The world is not a fare place in any way. Im afraid there are right now people living and breathing and trying to go on after unbelievable tragedies (African civil wars, Tchetchenya). Like those young Jewish men (I like to refer to the Holocaust, because for me it is the most horrible thing man has done to his fellow men)(and which is not learned from) who had to guide people (and one day there were their loved ones...) to the gas chamber, take them out dead and burn them. They were charged to do the concrete dirty work of the killing, constantly aware that as well it might be them, dead. Mostly they were young adults and many of them survived (youngsters are filled with selfconfidence, love of adventure and desire to live). And then they were forced to live (they had an alternative to kill themselves) the rest of their lives somehow. (You should see Shoah, a document where the survivors are telling their stories decades later, the amount of different kinds of coping methods there is...)
Of course that kind of experience does something to your mind and psyche. (in fact I think it has been researced many times, f ex in Israel even the grand children of Holocaust survivors are mentally more fragile to the thought of violence and are more depressed about the present suicide bombing than those whose grandparents do not have the experience)
One of the recurring thought among the survivers has been the one that this life now does not exist, it is only a dream, that when they wake up, they are going to be back in a concentration camp. To feel that the life you are living IS not, that what is now is only a dream...
Did I loose my point? Again... I think I was kind of trying to prove that it is not impossible to go on living after a dreadfully shocking experience. It leaves its marks to the person, but he does not have to be a total mental case. Some people are stronger than the others.
Im not saying that I would think that anyone of the IF, if survived, would have lived a "normal" life afterwards. I have always thought them as a unity or harmony of a kind (idealizing of course) and to loose such a net would have been a total tragedy. And the massacre... I remember wondering while reading about AA how she did not see more nightmares, how could she get up in the morning at all (if you cant really trust anyone there is no safer place than the one underneath your quilt).
Kind of hoping none of them did it.
