Just Like Nana
Dive into the journey of Just Like Nana, a podcast passionately exploring ancestral trauma, generational healing, and the profound ways our family's past shapes our present mental and holistic health. Amie Penny Sayler shares captivating, research-based fiction stories of her grandmothers' lives and features insightful interviews with leading mental health and wellness practitioners.
Learn how to break cycles of trauma passed down through generations, understand family dynamics, and cultivate a regulated nervous system. Ground yourself in your history, honor your ancestors, and find your own path to trauma healing.
New episodes every Friday. Learn more at https://justlikenana.com/
Just Like Nana
Elizabeth Rosner
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Author and teacher Elizabeth Rosner discusses the importance of naming and acknowledging intergenerational trauma before moving towards healing.
Elizabeth touches on the cultural understanding of intergenerational trauma, the limitations of scientific understanding, the importance of personal and collective histories, and more.
About Elizabeth Rosner
Elizabeth Rosner is an author and teacher whose work focuses on the redemptive power of storytelling and deep listening. Her six books have been translated into twelve languages and have received literary prizes in the US and abroad. Her most recent book, Third Ear: Reflections on the Art and Science of Listening, blends personal stories of growing up in a multilingual household with multidisciplinary research about sound and silence in the natural world. Her previous book, Survivor Cafe: The Legacy of Trauma and the Labyrinth of Memory, was a finalist for a National Jewish Book Award and was named among the best books of 2017 by the San Francisco Chronicle. Elizabeth travels widely to lecture and lead workshops internationally; her teaching carries forward a message of perseverance and tenacious optimism.
In This Episode, You’ll Learn:
- Validate the Biological Reality of Transferred Trauma: Intergenerational trauma is a concrete transmission where an ancestral injury, atrocity, or structural attack creates psychological consequences and genetic adaptations passed down to children and grandchildren. Knowing this science validates that you are not crazy for carrying fear from events that occurred before you were born.
- Reclaim the Ancient Wisdom of Lineage: While Western science is just beginning to understand the explicit mechanisms of epigenetics, indigenous cultures have always held the ancient understanding that we must look backward seven generations and forward seven generations when navigating our life purpose and actions.
- Embrace the Power of Deep Naming: True emotional and ancestral transformation cannot happen if we rush past the pain to reach a forced state of healing. We must dedicate time, energy, and meticulous attention to looking at, acknowledging, and naming our personal and collective histories to break the grip of secrecy and denial.
- Uncover the Multi-Generational Gifts of Resilience: Your ancestral inheritance is not solely defined by anguish and trauma loops; it also carries beautiful, luminous gifts. Reclaiming your lineage means actively identifying and savoring the creative talents, love of beauty, multilingual voices, and fierce courage passed down by those who came before you.
- Exercise Your Sovereign Capacity to Change: Although we possess no control over the exact traumatic history or genetic blueprint we are given, we hold absolute sovereignty over what we choose to do with it. By practicing deep listening and meeting ourselves honestly, we can actively rewrite our biological programming and choose our own changes
Resources Mentioned
- Elizabeth’s Books: https://elizabethrosner.com/books/
Connect with Elizabeth
Website: https://www.elizabethrosner.com/index.html
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/elizrosner/
Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/61096.Elizabeth_Rosner
Connect with the Show
- Website: justlikenana.com
- Share Your Story: If you have a family story or trauma you’re exploring, reach out via our website for a chance to be interviewed.
Connect with Just Like Nana's Website.
A proud member of the Feminist Podcasters Collective.
Theme music by Carter Penny.
Labyrinths of Memory: Epigenetics, Storytelling, and Reclaiming Your Ancestral Inheritance with Elizabeth Rosner
Amie Penny SaylerWelcome to Just Like Nana. I am your host, Amie Elizabeth Penny Sayler, honored to be here with you today and with our stunning, amazing guest. Elizabeth Rosner is an author whose work focuses on the redemptive power of storytelling and deep listening. Her six books of nonfiction, fiction, and poetry have been translated into 12 languages and have received literary prizes in the U.S. and abroad. Third Ear, Reflections on the Art and Science of Listening, her most recent book, blends personal stories of growing up in a multilingual household with multidisciplinary research about sound and silence in the natural world. Survivor Cafe, The Legacy of Trauma and The Labyrinth of Memory, her previous book, was a finalist for a National Jewish Book Award. It was translated into Korean and Dutch. Her best-selling first novel, The Speed of Light, is celebrating its 25th anniversary this year. Among several honors, it won Hadassah Magazine's Ribolo Prize, judged by Ellie Wiesel. Based in Northern California, Elizabeth leads writing workshops internationally. Her teaching carries forward a message of perseverance and tenacious optimism. Today, Elizabeth and I will be discussing her book Survivor Cafe, which does focus on her parents' experiences during the Holocaust and other atrocities. As always, please take care of yourself if listening might be too much right now. Elizabeth, welcome to Just Like Nana. So excited to have you here today. Thank you. It's it's really great to be here with you. Thanks,
Memories of Grandma Judy
Amie Penny SaylerAmie. Absolutely. We like to start if you have a favorite or powerful memory of your grandma and also what you called her that you'd like to share with us.
Elizabeth RosnerYou know, I called her Grandma Judy. Her name was Judith, and it was her given name in Poland slash Russia. And so I think my calling her Judy sounds so kind of American somehow, but I called her Grandma Judy, and I have many sweet memories of her, but maybe one of the sweetest ones is when I was little, she used to come and visit with, she always brought food. She always traveled on the bus with food, including a boiled chicken, which is just hilarious to me to picture her with her boiled chicken in her handbag. And she would also do one of those things that that people of a certain age or ear used to do, which is she would peel an apple in a single coil, you know, she would just continue to turn the apple and peel it all the way, and she would say in this inimitable accent, that I can't, I can't pretend to copy. Uh, an apple day will keep the doctor away. She was a doctor, and I was very confused by that. And I would say, but but grandma, if I eat an apple, then then you'll be away, you know, then I'll be keeping you away, and I don't want to keep you away. So we would laugh about that.
Amie Penny SaylerThat is lovely. I also find that skill of the one apple peel in a coil is just kind of magical, really.
Elizabeth RosnerThat's how it always looked and felt to me too. And she was doing it not with an apple peeler, but with a very sharp little knife, and she was turning the blade toward her, doing it. And so it was even more like not just magical, but risky and courageous somehow. And truly, the more I got to know about her, I'm guessing we'll talk about
Naming and Ancestral Trauma
Elizabeth Rosnerthis too. The more I understood that she was actually a tremendously courageous woman.
Amie Penny SaylerSo this podcast is born out of uh stories that I'm writing about my grandmas that are named Elizabeth. There are 45 of them in my family tree, obviously, going back many generations. Do you know the story of why you were named Elizabeth and how that name was chosen? I think I know it.
Elizabeth RosnerFirst of all, that's so extraordinary that there are so many Elizabeths in your lineage. I think that's fantastic. The name most common in my maternal lineage that I'm aware of anyway, is actually Sophia, but it was also sometimes Sonia and sometimes Sophie and sometimes Sonny. But Elizabeth was not, as far as I know, a name that goes back generations in my family. But I think it was chosen because my grandfather, my grandma Judy's husband, whose name was Zelman, or that was the Polish way of saying Solomon, had died just before I was born. And Elizabeth was a sort of an anagram of his name with the Z and the E and L and the A. And even though there's no M or N in Elizabeth like there was in Zelman, Zelman, that was a tribute to him. And Elizabeth was the closest to his name.
Amie Penny SaylerThat's beautiful. That was your mother's father?
Elizabeth RosnerCorrect. Yeah.
Amie Penny SaylerI want to dive in talking about what ancestral or intergenerational trauma is. And this is going to be a very long quote, and I apologize for that, but I would like to read what the American Psychological Association, how they define intergenerational trauma. And what they say is that it is the transmission of trauma or its legacy in the form of a psychological consequence of an injury or attack, poverty, and so forth from the generation experiencing the trauma to subsequent generations. The transference of this effect is believed to be epigenetic. That is, the transmission affects the chemical marker for a gene. The trauma experienced by the older generation is translated into a genetic adaptation that can be passed on to successive generations. Trauma reactions vary by generation, but often include shame, increased anxiety and guilt, a heightened sense of vulnerability and helplessness, low self-esteem, depression, substance abuse. The list goes on. The exact mechanisms of the phenomenon remain unknown, but are believed to involve effects on relationship skills, personal behaviors, and attitudes and beliefs that affect subsequent generations. This research that the American Psychological Association is kind of premising this definition on really starts to arise out of intergenerational trauma concentrated on children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren of survivors of the Holocaust and Japanese American internment camps. It's sort of expanding now to start to look at the impact of slavery, structural racism on black people, as well as trauma experienced by American Indian communities. And the list goes on as we know. What I want to talk about is because I think it's fair to say that you would fall in that definition as a child of someone who experienced that severe trauma of the Holocaust of two someones, and certainly not just your parents, but your family beyond that.
The Importance of Naming and Healing
Amie Penny SaylerBut thank you for putting this book out there. It's first of all, it just as a daughter, it's a beautiful tribute to your parents. And it's just such a powerful way for us to and what I mean by us is us who have not experienced these effects either directly or indirectly, to just get some sort of glimpse. And hopefully that glimpse helps us all move forward in a way that is away from that sort of path or repetition and in a way that heals and fosters kindness within all humanity. So thank you.
Elizabeth RosnerThanks for saying all of that.
Amie Penny SaylerWhen reading your book, what I was struck by is that the focus never wavered from your parents or others who had lived through the Holocaust or other atrocities as you address in the book, there were maybe less than a handful of times where there was sort of just the tiniest little nod to how the trauma may have affected you. And what I'm curious about is if you can address how does that second or third generation sort of respect and acknowledge that although the generations before experienced the trauma directly, they are also experiencing the effects of the trauma. How do they resolve that within themselves and learn how to heal that trauma while honoring what the earlier generation experienced directly?
Elizabeth RosnerThat is the key question you're asking. And really, first of all, thank you for taking the time to do the research and to really explore what we understand as of now, what we understand about how intergenerational trauma shows up. It's so meaningful to me to hear that reflected back now in the year 2026, because when I was writing Survivor Cafe, first of all, of all the books I've written, it was the book I wrote the most rapidly, which is really kind of counterintuitive because it's such a researched book. There's so much heavy, weighty, emotionally intense, you might say, material in it. And yet, as my editor put it, you know, it's the book I was writing my whole life. And so there was something about it just kind of pouring out of me, also. So it took me two years to complete the book, but I was working on it in the years 2015 and 2016 when it's even hard to believe now, but trauma was not a word on everyone's lips in those years. And intergenerational trauma, epigenetics, those were not terms that were being passed around as readily as they are now. And so, in some ways, I was writing about things that a lot of people didn't yet really acknowledge, including people like me who were descended from Holocaust survivors and who had been told most of our lives that we were too sensitive or that we were imagining things. None of this had actually happened to us. How could we be traumatized by events that had occurred before we were born or losses that our ancestors suffered or witnessed even? There was a kind of heavy duty skepticism that this was even a thing. And I compare it to the way PTSD or post-traumatic stress disorder, or just post-traumatic stress, was for a long time not acknowledged, not named, not understood. And it's easy to forget how recent those recognitions are. So I want to start by saying that, that that also meant that as I was learning, that there was research, there was evidence that science was finally catching up in a way with what I knew intuitively to be true, or what I and many of my peers who had also grown up with Holocaust survivor parents and grandparents knew that we were affected, that we were ourselves carrying around hypervigilance or walking on eggshells or feeling terrified of things that had no name, all of that that we recognized we shared. It was impossible really to foreground any of that. We were told that that really our suffering was completely minimal compared to, contrasted with. Nobody was trying to kill me all my life. You know, like those basic ingredients of what were considered privileges, I understood. But then there was this bizarre characteristic of having nightmares or worrying that, you know, anyway, I don't elaborate on my own experience so much in this book or even in other books of mine, partly because I was so trained to defer. I was so trained to see that what happened before I was born, that what happened to my parents and my grandparents were some of the worst things that could have happened to anyone ever. My feeling kind of unreasonably sad about something, or my being afraid, those were just minor. They just felt minor. And so even without deliberately setting out to do it that way in the book, I think it was just part of my ongoing approach to talking about these things. And yet, what I also want to add is that I believe that we have to spend a lot of time naming these things before we can move forward to the healing. And it's not because I don't want to move toward healing, and it's not because I'm holding on too tightly to suffering or victimization or anything like that. It's because I think there's a tendency to want to go past it and to get to the other side of it. And the truth is, I don't believe you can fully transform these things until you've really spent time looking at them and naming them and acknowledging that they're real, that they're there, and that they deserve to be given a name. They deserve to be given time and energy and attention. And that does include the generation that has been the receiver of those
Cultural and Scientific Understanding of Trauma
Elizabeth Rosnertraumas, whatever that mechanism is. As that definition says, the mechanism itself really isn't understood. I don't know if we're ever going to get at that, but that's sort of science's job right now, maybe.
Amie Penny SaylerRight. I see this iceberg with science as the tip. You know, it can tell us some, and there is so much more to it that we may never understand, but still exists regardless.
Elizabeth RosnerYeah, I mean, we're a culture, Western culture typically likes to have things made supported by evidence, likes ideas to have foundation in something concrete, something observable, something, you know, we are that kind of, I don't know, species, let's say. And yet, as I said, I mean, it's not just that children of my generation, descendants of Holocaust survivors, knew these things to be true before they were named or supported by scientific evidence. Generations of indigenous cultures have also known this forever. You know, that's why in indigenous understanding of the world, you look backward seven generations and forward seven generations when you contemplate your own life and your own purpose and the actions that you take in this life, that you understand yourself to be part of a lineage going backward and a lineage going forward. And those are actually ancient understandings. So it's not like, oh, we just figured this out for the first time. It's that we're catching up with, I think, very old knowledge.
Amie Penny SaylerWhen you talked about the importance, and and I'm using this word, but I think the power of the naming and really spending time, you know, not kind of naming and moving on, but really living in that naming. A few things about that. One is that's what your writing just captures so eloquently because it's this blend of, I mean, obviously the horrific, the experiences, and this way of kind of anchoring you to the place or the experience that is occurring. And not that I'm suggesting that I'm experiencing it, but you kind of have this way of blending sort of the mundane. This is what the cobblestones looked like, or this is what this tree looked like at that moment. And it brings you there in a way that feels very real. I also just,
The Role of Words and Language
Amie Penny Sayleryou know, I know you name this throughout the book, that just this urge, desperation, need to capture the stories before they're gone, before there's no more naming because there are no more voices. And I just want to honor that work that you're doing in that way to capture the naming as much as possible.
Elizabeth RosnerThank you. Yeah, I mean, you know, that was that was a book I wrote after my mother had died. I mean, my mother actually died before any of my books were published. She knew that I was a writer. My first novel had received an amazing contract with Random House right before she died. She knew that I was about to be a published writer for the first time, but she knew that I was deeply committed to being a writer, and she herself had been a poet, actually. She spoke seven languages, my mother. So I had this awe of her, really. Her linguistic abilities were just astonishing. So all of my books, though, came out after she died. And Survivor Cafe was the last book that was published while my father was still alive. I've since published another book after his death, but he died four years ago. But she's been gone for my entire writing life, which is just amazing, my entire publishing life. But anyway, all that to say that I do feel really committed to trying to find words for what I have experienced, what I have observed, what I've been puzzling over, that is my life work. I mean, I in addition to writing, I also teach writing. And yet, as you know, because you read Survivor Cafe, the book begins with something called the alphabet of inadequate language, which was my way of saying words are always going to fall short of trying to really fully describe and explain the mysteries of the human experience, including the most horrific of human experiences. So all of that is a very circuitous way of responding to your comment and your question. But, you know, I'm still always trying to find the right words and also to using my words and my public life, let's say, to hold on to the words of those who went through the Holocaust and, as you said, other atrocities, other attempted genocides, other tremendously horrific wars, in order to kind of keep reminding all of us that this is the human story and we share it, you know, and we can't we can't just wish it away. It's our job to keep looking at our personal histories, our collective histories, in order, I hope, to move past them, but it's not simple. It's not simple, otherwise, we would have done it a long time ago. I mean, this is when maybe the most obvious thing you can say, but World War I wasn't called World War One. It was called the war to end all worst. I mean, the great war. It was meant to be the last time human beings slaughtered one another like that. And look where we are. We have not ended war. We haven't even come close to ending it. So the things we name, and and including what we call a war. I mean, I talk about that in Survivor Cafe too. The war in Vietnam, we call the Vietnam War. The Vietnamese call it the American War. That is something that a lot of Americans don't know. And yet we should know that because that says something about our role in that war and in that time and in that place. And how we are seen outside of ourselves. And I don't mean to sound like I'm on a soapbox here. I'm just, this is all I think in response to your comment about the naming of things and the naming of ourselves and also what it means to hold on to history with accuracy and with sensitivity.
Amie Penny SaylerYou know, with the Vietnam War versus the American War. There's also one thing to add in there that technically and historically, there was calling it the Vietnam Conflict because it wasn't a war declared by Congress. And just even that, how we play with words, use words, how words can be used to minimize or accentuate. There's so much in there. And it it again, I don't know why this iceberg analogy is with me today, but it struck me when you were talking about trying to choose words, trying to use words that convey what is inside of you. And it's the same where there's so much that we haven't, no matter how gifted you are at language, it cannot capture everything.
Elizabeth RosnerYeah. I mean, I was about, even though, as I said earlier, you know, Survivor Cafe was the book I wrote the most quickly of all of my work, I was probably about two-thirds of the way into writing it, which is also researching it, which is also editing and refining it. And I was just completely overwhelmed by this task I had set myself and that I just felt that it was too much for me. I was overwhelmed emotionally and psychologically and and just even technically, I felt out of my depth. And so that was when I wrote that alphabet of inadequate language. And it was really almost just to confess to myself, these are words that just don't begin to say enough. And they're also words that are doing too much. You know, they're trying to, it's what we use the word trauma now. I mean, there's a whole chapter on the word survivor because the word survivor is so ubiquitous and so vague, really. And then I was looking at what do other languages use for the word survivor and what do they mean? And so it's it's really kind of an endless conversation we could have just about words, you know, just about language and and how hard we tried to use it because it's our tool, you know, and as the writer, it's my main tool. But I also have to keep acknowledging its limitations. And, you know, I learned a so much from writing poetry that I was trying to always apply to my prose as well. Like, why should I be any less precise and compressed and and specific with my words in prose than I am in poetry? I mean, poetry sort of one of the characteristics of a poem is you know, the the best words in the best order. Well, shouldn't we always be doing that? You know, when we're speaking, when we're whispering, when we're teaching, when we're writing. I mean, so words, words matter and they're also really flimsy sometimes.
Amie Penny SaylerI also want to honor and acknowledge the gift of words that your mother gave you. And and it sounds, you know, when you talk about her linguistic abilities too. So I'm a person who focuses on words also, but to me, words are very visual. They are black and white on the page. And what I hear you saying about your mother, and and perhaps this is a little bit of what you got from her, is words seemed more alive and more, I'll use the word oral, A-U-R-A-L. You know, she was hearing the words, and her brain was processing them that way with this gift
The Influence of Parents and Ancestors
Amie Penny Saylerfor language. And that's the other thing we get from our ancestors. It's it's not all the whatever this means, ancestral trauma, it's also the gifts and the gifts of what they've been through.
Elizabeth RosnerAbsolutely true. And and this is gonna sound like I'm I'm doing some kind of advertisement for myself, but the book I wrote after Survivor Cafe is about listening. It's called Third Ear, and the subtitle is Reflections on the Art and Science of Listening. And it begins with my earliest memory of listening to my parents talking in Swedish to each other because they thought I was asleep, but they weren't sure that I was asleep, and they were talking about me, but they didn't want me to hear what they were saying, so they spoke in Swedish. Swedish was their secret language, it was their love language, it was the language in which they met as refugees after the war, and they kept it private. We never learned it. And anyway, so much of Survivor Cafe and so much of all of my work really had its origins in my attunement to my parents, both to what they were saying and to what they weren't saying, and what was being whispered and what was being kept a secret, and what was, you know, what I might eavesdrop on, or also listening beneath words completely, and listening to how they were moving through the world emotionally, and how present or not present they were with me, and and all of their friends, many of whom were also survivors. And so you're absolutely right that that's so much my mother was this very colorful, vivid person, and her polyglot self-you know her her her tongues, her many tongues, were uh really always kind of in motion. And so I paid a lot of attention to her, and she paid a lot of attention to me, but there was also something that was very confusing to me. My mother late in life was diagnosed with bipolar disorder, her moods were very erratic, and so there was a lot there that I was both listening to with my ears and with my whole body. And so the gifts of not just my parents, but of course my my grandparents, some of whom I knew and some of whom I never knew, I was aware that they were all somehow alive in me, you know, alive in my parents, alive in me, alive in ways that that weren't necessarily obvious, but that I I had certainty that they were there. Do you still feel that way with your parents? I definitely do. I, you know, I um I had so much more time with my father as an adult. I mean, I was 40 when my mother died, which isn't young. She was young, she was only 70, but but there was a lot we didn't get to resolve, let's say. We didn't get to work all the way through some of our difficulties. But I had a lot of time with my father to talk and listen. And and he is so much more present in a way for me because his his life was more elongated in in contact with mine. But I'm I'm really aware of my mother because of her love of beauty. My mother really taught me that. And she didn't just love beauty, she revered beauty. And so my I think my even just I'm looking around my study right now while I'm talking to you, so much of the way I've designed my own life is is inspired by a love of beauty that I I absolutely got from her. And and yeah, I feel that what they gave me is so important to who I am. And, you know, sometimes for good, sometimes not so great. But but as you said, I think it's really important to say that I wouldn't trade it for anything, you know, including the painful parts, including the the deep anguish of things I didn't understand or things I didn't want to understand. I mean, all of it made me who I am. And so I'm very grateful for all of it, really.
Amie Penny SaylerIn reading Survivor Cafe, I just want to take a moment to tell you that the the beauty of the father-daughter relationship with you and your dad came through so loud and clear. It was really touching.
Elizabeth RosnerThank you. Well, I you know, again, I sound like I'm doing a commercial. I'm sure you have a ton of things to read all the time. But third year continues my exploration of my relationship with both my parents. Both incredibly profound relationships. And as I said, a much more elongated one with my father, and in many ways, more complete than I ever could have believed was possible. So that was a great blessing. Got to have that with him.
Amie Penny SaylerThere's obviously so much more to talk about, and I want to be respectful of your time. Is there something else that wants to be heard in this discussion that you think it's important for our listeners to hear, either sort of from you or from your ancestors?
Elizabeth RosnerWell, I am so grateful that that you wanted to talk to me. I I love being given the chance to talk about my work and my life and my lineage and what I've been given. It's a great privilege to get the chance to speak in this way to listeners that I may never even know or meet. But I think one of the things I feel compelled to say right now is that even though my experience as a daughter of two Holocaust survivors absolutely shaped me, uh indelibly. I mean, I I can't, none of us can imagine who we would have been with different parents, although maybe some of us try. But um I feel very fortunate that I was raised with this inheritance, as I said before, no matter how painful or complicated. And that being said, when I have the chance also to remind listeners that as much as I recognize my specific inheritance, you know, and how much that matters to me personally, I try whenever I can to show how it connects me with other people. That so much of my, I think, early
The Power of Listening and Storytelling
Elizabeth Rosnerlife, I had this sense that that's what differentiated me. And there's a part of me that will always feel a little different, you know, a little, I don't know, specifically of a tribe, a population, a generation that has a very special connection to a terrible time in history. You know, there aren't that many of us that have that particular gift. And it is a gift, it's a very strange gift to hold. But I think that it's really important for each of us to find what that isn't in ourselves, you know, and that that's part of what it means to be human and to pay attention to why we're here is to look at what we've been given. And it's not always easy to do that. It's often really hard to do it. And and what we were saying earlier about that, that wish to heal, that wish to transform, that wish to move forward or to not continue a certain kind of repetition. You know, I learned that the people who study intergenerational trauma, the experts will call them, the people who are the scientists, the biologists, the geneticists, the psychotherapists, they say that if traumatic experiences can change us biologically, which clearly they do, it doesn't mean those changes are permanent. We can change again. We can keep changing. It doesn't just happen all by itself, though, you know. And that's the thing. So we meet, we come into the world to kind of meet ourselves. And the more we know ourselves deeply, the more those changes are are possible that we can choose, you know, that we can choose our changes. Maybe we don't get to choose what we're given, but we can choose what we do with what we're given. And I don't mean to sound like some kind of proselytizer about this. I just think it's important and it's worth doing. It's worth doing. So I just really want to thank you for the work that you do to support people as they as they look. You know, you're doing that looking. And there's the question of these Elizabeths in your life, you know, how cool that I'm now an Elizabeth in your life, you know, a different Elizabeth in your life. But, you know, that you're choosing to do some hard looking and also some grateful looking, like to say yes to it, you know, really, really to say yes to it. So thank you for what you do. And I'm sure you're having a really important impact on a lot of people.
Amie Penny SaylerThank you so much. Uh obviously, as your work does, your work to me really strikes me as a lot of you talked about your grandmother being a courageous woman, and I'm sure she was. And I think that's a gift she gave her granddaughter because there's a lot of courage in here. A lot of courage. So thank you for that. As you were talking, and I was thinking about the kind of meeting ourselves and knowing ourselves and that sort of being, in a sense, part of our life's work. I think as we do that and we come to know, appreciate, love, except ourselves, that's where that grace to do the same for others lives and resides. And the more we can do that for ourselves, the more we can do that for others. And that to me is the path forward from the Great War. You know, that is the path forward. And if you, if you're okay with it, I would like to read a passage from your book to just sort of end with that because I think it's a lot about ourselves, but also how we move forward together as humanity, because part of the courageousness and part of the importance of your work is that we learn and we don't go back to what has been. So I'm reading Elizabeth's book right now. I believe we are obligated to listen to all of these stories and to try against every instinct to stop ourselves from judging the perpetrators. We have to hear them speak, just as we have to hear the reports of the victims. We have to accept that they are us and we are them. If the stories are held in silence, if the people who suffered and the people who committed atrocities are secretive, we can never really know the truth about the human condition, about the perpetual and inherited traumas, about what each of us may be capable of enduring, and what we may be capable of doing under certain circumstances, with just the right amount of brainwashing, and herd mentality, and abject terror, and sense of duty, and temporary insanity. Thank you, Elizabeth. Thank you, Amie.
