Ann Diamond on Memory and Forgetting

 

Ann Diamond: Well, most of our lives prob­a­bly dis­ap­pear from our mem­o­ries, although some peo­ple remem­ber much more than oth­ers. I have met peo­ple who say they have total video­graphic recall of every­thing that ever hap­pened to them, and they can access these mem­o­ries at will. That’s pretty unusual and it can be more of a plague than a bless­ing, to remem­ber every­thing. Forgetting is prob­a­bly a pro­tec­tive mech­a­nism that allows us to imag­ine a future, instead of drown­ing in the past.

 

I have a twin brother who remem­bers our child­hood in much more detail than I do. Twins grow up closer together than sib­lings whose births are fur­ther apart. Twins start school at the same time, for instance, and tend to be at the same stage devel­op­men­tally, so it makes sense that they would remem­ber the same events in sim­i­lar ways. My brother and I do share cer­tain mem­o­ries. A few years ago when I started recon­struct­ing my child­hood, as opposed to “our” child­hood as “we” remem­bered it, to my sur­prise, it seemed there were gaps, peri­ods when I was “gone” – it was as if I hadn’t wit­nessed cer­tain events or expe­ri­enced the same con­ti­nu­ity of fam­ily life that he recalls. So, I started to ask, where was I? That became the ques­tion. I wasn’t expect­ing any­thing like the answers that I started finding.

 

So, to answer your ques­tion: I can’t really see why we would have to “repress” happy mem­o­ries. Some happy mem­o­ries sim­ply evap­o­rate, or get replaced by other happy mem­o­ries. Traumatic mem­o­ries, on the other hand, can hang around and haunt us, or we can dwell on them too much. But when there’s noth­ing where oth­ers remem­ber some­thing — a blank space, where you can’t really say any­thing about a period of your life – that sug­gests some­thing hap­pened that your con­scious mind has decided not to rec­og­nize, for any num­ber of reasons.

 

RM: How do you find out what hap­pened in those mem­ory gaps? And as you find things out, does that make you feel less “artificial”?

AD: I don’t know how other peo­ple inves­ti­gate mem­ory. Psychotherapy would be one way that seems to work. Or hyp­no­sis. I only tried that once in 1998 and it took me back to ancient Egypt and then to a past life in 1942 in occu­pied Poland. Far, far away from the world I was born into, which was Canadian through and through. It was incred­i­bly vivid, just like being thrown back to wartime. It’s what I imag­ine peo­ple mean by “video­graphic” mem­ory – except I wasn’t just watch­ing the video, I was inside it. And I died at the end. That was quite some­thing, too, because after death I flew down a long tun­nel that was like a long windy worm­hole all the way to Canada and the par­ents I had in this life­time. And they were dressed exactly as they would have been in 1950, when my mother got preg­nant. Some peo­ple find that kind of story “flaky” even though hav­ing an expe­ri­ence like that can really be life-changing. What this strange and intense expe­ri­ence sug­gested to me was that my birth, and my child­hood, were closely linked to the Second World War in Europe – even though I was born in Canada and never went to Europe until my late twenties.

 

In 2002, I was liv­ing in Vancouver and hap­pened to read a novel: The Good German, about Nazi sci­en­tists hid­ing in Berlin who were being recruited by the OSS – the pre­cur­sor of the CIA – just after the Second World War. It wasn’t a great book, but I became obsessed for a while with “Operation Paperclip” – the secret pro­gram that brought Nazi sci­en­tists to America after the war. And I began won­dered if some of the sci­en­tists might have been med­ical peo­ple.  Earlier that same year I had been to Auschwitz as a tourist, and I had seen Doctor Mengele’s clinic, which stands next to the Wall of Death where the Gestapo used to exe­cute resis­tance peo­ple and so on.

 

I started fol­low­ing Mengele’s tracks and as syn­chronic­ity would have it, he started to show up mag­i­cally, every­where, like the White Rabbit – except more mon­strous. I met a kid on the inter­net who claimed to be Mengele’s rein­car­na­tion, and for a month he bom­barded me with emails. An old friend  sud­denly turned up mirac­u­lously after twenty-five years and invited me out to a movie that turned out to be about Dr. Mengele’s assis­tant. And so on.

 

I was moti­vated by his­tor­i­cal curios­ity, plus a feel­ing that Mengele was some­how “famil­iar.” This was noth­ing new – I had always had the feel­ing I had lived dur­ing the Holocaust, even though I wasn’t born until 1951. What did this have to do with my child­hood? Absolutely noth­ing! I had always been afraid of ask­ing per­sonal ques­tions, like “What really hap­pened in my child­hood?” As far as I was con­cerned, my child­hood was not worth inves­ti­gat­ing. Whereas Dr. Mengele, the Angel of Death of Auschwitz, was.

 

Since I sud­denly had unlim­ited time and inter­net access, the first ques­tion that came to me was: “Did Dr. Mengele ever work for the CIA?” And my first Google search took me straight to the Allan Memorial Institute in Montreal, and the year 1962. The first arti­cle that came up said Mengele had actu­ally been there that year, and had worked for the CIA. And there was plenty of infor­ma­tion in other searches that seemed to sup­port that bizarre asser­tion. The real story of the Allan Memorial has never been told, in my opin­ion, but it’s well known as the Montreal men­tal hos­pi­tal where the CIA funded some very heinous exper­i­ments from about 1953 to 1964, with help from the infa­mous Dr. Ewen Cameron.

 

Now – coin­ci­dence or not – in 1962 some­thing ter­ri­ble had hap­pened to our fam­ily, and espe­cially to my father. He sud­denly went into the Allan Memorial, in early December of that year, just after the Cuban Missile Crisis, and that was a very scary time for me as an eleven-year-old. Because my dad was gone for six whole weeks and all of a sud­den he was “men­tally ill” although really, apart from some­times hav­ing a bad tem­per, he was a totally straight type of guy, a high school teacher, never missed a day of work, didn’t drink or do any­thing. A super-responsible, if some­what dis­tant, fam­ily man. I do remem­ber he was under a lot of stress in those days, as was my mother.

 

When he came home from the hos­pi­tal six weeks later, he seemed not to remem­ber us at first, or he seemed a bit con­fused as to who we all were and what we were sup­posed to be doing all together as a fam­ily. But he recov­ered quickly and went right back to work – unlike many other patients of Dr. Cameron, who were reduced to a veg­e­ta­tive con­di­tion with drugs, elec­troshock and other meth­ods that were being tested on unwit­ting people.

 

Now you might think those trau­matic events in my child­hood would have dogged me for years – but I very quickly for­got about them. Like the rest of my fam­ily, I min­i­mized them, put them in stor­age, never men­tioned them, because they were not impor­tant. They were just an anom­aly that didn’t fit into any pic­ture we had, from before or after, of who we were, which was: a nor­mal, middle-class Canadian fam­ily who were “suc­cess­ful” accord­ing to the stan­dards of the fifties and early six­ties. That time when my dad sud­denly went into the hos­pi­tal, and cer­tain other very pecu­liar things that were hap­pen­ing dur­ing those months, just seemed totally dis­con­nected from every­thing else about us, and our lives, and the world we lived in. Who could I talk to about all that? I had my image to keep up: I was bright at school, pop­u­lar, ath­letic – all those attrib­utes that peo­ple val­ued then. I sim­ply went on grow­ing up and liv­ing my life in the belief that what­ever had hap­pened, back there, we had sur­vived, so why think about it? In fact we had only partly sur­vived – my father had lost his short-term mem­ory and had to quit teach­ing, and my mother had come down with a crip­pling ill­ness. But when you’re young, you can over­come everything.

 

So at age thir­teen, when a guid­ance coun­sel­lor asked me if I suf­fered from any fears or bad feel­ings or had any per­sonal prob­lems that I would like to con­fide, I told him my biggest per­sonal worry was that we were not try­ing hard enough to get along with the Russians. I deliv­ered quite a long speech about that before leav­ing his office. That year I also read the Communist Manifesto and wrote a term paper about Vladimir Ilyich Lenin as “The per­son I most admire.” I don’t really know where all that came from, but that was where my think­ing took me. I was very sin­cere. It seems I had dis­so­ci­ated from a trau­matic real­ity that was too close to home, and sub­sti­tuted a par­al­lel, arti­fi­cial one.

 

So forty years later, in 2002, I sud­denly had the time and the means to inves­ti­gate what had been going on in my envi­ron­ment, in Montreal, the city we lived in dur­ing those years, at the begin­ning of what they call the Quiet Revolution in Quebec, and in the out­side world it was the height of the Cold War when peo­ple were build­ing under­ground bomb shel­ters in case of a nuclear attack. As a “cre­ative writer” of fic­tion and poetry, I thought I dis­liked libraries and research, but sud­denly I was read­ing twelve hours a day and more. Thanks to the inter­net I could access thou­sands of pages of doc­u­ments and infor­ma­tion. That win­ter of 2002 – 3, I read con­tin­u­ously for months. Much of what I read was about some­thing called “Trauma-based mind con­trol.” Whatever that is, lo and behold! Dr. Mengele prac­tised it, and had been doing it to peo­ple in his clinic at Auschwitz.

 

I sud­denly felt I had the key to unlock some pretty dark, but def­i­nitely bizarre, clos­ets that seemed to be lurk­ing in my past. That was when cer­tain mem­o­ries started sur­fac­ing, and mak­ing sense – some of which I had been aware of, con­sciously, since early child­hood, and had even writ­ten about, as fic­tion, such as being in an under­ground lab­o­ra­tory with other chil­dren. Other mem­o­ries arrived as real, phys­i­cal flash­backs, where sud­denly you are a lit­tle girl on a table sur­rounded by doc­tors, and you can hear them talk­ing about what they are about to do.