One of the problems of getting older is
short-term memory loss versus the clarity of long-term memory
gain. Of course, being only 39-ish and fully intending to
be that age for the next decade - as Dorothy Parker said,
39 is the best 10 years of a woman's life - my niggle with
memory failure is only just starting.
Ask me at teatime what I had for breakfast or did the night
before and my mind goes blank. But ask what I did on November
5 1987 and I can remember almost every detail of that night
and indeed every night in that November and the years before.
I can remember with every sense memory (the Stanislavskian
concept of sound, taste and smell forming memory) the following
events, beginning with the death of Elvis on August 16 1977.
I was swimming with armbands in an over-chlorinated pool,
my eyes stinging, the tinny radio blaring and Mum crying
at the news.
I can look back to the death of John Lennon on December
8 1980. The heating was on the blink so we were freezing
cold in our house in Stanmore, and Mum was crying at the
news. The night Thatcher won, my parents held an election
party for the neighbours. We kids were allowed to stay up
late, stealing smoked-salmon bagels and biscuits.
I wore a hideous scratchy knitted jumper and watched Mum,
Aunty Celia and Aunty Lesley jumping up and down in the kitchen
like a gang of suffragists, shouting: "She won." And
Mum cried at the news.
My great-grandma, at the ripe old age of 91, could recall
with clarity and great detail her home in Kiev, which she
fled on account of the pogroms when she was 14. She could
remember the sickening journey on the boat and how her back
hurt, waking up every day on the floor of the factory where
she slept in her early years in the East End. But ask her
to remember where she left her teeth or which was her bedroom
and she was a goner.
I am therefore surprised to find that Laszlo Csatary, 96,
who was recently discovered in Hungary and arrested for "unlawful
torture of human beings", claims that he cannot remember
much about his Holocaust years. Csatary is on the Simon Wiesenthal
Centre's list of most wanted war criminals, accused of torturing
Jewish prisoners and sending more than 15,000 of them to
their deaths in Auschwitz.
The years of 1939-45 are apparently a blur to this former
commander of a Jewish ghetto. His younger years were spent
making life-and-death decisions and he has been described
as a sadist. In his dotage, these must be the events that
come back to him in vivid colour, day and night.
But sadly it is not just individuals like Csatary who have
lost their long-term memories. Efraim Zuroff, of the Simon
Wiesenthal Centre, notes that, beyond the old, unrepentant
Nazis who seem to forget their past, entire swathes of Eastern
Europe - including countries such as Hungary - are demonstrating
long-term memory loss. thejc.com
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