Time Traveling

I am heading off on a research trip to Poland and Germany in a few days, so there will be no post for the next two weeks. This is why…

Peter and I on the Eurostar back in the art school days.

This is a true story. Some names and details have been changed to protect individual’s privacy.

I’m not sure if I awakened the spirits when I planned a trip to Warsaw and Berlin with my best friend from art school, Peter, or if they’d been hanging around waiting for me to notice them. The night we booked hotel rooms I fell into a deep sleep only to hear a voice telling me it’s important that you are going on this trip with Peter because you are the granddaughter of a Polish Jew and he is the grandson of a Nazi S.S. Officer.

The rest of the dream (vision?) are foggy. I heard the words atonement and healing and something about it being important that we would be traveling by train from Warsaw to Berlin. I woke up in a cold sweat and a detail of Peter’s ancestry I’d long since buried came to me in a flash of remembrance.

I met Peter at School of Visual Arts in New York when I was 17, and we became fast friends. He is the only professional photographer I’ve ever allowed to shoot nudes of me. I trust him completely. Except for one time early in our friendship when he used a photo of me in a burlesque costume as a flyer for a nightclub without telling me, we’ve never had a fight. It must have been in the first year of knowing him that he told me his father had been a Hitler youth. Peter was raised in Austria, and his German father was of age during the war when the Nazis made membership in Hitler Youth mandatory for all "Aryan" boys between the ages of 14 and 18, so that they could be indoctrinated into Nazi ideology and prepare them for a racially pure state.

I remember being shocked and ashamed when Peter told me, not knowing what to do with the information. I buried it deep in the recesses of my subconscious, only to have it emerge almost 30 years later in a dream.

After the voice came, I laid in bed for hours with a pounding headache thinking about Poland and Germany, places I’d never been, and wondered why now, in my late 40s, it felt like I had no choice but to go.

When I got out of bed and looked at the news feed on my phone, I saw it was International Holocaust Remembrance Day, January 27th, 2025. I’d never made notice of the occasion before. I scanned the international headlines, full of images of the holocaust competing for column space with photos of Elon Musk making a speech at the campaign launch for Germany’s far right political party, “Alternative for Germany (AfD)” two days prior.

Unable to shake my headache, I rode my bike bleary eyed to get fresh spring water and cleanse myself in a cold waterfall in my neighborhood. I ran into a casual acquaintance there who said I looked tired. I’m not sure what possessed me to tell her why my under eyes were particularly dark that morning, but I said yes, spirits were talking to me all night, I barely slept. She accepted this as normal, as we live in Hawaii where spirits are close to the surface, and replied, what did they say? I found myself telling her about the trip with Peter and his ancestry. How he was part of my chosen family, yet I was conflicted by this part of his lineage. She looked at me for a long while, as though internally debating something. After a long pause, she shared that her great grandfather had been a Nazi soldier and her great grandmother, an Auschwitz survivor. They met in New York after the war, having both emigrated through Ellis Island. Both were divorced with no children. We looked at each other and had chills, or as one says in Hawaii, “chicken skin.”

What followed was a long conversation about how we can carry good and evil in the same bloodline, that humanity and America itself, contain the duality of light and darkness. That now, almost 100 years later, we are repeating history, as fascism rears its’ ugly face just as it did in the time of Hitler.

The very next day, Jan 28th, I found out something I never knew about my own lineage. I discovered this not through the sharing of stories within my family, but via an email from the Żydowski Instytut Historyczny in Warsaw, who I had been emailing with to track down addresses where my grandfather and great grandparents may have last lived.

I was not prepared for what was waiting in my inbox.

According to Żydowski Instytut Historyczny, I had an ancestor who died in the holocaust. My great aunt Mania, my grandfather’s sister, had been gassed to death at Treblinka concentration camp just outside Warsaw, along with her husband Abraham. Attached to the email was their death record, the date of which was listed as sometime in 1942.

I was left gasping for breath, my body covered in chicken skin and in total shock that this had been kept from me by my father. Could it have been kept from him by his parents? He would have been 15 when Mania, his aunt who he’d never met, was murdered. I know my grandmother Frances so feared the Nazi’s coming to America during WWW2, that she concocted a plan to fake my father’s death and bring him to Mexico to start a new life under a new name. But sometime along the way, especially as my father grew into a man and started his own family, he must have uncovered this piece of our history. Did any of my older siblings know?

The 24 hours I’ve outlined above is just the tip of the iceberg of esoterica, strange dreams, unexplained phenomena, ancestral and historical revelations I’ve been experiencing in the last 6 months. The portal to the past is wide open. As I sit here in London writing this to you, my under eyes are once again dark, my cheeks wet with tears, watching military force used to quell democratic protests in my hometown of Los Angeles, where ICE is conducting raids on the immigrant communities that *actually* make America great.

I am not sure how this is all connected to what was bubbling 100 years ago in Eastern Europe, or exactly what guidance I am looking for from my ancestors as to how to be a human and artist in resistance during these times of authoritarian rule, but I am actively following the signs.

While I will not reveal details here of what Peter and I are doing on our spiritual pilgrimage to the lands where our ancestors came from, I will share that our first stop, upon landing in Warsaw, is to bring white roses to Treblinka to lay down in honor of Mania and Abraham.

I don’t know yet if what I am researching is a new book, a documentary or purely an important part of healing intergenerational trauma for both my and Peter’s ancestral line. I would never have predicted that delving into esoterica and fascism would be the course my life would be taking at this particular point, but I can do nothing but surrender to where I am being led.

I made this post free for now, but I do hope you will consider becoming a paid subscriber as what I share here are pieces of my heart.

xLiz

Ps. How cool is the cover of the Polish edition of my last book, Sex, Health & Consciousness? Shout out to my Polish publisher, Wydawnictwo Kobiece, who I hope will forgive my total lack of the language when we meet in person (finally!) next week. I look forward to being educated.