decided to go back to Russia.

He probably disappeared into the camps like so many other Russians who came back, which is why I reacted so strongly when I discovered GULAG at the age of sixteen. Words can't describe how horrified, numb, sickened, angry, shocked, I was as I was reading the book The First Circle and finding out about this barbaric system for the first time.

 

[HelplessDancer]

Hiding under a bed

For some reason I began thinking of this recently. When I was younger, I was always upset that I could never crawl under my bed and hide there, or under any of the beds I slept in in other places. The few times I got to be in a bed I could crawl under, I was really happy. Then I remembered, when I was writing what I believed happened to Oda in the camp, in the fall of 1995, there was something there about hiding under a bunk. I don't know if this really happened or it was just something my mind made up, but in the final days before the Nazis fled the camp, afraid of the Russians, Oda and her friends were desperate not to be marched out. I'd had several dreams about them being marched out, then repeatedly turned around; either they just wanted to torture us or else every time they were about to leave the coast wasn't clear for whatever reason.

There were barely any women and girls left in the Barracks which Oda was assigned to by that time; her friend Lorelei was behind the fence from her, having been seized the moment the doors of the train opened and smuggled over to a special section of camp, where she was raped and forced to work as a prostitute.

Lorelei was very beautiful, and the Nazis zeroed in on this beautiful young girl and grabbed her by the hair, smuggling her over in a burlap sack. They had to have her. Oda later found her other best friend, Ilse, working in the kitchen, though Ilse was in another Barracks.

People in the know were warning the ones still left in Oda's Barracks to get out of there, sending her Catholic friend Dorchen off to the kitchen, her friend Bettchen (who was very trusted by the Nazis) to her special section, and three Hungarian sisters off to the section of camp they sometimes worked at. Their friend Erma, who was very emaciated but still alive, managed to hide on one of the many stacks of corpses; who would know the difference? Then someone smuggled the youngest of the Hungarian sisters off to another section of camp, since she was very young.

The only ones left who weren't on their last legs were Oda and the fourth of the five Hungarian sisters, a young girl named Marisa (or Mariska?), about fifteen years old, very pretty, just got out of the excuse of a hospital, the fuzz of hair poking out of her shaven head a lovely shade of orange.

Perhaps Oda and Marisa hid under one of the Pritschen (the excuse of bunk beds they slept on), holding one another very tightly, as the Nazis stormed in and shot all of the remaining women in there, not even bothering to check for pulses on the masses of bodies or to look under the Pritschen. I do remember something in at least one dream about hiding under the bed to be safe.