TRANSCRIPT
Conversation with Vivien
Gissele: [00:00:00]
Just wanna shout out to Feed Spot slash overcoming adversity for selecting our podcast as their top 10 podcasts.
Thank you. Thank you for acknowledging all our hard work. Hello and welcome to the Love and Compassion podcast with Gissele. We believe that love and compassion have the power to heal our lives and our world. Don’t forget to like and subscribe for more amazing content. Today we’re talking about getting under the skin, journey from estrangement to forgiveness, and I’ll be talking to Vivien Kalvaria, whose creative journey began in Rhodesia, where she discovered a love for theater as a child.
Although she began her career on stages her true passion laid behind the scenes, producing and directing. She opened a drama studio for children and staged plays at the local theater. At 24, she was appointed news director for Rhodesia Television, the first television station in southern Africa.
After moving to South Africa and then to the United States, [00:01:00] Vivien turned her focus to writing. She’s the author of Break and Hold, and has just completed a deeply personal memoir. My Name is Not Rifka, about her mother-in-law, a Schindler survivor. The book explores tumultuous relationship, the scars of intergenerational trauma and what it truly takes to move from anger to forgiveness.
A lifelong student of Holocaust history and its psychological legacy, Vivien brings rare insight into the wounds of the past, echo through generations and what it means to heal them. Please join us in welcoming Vivien. Hi.
Vivien: Hi. Thanks for having me, Gissele. It’s good to be with you.
Gissele: Oh yes. It’s so great to be with you.
I think this conversation is very, very timely.
I was wondering if you could begin by telling the audience how you got to write this memoir for your mother-in-law.
Vivien: Well, in order to understand [00:02:00] the sort of genesis of all of this and to understand the forgiveness piece of this story, we have to go back to where it all began.
when I started dating Zach, that’s my husband, his mother, Rifka everything she could to sabotage our relationship for two years, she would randomly call me at all hours of the night hysterically crying, insulting, yelling, begging me to walk away from the relationship.
She refused to attend our wedding and turned much of the community against me. Only a handful of people actually showed up. I was devastated and furious, and for a couple of years we were estranged. What I didn’t understand then, but would come to learn much later, was that her behavior was rooted in her past.
Rifka carried wounds from traumas I knew nothing about. In fact, nobody knew about them, and that was the stumbling block. She [00:03:00] never spoke about her past for 50 years. It was this dark secret that everyone tiptoed around, her sons grew up, and knew nothing about what she’d gone through as a child. All we had was this tattoo on her arm, a daily reminder that she’d been in a concentration camp.
For me, her silence made it nearly impossible to understand her, let alone try and repair our relationship. So I stayed angry and resentful, not just because she had rejected me as a daughter-in-law, but because I had no frame of reference to understand what motivated her hostility. I couldn’t make sense of why she had waged such a fierce campaign to stop me from marrying her son.
There was nothing in my background or my family’s background to suggest that we had done something terrible. So for two years we were estranged.
Gissele: Did she ever tell you why, [00:04:00] specifically?
Vivien: She was just looking for an excuse. There was actually somebody before me. There was, I had a predecessor who went through the same thing as I was going, and she just fled the scene.
Mm-hmm.
Vivien: And then I came along.
Mm-hmm. Yeah,
Vivien: so the real crack in my armor came when our son was born. We were living in South Africa. Rifka was in Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe a thousand miles away, and within hours of the birth unannounced, she took a three day train trip to see the baby. Now you have to remember we were estranged.
Hmm.
Vivien: And I was still so outraged by what she put me through. I refused to allow her to see her grandson. Well, between midnight feeds and exhaustion that comes with a newborn, I had a lot of conversations with myself. Somewhere deep down, I realized we were all losers in this drama that had gone on for so long, and that I was the one who needed to change.
For [00:05:00] days. I wrestled with myself, but I just couldn’t do it. Then one evening I overheard drifter on the phone, begging my husband to see the baby, and something in me shifted. I took the phone outta my husband’s hand and invited Rifka to meet her grandson. It was a small step towards the long road to our healing, but it would take years of research.
And while writing my book before I understood how deeply trauma from the Holocaust affected the survivors, and as it turned out, the children of survivors, you have to remember that after the Holocaust therapy, as we know today, didn’t exist. PTSD wasn’t even a recognized term. It wasn’t even a word in the lexicon of psychologies.
So you have to picture this. After years in concentration camps, hiding [00:06:00] in tunnels, sewers, caves, underground bunkers, survivors emerged into a world that expected them to just get on with their lives. Yet for so many. The Holocaust had lived deep scars, depression. There were all these wounds survivor’s, guilt, emotional numbness, flashbacks, nightmares and angry outbursts, symptoms that we now recognize as PTSD, which made it very difficult for the survivors to rebuild their lives.
Then in 1960, there was this new awareness, Holocaust Trauma not only affected the survivors, but extended beyond them to their children and silently shaped the emotional architecture Yes. Of their survivor families. ’cause children born in that post-war decade, like my husband Zach, were handed this [00:07:00] unspoken job.
Fill the emptiness in their parents’ lives and provide their lives with a new purpose. Parents developed this unrealistic expectation that their children would cancel out the devastation they’d experienced and fill their empty lives with meaning. And this is why Rifka saw my marrying Zach as a threat.
She believed that I, a strong-willed young woman, would come between them and sabotage their relationship. So little wonder, she fought so hard to break us up, so children unconsciously became replacements for sisters, brothers, cousins who had perished in the Holocaust and whom they never knew. There’s this very poignant quote from psychologist Erin Has.
He was the son of two Holocaust survivors who [00:08:00] wrote The most important event of my life occurred before I was born. And unfortunately for Zach and his brother, that was the case for them to, both Rifka sons were profoundly affected by their mother’s silent suffering and unpredictable bouts of anger, because trauma doesn’t just disappear.
It hangs around in quiet, complicated ways. So many survivors like Rifka were hypervigilant and overprotective afraid that history would repeat itself, that the world was a dangerous place obsessing, that their children could disappear from one day to the next. Like so many of Rifka’s families had children like Zach.
Especially firstborn, he’s a [00:09:00] firstborn, grew hyper attuned to their parents’, unspoken trauma. They rarely rebelled or tested boundaries. They stayed compliant. And Zach was a model child. They, if you can call that being a model child.
Gissele: Yeah, for sure.
Vivien: Yeah. They suppress their own needs out of a fear of re-traumatizing their parents or opening up.
Mm-hmm. Although the child
Gissele: becomes the parent that holds the emotional space. Yes.
Vivien: Yes.
Gissele: I can relate.
Vivien: Yeah. Oh, really?
Gissele: Yeah. My, mother had a huge trauma growing up. that’s the reason why I wanted to work in the child welfare system and my sister, like later on in, in life we were talking about, she had encountered a book that said the survival skills.
Of children who are raised by parents who experienced abuse, and you gain those same skills [00:10:00] that hypervigilance the fear of people, the emotional attunement to the parents so that you can be like their emotional support system, like their crutch. So yeah. I’m relating to everything yourself.
Vivien: Yeah. Well, that’s pretty much kind of the. Childhood that he had this overprotectiveness. and as you say, he took on, he actually took on this caretaking role as, as you said, a kind of parental role reversal.
Gissele: Mm-hmm.
Vivien: And these kids, they grow up with separation issues because the bond between the parent is intertwined with pain and unhealed trauma.
Mm-hmm. That is not to say there wasn’t affection and joy at times, but the trauma left a long shadow that shaped Zach’s life. But the trauma didn’t only shape Zach’s life. It shaped mine too, because I married into it. Rifka pain turned into this invisible wall between us, and I kept [00:11:00] slamming into it with my anger, and I thought that my anger made me strong.
It didn’t, it just made me confused and bitter.
Gissele: I wanna go back to the point where you made a decision. ’cause you have to have made a decision to allow her to see the baby. And to me it makes sense that you would want to see the baby regardless of your relationship. Because like as you mentioned, they lost children.
Many generations were lost. So for her to lose another generation would probably be really difficult for her, but you had to make a conscious choice to allow her back into your life, despite the fact that she had been so hurtful. What do you think that sort of led to your willingness ’cause many people want to get stuck in that victim consciousness.
Many people want to say, no, this is a perpetrator, this person hurt me. Not realizing that as long as they [00:12:00] hold the image of a perpetrator, they will have to be victims. I know that you did a lot of exploration, but What helped you even be willing to even engage in that dialogue where many people won’t?
Vivien: I think one of the turning points for me was when I stopped seeing Rifka as the woman who rejected me and started seeing as this little girl who walked into hell and somehow came out alive. It was such an epiphany for me. ’cause of course I’d done all this research. This book took 20 years to write, so I did a, a fair amount of research.
yeah, so I finally understood her. You know, when you choose to understand, you choose to heal. Understanding isn’t about forgetting. It’s about bearing witness. To someone’s story or pain or experience, [00:13:00] understanding is the bridge. When we allow ourselves to bear witness, compassion follows, and when compassion follows profound, transformative healing becomes possible.
One of the things I learned on this journey was that ’cause I was so angry that anger looks for blame. Rifka had a thousand reasons to cast blame Through the hundreds of hours I spent interviewing her, she questioned this. She questioned the holocaust. What she’d gone through, she questioned, she lashed out, she protested, but she never blamed.
She never blamed the person who upended her life and she never blamed God.
Gissele: Wow.
Vivien: Blame feels good for a moment. Blame is comforting. It tells you that the problem isn’t yours. But here’s the trap. If someone else is the [00:14:00] problem, they also hold the solution that leaves you stuck waiting for someone to change so that you can move forward.
That’s the danger of blame. It feels powerful, but it actually leaves you powerless. And that’s when I decided I have to make this move. She’s not gonna do it. Mm-hmm.
Gissele: Yeah. Wow. That’s, that’s so powerful. I totally agree with you. Like, you know, curiosity for me is a stepping stone to compassion.
’cause then you start to understand people’s behavior. It really had nothing to do with you. No, it really didn’t. It had to do with all her history and she was so damaged. Mm-hmm. But how did you get to, from allowing her to see the baby, to you being the one person that she would give her story to? I’ll try and give
Vivien: you the cliff notes on this.
I was always pushing, you know, a lot of our, our conversations took place in the kitchen. I called it Fridays with Rifka. Like Tuesdays with Murray. You [00:15:00] do you know that book Tuesdays with Murray? Mm-hmm. So a lot of things emerged in there and sometimes things would slip out, but she was always very careful not to go too far.
Then one day I showed her a documentary. I said, do you wanna watch this documentary? It’s about the Holocaust? And she said, why should I want to watch a documentary about the Holocaust? I lived the Holocaust. I said, well, if you don’t wanna watch it. After a few minutes, we can turn it off.
It actually is a very famous Holocaust story. It’s well documented. It’s called Shoah. S-H-O-A-H and it’s nine hours long. Wow. And so I, I went through this whole nine hours because I knew I couldn’t show her nine hours. there are interviews with people from anyone who was connected with the Holocaust from survivors to people who ran the camps to comandantes.
And a lot of it was done without them really realizing that they were being interviewed for what would ultimately become this [00:16:00] incredible documentary. Wow. So I showed it to her and she was riveted And every now and then she would make a remark and I would think to myself, gosh, am I re-traumatizing her?
Because we are really digging into some stuff here there was this scene on a train. And I wondered to myself, I’m sure she was on a train, I’m sure she was a train that that took her to one of the camps. ’cause she was in five different camps. Five different, including including salt mine.
but I didn’t push it. Well at two o’clock in the morning we were done watching it. And she actually said, you, you should, you should come and sleep with me and don’t wake up Zach, because it’s so late. And I said, no, I’ll, I’ll be by myself. I’ll sleep here in the, in the family room. And she went to bed and anyway, the next morning she came downstairs and she said, what are you doing today?
And I said, well, I’m just a lot of stuff to do with the house. And she [00:17:00] said, well, I’m ready. And I said, ready for what? She says to talk about it. And I said, to talk about, to talk about your Holocaust story. She said, yes. So I raced, I have a background in, in television.
So I grabbed a tripod, I grabbed a, camera and set it up in my husband’s office. And I began to interview her and that’s how I got the story out of her.
Gissele: Wow. And so she was a Schindler survivor, so it’s like Schindler saved her,
Vivien: She, was in his factory ’cause Schindler had a factory in Czechoslovakia, and she was chosen, and that’s all in the book.
How she was chosen is just ’cause only 1000, 1100 people were chosen to be in this factory out of. Tens and tens of thousands. But it, that would take too long for me to sort of describe it. It was a miracle that she was chosen and [00:18:00] that’s where she lived out the rest of the war for, I think it was nine months until the war ended, and then she had to make her way.
Gissele: So when I read Victor Frankl’s bookTalking about those who survived were the ones who saw their life beyond the circumstances that they had. Was that the case for Rifka as well?
Vivien: Yes, because Viktor Frankl, who was in the same camp as Rifka, although they never met,
Yes. He had this theory that, In order to survive, you have to have a purpose. So he would see those prisoners around him who had given up, who had given themselves a deadline. If the war doesn’t end on March the 25th, I’m done. And literally they died. They just lost all hope for Viktor Frankl.
The interesting thing about him was, was that he had this book, he was writing this book when he arrived at Auschwitz, he lost the [00:19:00] book and he was devastated. And so he started writing the book in his head all over again.
I asked Rifka, what was your purpose? Why do you think you stayed alive? What were you thinking? And she said, I would dream every night that I was back home and we were having a big Sabbath dinner and my mother made chicken soup and all these wonderful dishes. And the other thing, because I was very good in arithmetic, I wanted to be a bookkeeper and I saw myself in this office and I had my own desk.
This is what she kept in front of her and what kept her going. So that was her purpose. That was her reason For surviving.
just to mention you, that there’s a very, there was a very different dynamic between how the men, survived and how the women survived.
The women all had what we [00:20:00] called Barrick sisters. if you didn’t have a Barrick sister looking out for you, the chances were that you wouldn’t survive. So all of them, most of them had Barrick sisters who really looked out for them. I mean, sometimes these barrack sisters would even sleep with a guard to prevent one of the sisters from being, sent to a concentration camp where they were exterminated.
So there was this incredible bond that they, I’m just mentioning this as an aside.
Gissele: Yeah, yeah.
Vivien: And
Gissele: the men.
Vivien: The men had different ways. they had bonds too, but not like women. You know, this is what we women do. It, it’s part of our DNA, it’s how we roll.
So it definitely worked very well for women in the concentration camps. Those who didn’t, didn’t survive.
Gissele: Yeah. So based on everything that you know about trauma, and based on all of the research you have done on the [00:21:00] Holocaust. Do you have a theory as to what drives people to commit such atrocities?
you have to be able to dehumanize other people in order to treat them in that manner. I always think about, ’cause everybody always focuses on Hitler, but they don’t focus on the, millions of people that followed him. And so I’m interested in the millions of people. I’m not interested in the one, because without those millions of people, you don’t have the one, the one is just like some crazy person.
So I’m curious as to what your thoughts might be knowing what you know about trauma.
Vivien: should we address why these people became so, Dangerous. you have to go back to something that Hannah Arendt said.
she talked about the banality of evil. And, I came across this many times in all the camps that Rifka did. I did a deep dive into the comandantes. two of Rifka comandantess were formerly barbers [00:22:00] hairdressers and Yes. Wow. And they had no history at all of anything that they had committed crimes or anything like that.
But something happened when they were given this role and this ideology took over. And by the way, after the war, these people went back into life. As carpenters, as hairdressers, and with not anything that would have suggested what they had committed in these, concentration camps. So the banality of evil.
It’s just so surprising, remarkable that these ordinary people did such extraordinary, terrible things.
Gissele: it’s interesting because it, have you heard of that, prison experiment? It was, I think it was Stanford, that they decided to do this prison experiment with students. Some were assigned the role of guard, some assigned the role of prisoners.
Yeah. And then [00:23:00] they started acting in their roles, and it became so abusive they had to stop the experiment. There is something to be said about like identities and roles and prescription I do feel that. Hate and that kind of oppression is a choice. The same as love. You have to choose love.
You have to choose forgiveness, which is why it goes back to that very important choice you made in that moment, which was, I’m gonna allow Rifka to see her grandson. And in that moment, you chose love, you chose forgiveness, you chose to be willing, even if you hadn’t seen the full landscape yet.
And I think that’s the difference from my perspective. Those people every day are making that choice. They’re making the choice to stick with their role and, align and belong and fit into that. Because I find that, you know, obviously there’s fears If I don’t align, what would happen. So I do think it’s a choice.
‘Cause I think we all have the potential. Oh yes. I think we all have the potential to be [00:24:00] very evil or very, very loving if we choose.
Vivien: I think what I learned. As our relationship began to heal is that understanding is the key to reconciliation. It’s the most crucial tool for repairing a broken relationship.
As I dug deeper trying to understand Rifka, I began to suspect that she suffered from undiagnosed PTSD. She had never seen a therapist. So I was just going on my instincts initially, but until I, eventually I met with a psychologist who confirmed what I’d long suspected anyway. our reconciliation wasn’t an overnight thing.
It took time and a complete shift in perspective for me to move past my anger after what she’d put me through and see Rifka for who she truly was a survivor, silently struggling under the enormous weight of her past. Yeah. it meant reimagining Rifka, not as an adversary, but as a woman shaped by unspeakable losses.
And [00:25:00] there’s this other quote from. To Kill a Mockingbird, where Atticus Finch says, you never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view, until you climb into his skin and walk around in it. And so for 20 years while writing my book, I put on Rifka skin and stepped into her world.
This young Polish girl, 13 years old, naive, deeply religious, lovingly sheltered by her parents. She had never even said foot outside her village. And then in one unspeakable moment, she was alone shoved onto her train bound for her first camp, as I told you, one of five, including assault mine. Yeah. Yeah. It wasn’t until she.
Finally opened up and entrusted me with her story, that our relationship turned the corner and my anger began to dissolve. When you are estranged as I was, you [00:26:00] have to move from anger to empathy to mend what often feels like unfixable? Empathy is the magic push. You must listen to the silence between the words, to fully grasp what shapes someone’s behavior.
You have to move past judgment into the heart of someone’s story. That’s where empathy lives.
Gissele: I think you said something so fundamental, which is the willingness to reimagine, right? Yes. I think to me it starts all starts with willingness. You are willing to see her differently, and I think that’s where.
We struggle in today’s society, like cancel culture. We’re not willing to listen to each other. We’re not willing to engage in dialogue. And so we stay in our camps and then we can’t come closer together. That’s why we feel so divided. So there has to be a willingness. And I think the willingness to reimagine someone is so magical because you are willing to see their [00:27:00] humanity, willing to see them from a different light.
You are willing to be wrong about them, which I think is, says a lot about you, Vivien, because many of us don’t like to be wrong and our mind doesn’t like to be wrong. So it looks for evidence to confirm that this woman is horrible, this woman’s evil, this woman hates me, And so the willingness to say, am I not looking at this with a proper lens or in the proper way, I think says a lot about you and your ability to be able to, to open up your heart.
I think that’s incredible.
Vivien: There is an actually an example of me being wrong. it’s an interesting anecdote. It’s about how easily we judge and get the wrong end of the stick. And yeah, as I said, this is a personal experience. Rifka criticisms of me, which I once took as personal attacks, turned out to be something else entirely.
When she spoke, she was translating Yiddish into English, A [00:28:00] language that’s English that doesn’t fully capture the layers of meaning. Humor, that cultural undertones unique to Yiddish. Yiddish is this colorful language with a rich vocabulary full of curses and unique expressions, that sometimes come off as insults or not politically correct by today’s standards.
So what sounded sharp or offensive. In English to me, often had a completely different meaning or connotation in Yiddish, where insulting humor can actually be a sign of closeness, even affection. So I only discovered this when I made the effort to understand Rifka when I climbed into her skin and listened to what she was saying in the context of her culture.
What I had interpreted as insults were nothing more than cultural differences.
Gissele: Yeah. It also reminds me, there’s this I can’t remember who said it, I think it was Louise Hay, talking about how like behaviors make sense for the person. if you had [00:29:00] their perspective and their lived experience, the behaviors might make sense to you, right?
Yes. And so it goes along to what you were saying, right? If you were carrying their lens with their experiences, with their childhood, with their parents, with their perspective, with their whatever, that behavior may make sense to you. But because you are looking at it from your lens, from your experiences as an outsider.
You judge from what you think you would’ve done or should do. And I think this is where just taking a moment to suspend judgment, it can feel really challenging because there are real hurt feelings. She didn’t attend your wedding, right? Like she didn’t want you to be in her son’s life. That’s very, very challenging to feel that rejection and which is why your behavior is so incredible.
just the willingness to be able to say, I’m gonna create space for this, I think is extraordinary. [00:30:00] What did you find helped? I know that you were mentioning like understanding helped your forgiveness was there.
Any aspect of you that had to deal with your own self forgiveness and was there anything surprising about forgiveness that you hadn’t expected?
Vivien: Well, we were talking about blame Rifka example of not blaming pushed me to face the demons from my childhood. I stopped rehearsing my past and quit the blame game.
It turned out to be one of the most cathartic, transformative outcomes of our relationship. Rifka was my greatest teacher
Gissele: Hmm. Oh, that’s fantastic. I mean difficult and fantastic. Yes. Yeah. And so let’s go back and talk about PTSD, right.
Because, you know, there’s an element of people that think, well, you know, when [00:31:00] you survive something that challenging and, and she survived by having the vision, right. Seeing herself beyond that. And once they leave that circumstance, they still hold onto it, right? I think of Nelson Mandala who said like, you know, if I leave prison, but if I’m still mentally trapped here, I won’t be free.
And so what do you think causes someone to hold onto it versus like allow themselves to truly live life?
Vivien: Rifka could just put it all somewhere.
I think that she just shut down and she met this wonderful man whom she married. she met him in a detention camp because after the war she was, they were put into detention camp. So she was in Italy for a while and, he was,
Gissele: you know, sorry.
Pardon? I thought when, when they were rescued, why was she put in a detention?
Vivien: [00:32:00] So she was in Schindler’s factory, and then from one day, you know, in 1945, there’s this very dramatic scene in the book when in the factory there the loudspeakers are, and Churchill’s voice is saying the war is over and they’re just standing there, just dumbfounded, you know.
So they were only allowed to go back to the country from which they came. And of course, they all wanted to go back to see who had survived. Rifka went back to her house in Poland, and the reason for this was that there were all these occupying countries. Now there was Britain, there was Czechoslovakia.
All of these countries had certain. Countries that they were in charge of and if you weren’t Czechoslovakia, you couldn’t come back to Czechoslovakia. So she went back to Poland, but she didn’t wanna stay in Poland
So she said, I have to get out of here. So she’s now 17 years old, she decides she has to get out and she joined an underground. And there’s this whole story of [00:33:00] her being. with a bunch of other survivors going from one country underground through the forest, through the mountains, to another country, to another country, until they eventually arrived in Italy where there were all these DP camps and she was assigned to a DP camp where she stayed waiting for a ship to take her to Israel.
So that’s how she wound up in Italy. Wow. It’s an amazing story of how these survivors, not only what they went through, ’cause it was very challenging. I mean, they were, they were walking through forests at night. They weren’t allowed to have any light, no flashlights, nothing dark, damp, wet, following one step in front of another with some leader, you know, taking them to the next post.
Gissele: Yeah. And. Was it that vision that kept her, even beyond the [00:34:00] Holocaust that kept her moving forward, did she still use that same strategy and like getting through the forest and getting through detainment?
Vivien: Yes. It must have been now. It was coming closer and closer. The war was over. Now she was going to re restart her life.
I mean, it was a very naive, I suppose, but that’s because as we know, she eventually had diagnosed as PTSD, but she had this vision and, you know, she actually lived out her vision. She became a bookkeeper and a very, very good one to, everybody wanted Rifka her to work for them. And, so yes, there’s no question that all along in front of her was this, saving grace.
This is what I’m going to do when, when I get back home.
Gissele: Incredible. so I wanted to ask about your husband’s role in, in the whole conflict in terms of the dynamic, ’cause it must have put him sort of in the middle. What was his perspective as to your relationship and eventually reconciliation?
Vivien: [00:35:00] Well, he didn’t have an easy relationship with her.
It was a relationship based, obviously in love. But he had this very closeted, very overprotective mother who didn’t let him do a lot of things. So now, I mean, he climbs mountains, he forwards rivers, he does everything that would just make r rifka hair turn gray. But he, so he wasn’t allowed to do any of these things.
So his loyalty was to me and. That was a big shift for Rifka. And it was sort of an understanding that that’s the way it would be. It would have to be like that, you know? But I, I fully encouraged him to have his relationship with his mother. but she wasn’t allowed in our home for a while.
And he was okay with it. And, you know, he’s been wonderful
Gissele: actually. Yeah. That’s incredible. Because there’s usually that, that person in the middle that feels like sort of conflicted. But I can understand a [00:36:00] child feeling completely constricted and suffocated. Right. Especially if here’s a person experienced so much loss, they’re gonna hold onto whatever they have for dear life, but at the same time, not realizing that they’re choking the life out of something.
Yes. Out of the thing. Right. And also preventing themselves from living life fully, because life is about loss. Life is about change. Right.
Vivien: she wouldn’t let him climb the big tree in the back of the garden. She wouldn’t let him go to camp with all his friends. She kept him at home. If he rode his bicycle, it had to be in the yard, not anywhere else.
There was this constant overprotectiveness. And, you know, he rebelled against it as an adult. Once he left home and went to medical school, he started to live the life that he had missed and that he actually dreamt about it. he had a great wonderlust. so Zach won a scholarship to Birmingham University.
Now you have to imagine we are in this, ’cause I grew up in the same town as Zach, [00:37:00] this little town. So for someone like. To get a, a scholarship to medical school in Birmingham. It was a big deal and it was in the newspapers. I didn’t know him then, but I was very impressed. Well, imagine my surprise when we were married and he said, you know, I didn’t go to Birmingham.
And it turns out that, and this is the thing with PTSD in some unspoken way, Rifka made it clear that she did not want him to leave. That leaving her was abandoning her. And so he, he, absorbed this. Even though it was in the ether, she never came out and said it, but there was a lot of suggestion. Yeah.
So here’s this brilliant boy who’d worked his tail off his whole life as a scholar who finally gets this amazing scholarship and [00:38:00] turns it down to stay close to his mother. I mean, it’s very sad.
Gissele: Hmm. Yeah. Hmm. It’s amazing how emotionally attuned children are to their parents, right. Especially parents that don’t say very much.
Did you find that sharing her story led to some sort of healing for her at least improvement of the experience?
Vivien: I, and there was no question that, you know, it started off, as I say, as a slow drip, and then it became a tsunami where she couldn’t stop talking about it. And in fact, when Schindler’s List came out, she was one of the keynote speakers in Rhodesia, you know, describing Yeah.
Her experience in his factory. it was like we had unlocked this, this secret and she gushed and so definitely it had a positive [00:39:00] effect on her. I was very concerned that she would be re-traumatized, but yeah, thankfully she wasn’t.
Gissele: Yeah. I think one of the things we’ve learned from Truth and Reconciliation, story sharing from indigenous people is that the ability to share their story, to tell their viewpoint, to say what they’ve lived, can be very, very healing. And so interestingly, you became the venue for her healing, which I think is wonderful.
Vivien: Yeah, yeah. Well, it was just incidental, but yes, were both healed.
I had traumas from my childhood and also I was on this mission. I just had to get the story out of her. And a lot of people said, you know what? you’re stepping into a hornet’s nest here. You should back off. Why would they say that? Well, because of fear of retraumatization, because a lot of, oh yeah.
They just wouldn’t talk about this and went to their deathbeds having never said a word.
Gissele: Mm-hmm. Trauma that gets stuck in the body, you are offering a venue to be able to release it out ’cause [00:40:00] they’re still carrying it, right? They carry all those stories in their bodies and in their minds.
But to be able to record it, to be able to just get it out and share it one of the pivotal things about the Holocaust, and you mentioned it was the numbers. They weren’t people, they were numbers. But to go back to share your own story, it sort of re humanizes you, right? this is me.
I am a person. I wasn’t a number, I’m not to be forgotten. I have a story to tell. I think that is very, very powerful to be able to share their story.
Vivien: You just reminded me of something. So Rifka wound up in Auschwitz, by accident there were 300 women who wound up there. They were actually supposed to be on their way to, Schindler’s factory.
And the train inadvertently took a wrong turn and they wound up in Auschwitz. So here they were thinking, you know, we’re gonna live out the war in Czechoslovakia, in his factory, and they wound up in Auschwitz. it’s a [00:41:00] well-known story. And so these 300 women were in Auschwitz first, and then Auschwitz Birkenau, which Birkenau is the labor part of the camp.
So while they were there, Schindler was. Frantically trying to get them out of there And he reached out to all his contacts, but nobody could help him. Eventually he did find someone, a woman, a very beautiful woman, and he sent her with some diamonds and she met with some of the higher up.
And somehow she managed to arrange an agreement that they would be released, but, but. Before their release, there was all this paperwork to go through, and in the meantime, these 300 women were so emaciated, so sick, I mean, what two or three of them wound up in [00:42:00] the hospital that they had, unbeknownst to the lower down people in this echelon, that there was something going on up, above them to release them.
they were waiting to go into the ovens. They were sitting, waiting to go in unaware that all of this was going on behind the scenes. And then as one of the women said, in a two hours time, we would’ve been dead.
But suddenly, one of the capos came running in and said, and started shouting out these names, all these people out, out, out. Back to the back to the barracks. Back to the barracks. and it was because suddenly the word had come down that they were being released and being sent to Czechoslovakia to join Schindler.
But the thing about being a number, it was unheard of that people were there addressed by their names. It was numbers such and such such. But here they were being called by their names, and they were [00:43:00] so surprised to actually hear their name being announced that there was just shock and awe. Wow. And they realized, gosh, something wonderful is about to happen.
And it did.
Gissele: Wow,
that’s so powerful. Yeah. Yeah. Did Rifka ever mention a little bit about, Schindler in sort of what kind of person he was?
Vivien: She once said to me, he was like Moses, he brought us out of the desert, and gave us life. She said he was a very tall, very handsome man. He would walk around the factory from time to time, but they didn’t see much of him.
They saw quite a bit of his wife. She was the unsung hero of the factory. And there are many stories about her and how she saved so many of the survivors. But no, she didn’t really have any direct contact with him Why do you think,
Gissele: I don’t remember that in Schindler’s list, like the [00:44:00] anything about the wife?
Do you remember? I don’t know. You said she was the unsung hero. Why do you think that was?
Vivien: Well, you know, he was a bit of a philander. And, he had a bit of a dark past and he liked to do all the things that a single man would do, let’s put it that way.
Mm-hmm. And
Vivien: he like put up with all of this.
And she wasn’t always around, you know, he would do a lot of traveling, but there was this one moment, it’s the “Kolasha” incident when he was not there, and this was in the factory and this train that had been traveling back and forth trying to offload these prisoners. I think there were like 200 of them. they were men.
Somewhere, but by the time the 10 days had passed and nobody wanted them because everyone knew that those prisoners inside that train were not healthy enough to work. So where whichever camp they went [00:45:00] to, they said, no thanks. Not for us. So, and eventually it was the middle of winter, the whole carriage froze and it was totally iced up.
Someone told Schindler’s wife about it. She was woken up in the middle of the night and she said, bring the train here. So she woke up some of the survivors who were now had been eating good food and were strong and they tried everything to get these guys out of there. They even burnt mattresses to try and melt the ice.
And eventually I think that they just. Cut the doors open. And the site that they were, they looked like women. They thought they were women. They were so tiny, so emaciated. So having not eaten for so long, and she brought them back to health, she brought them back into the factory She had a little hospital underneath the factory where she made this wonderful soup that she [00:46:00] was famous for, this porridge that she was famous for, and all of them survived.
Wow. So she definitely was the unsung hero. She wrote a book about her life. she was a little bit bitter towards the end and No, no surprise there.
Gissele: and I think it goes to show that nobody’s a hundred.
Percent good and a hundred percent bad, right? there’s, they’re philander, but at the same time somebody who’s caring and compassionate towards people that are struggling, right? What motivates people to help? Like what motivated Schindler’s wife to help?
Vivien: at heart, she was a good-hearted woman, and what motivated him is much more interesting because he came to, Poland to, make a lot of money.
He
got
Vivien: a factory. he purchased this factory where he was making pots and pan for the war. So he made a lot of money, but [00:47:00] he had this relationship with the comandantess of a camp that was sort of affiliated to his factory.
And the more he saw this commandant, the more he started to, and he was actually a Nazi himself. he belonged to the Nazi party and he started to turn against the Nazi party. And he started to see these Jewish people as pathetic badly treated. And that’s when he changed. So instead of becoming a war profiteer, he took all that money.
He was penniless by the end of, because in the book I explained all the money that he spent, he spent, like I told you, when he sent this woman with these diamonds, these diamonds were what he purchased to bribe the commandant to sleep with this woman.
You know? So all of these things [00:48:00] bourbon to mollify them the best cuts of meat in a time of war. So he was constantly traveling the country trying to find these products. Mm-hmm. Wow. And then he just had this epiphany. He said, I need to do something. I need to save as many as I can. And he saved almost 1200 of them.
as a historian documentary. And how do you feel about the things that are happening in the world right now in terms of even what’s happening in North America? I’m just curious as to your thoughts.
I don’t really know what to make of it. I mean, it’s such turmoil and, you know, we’re again so divided.
It’s very terrifying. It really is a big worry. And I think about our children and our grandchildren, what their futures hold in this very fraught
Gissele: Right. Well, I take your words as comfort. You know, if you were willing to reimagine somebody [00:49:00] that was considered at the time your worst enemy, right?
Like the person that gave you the most conflict can we not reimagine each other as brothers and sisters, as friends, can we not reimagine these countries as loving and inclusive and compassionate instead of conflicting? But I think there has to be a willingness, like you were willing to look at yourself, you were willing to.
To do the inner work and say, you know, I’m willing to be wrong. I’m willing to look, I’m willing. Many people struggle with being willing.
Vivien: Yeah. I mean, you know, we have to stop looking at the differences because, as soon as you start looking at the differences, it’s hard to heal.
You know, I mean, religions are very similar. They’re very similar. The foundational parts of them are, they may have a nuance here and a difference there, but basically they’re the same. And yet, religion has always been what has divided us, you know, going back [00:50:00] into history.
Gissele: Yeah.
Yeah. I, I think what you’re saying is so spot on. I think we really focus on the differences I think that’s the most threatening thing, right? Like we are taught conformity. If you look at the school system, fit into this box, follow this rule, you know, like align. And we are not taught how to manage differences.
Like, so I’m a Professor at university, I’m supposed to teach my kids like the young people, critical appraisal skills, right? To be able to critically think about and reflect on things. But they don’t come to me with an ability to look at both sides. There’s only one side, there’s a right side, and they’re not exposed to the other side.
Like true history would give you all of the different perspectives, right? Confirmation bias, that’s what it is. Yeah. And so. we gotta look at both [00:51:00] perspectives and what is the other side. And some of them can’t even look at the other side. They’re so entrenched in their viewpoint because that’s what they’re taught.
So for them, diversity is threatening, belonging fitting into a box. there has to be a right answer. And so that’s why we struggle so much with diversity, because it’s different. It’s uncertain. it doesn’t feel safe, but what a boring world would it be if everybody was exactly the same.
I think that’s, that’s the beauty of living, right?
Vivien: We need to celebrate our differences, but they shouldn’t be dividing us. Yeah,
Gissele: yeah, yeah.
Vivien: You know, Rifka left us 11 years ago, long before I finished the book. But we’re talking. But, but she never left me. I felt her presence throughout the final chapters.
She carried me through those long days and nights of research when the cruelty I was [00:52:00] writing about felt so suffocating. Yeah. Throughout. She was my silent cheerleader right here.
Mm-hmm.
Vivien: she enriched my life and she taught me so much. Same thing like the, what you’re referring to, what divides us, which we shouldn’t be focused on.
So in that respect, she was willing to look at both sides. That’s how she came to terms with, you know, with what she’d gone through. She was able to look at both sides. She was really my greatest teacher
I could look upon some of these awful men and women who ran these camps and understand that they just got sucked into an ideology. And once the war was over, they moved on as though nothing had happened and didn’t manifest any of these cruel, things about them that marked the Holocaust,
Gissele: I find it puzzling that they wouldn’t have seen the suffering on the other side.
Like, how divorced are you from yourself, that you are not picking [00:53:00] up on the suffering, you’re inflicting, and then you can just go back and just live There’s gotta be a disconnect because like Yeah. Like how could you witness. The suffering and then go, oh, okay, well that’s, they’re a lot in life.
Or They deserved it, or whatever justification you have in your mind, it baffles me. And then to think that you could just go back to your regular life as if nothing happened. That’s, that’s interesting. I’m
Vivien: curious about that. There’s a whole other story there.
That’s exactly what happened. Some of the most heinous of them went on with their lives. A lot of them escaped to South America and lived long lives. a few of them were captured, but most of them were not. And well, many of the
Gissele: doctors too went to different places.
Like the ones who did a lot of experiments. ’cause a lot of experiments also happened, right? Yes. Yes,
Vivien: I, yes, I talk about that in my book, especially with Mengele with eyes. He tried [00:54:00] to change the color of the eyes of the children, so he would inject, especially, he worked with twins
Gissele: And
Vivien: he would, without anesthesia, he would inject dyes into their eyes to see if that would change their color. In fact, one of his, patients, if you can call her that said, his laboratory looked like a butterfly collection with all these eyes that he had on the walls. Wow. Yeah. I mean,
Gissele: wow.
It also makes you think about butterflies like that. I teach an ethics course in a number of our medical advancements. Were due to his experimentations, which is really like, ugh. I think we have to acknowledge the history.
I think we’re get so stuck on the advancement that we fail to acknowledge that some of that stuff was done. Yeah. Advanced knowledge, [00:55:00] but also at the cost of people’s physical bodies. And so I think there’s like a dark side to that
Vivien: that we don’t
Gissele: often acknowledge.
Vivien: and Mengele was a music lover. He was a Catholic.
He came from a very religious family before he became a Nazi.
There wasn’t a hint of this maniacal man that he became when he became the chief physician doctor at Auschwitz.
Gissele: in that sense, like again, I also have a hard time reconciling the religion with the oppression. I’m more spiritual than religious, not, there’s nothing religion.
If that works for you, that’s fine. I but I think one of the things that I feel is we’ve gotten away from the message of. First of all, do unto others as you would not do unto you, and to love each other. Like the fundamental was [00:56:00] about love. It was about inclusivity. It wasn’t about those people are going to hell, these people over there are separate, these people are below, like none of that.
The teachings of Jesus. so it doesn’t compute in my head it’s amazing what we can rationalize. Yeah. This is the only thing that I can think of. So how we can talk ourselves into almost anything when we see ourselves as victims.
Vivien: Yes. Good point. Absolutely. Yes.
Gissele: Yeah. ’cause there’s this theory about like the Treaty of Versailles after the First World War and how it kind of decimated Germany.
And Hitler coming, we’re gonna make Germany great again. There is this perspective that if it hadn’t been for the Treaty of Versailles, then perhaps the people wouldn’t have been so receptive. If you know what I’m saying? Right. Like receptive to somebody coming and rescuing them.
Vivien: Yeah. I mean, it’s wonderful the work you’re doing, you’re doing God’s work. Even if you’re not religious and you’re spiritual, be [00:57:00] doing God’s work.
Gissele: I just think it’s very powerful and I think the messages, like stories like yours, I think need to come out. And it’s important for us to have these difficult conversations because the goal really is for us to come closer together.
Your willingness to have a difficult conversation, your willingness to get curious when everything was telling you, this lady doesn’t like me, all of those things were good justifications for you not to do the work, which is what we do in your willingness to say, and yet I’m still curious.
Let me try to understand this person better. That’s huge. And This is the path. This is what we need to do to be willing, just, even if we don’t have the answer, just be willing, understand the perspective. I tried
Vivien: hard to portray her not as this villianous woman in the beginning.
So, you know, I belong to a writer’s group and they’re all amazing writers. They’re fabulous. Mm-hmm. so the way it [00:58:00] works I dunno if you’ve been in a writer’s group,what what happens is that each person reads a chapter from their book, and then we all give our opinions of what we think of the chapter
And so when I started and was reading, my name is not Rifka. they were just horrified. They did not like this Rifka one little bit. I mean, I got notes to say, how could you you know, forgiven her? She didn’t come to your wedding, she, anyway.
Yeah.
Vivien: And and I was only, I was only writing about her story.
That was, that was the original motivation. I needed to get Rifka story. And somebody said, came up to me and said, you know, Vivien, this book isn’t just about Rifka. This is about you as well. You have to play a role in this book. So I kind of thought about it because that was not my, the original intention. [00:59:00] And then I thought to myself, no, he’s right.
This is about Rifka and me. Our healing. And so the way the book works is there’s, there are two threads. The one is the historical thread of Rifka, and the other is our relationship. And each, there’s a chapter of each one chapter, the other chapter, the other chapter, and the, crisscross like this.
And at the end, the point of my telling you the story is at the end to a man or to a woman in that room, everyone loved Rifka, everyone, it was unbelievable. they talked about her she was like a relative friend. They loved Rifka. and it’s not that I tried to, paint this rosy picture of her.
I didn’t. But she really was a very lovable woman. Yeah. When you got under the skin.
Gissele: Couple more questions. what’s your definition of love? I ask all my guests this [01:00:00] question
Vivien: my definition of love, I think that it’s being non-judgmental for me.
Non-judgmental. when you again, get under the skin of somebody else and you walk around and it after a while, you understand what motivates them, that for me would definitely be love.
Gissele: That’s beautiful. That’s a great answer. Tell the audience, when the book is coming out, what do you want them to know?
Where can they find you? Anything you wanna share?
Vivien: It’s not published yet. We’re in the process of, it should probably be published sometime in early 2026. But we’re heading towards that.
I have a wonderful team around me. Mm-hmm. my editor who’s worked with me for three years, she was actually the editor of Schindler’s List. Oh wow. And yes. Incredible. And, and then I have a coach who’s doing all this scuttlebutt [01:01:00] work that I don’t really understand and don’t care for.
So that’s his job. So yes, it’ll be published by. Early 2026.
Website is, http://www.vivienkalvaria.com
Gissele: That’s fabulous. I’m definitely getting my copy, I’m very, very excited to read it, I’ll be lining up for my book. Thank you so, so much, Vivien, for sharing your wisdom with us and for sharing your story.
and everyone go get the book as soon as it comes out. It’s gonna be incredible, and I would love to have you back after the book comes out to share and to have another amazing conversation. Thank you. Thank you so much. And thank you for everyone who tuned in to the Love and and Compassion Podcast with Gissele.
Bye.
Vivien: Thank you.