Mother of Darkness

Long Black Cape

2011-09-12T11:41:00.001-07:00

When I first arrived in Hamilton, late in November 1973,I was wearing a long black cape that made me look like a witch. A friend had given it to me as a going-away present, and now that I think of it, he had received it himself as a present from a woman who I believe was a practicing Wiccan. My friend said it would help keep me warm – it was made with heavy black wool and had a roomy peaked hood. In Montreal, a cape like that would have passed as just another fashion statement. But Hamilton was not Montreal. As I explored the downtown streets of my new, temporary home, I attracted considerable attention. More than once, someone in the street would come to a full halt, stare me in the eye, and one even asked, “Who are you?”
I would sometimes chat with these friendly people, whom I took to be an informal greeting committee, albeit some struck me as a bit strange, even by my standards. Then, usually deciding we had little in common other than a superficial interest in the colour black, I would continue on my way, my costume drawing more looks from other passersby.
Nor did I know that Hamilton is the Masonic capital of Canada. Even if someone had told me all this, it would have meant nothing to me, a young woman of 23 with a B.A. in History and English, and very few marketable skills, one of which was writing.
It was on York Street that my strange adventure began. York Street was originally an Indian trail, and later a military road built along a portion of Hamilton harbour. It was lined with old, Victorian-style mansions which offered cheap rent and access to a neighbourhood where hippies had gathered, a few years earlier. Not much was left of that scene: a natural food store, a coffee house offering folk music, one or two book or record shops. And a few community organizations, like the newly opened Hamilton Women’s Centre, which was the first place I went to look for work in early January of 1974. A bad choice as it turned out, but a logical one since I was qualified for the job of coordinator. I arrived for my first interview, in my long black cape, and before I knew it I was on the short list, and then hired. I was advised, as a welcoming gesture, to pay a visit to one of the Centre’s founding directors, a woman named Nairn Galvin. I wondered why, and was told “You would have a lot in common with her.” So, out of politeness but also curiosity, I phoned her number and was invited over for dinner. As it turned out, Nairn Galvin was a witch, a role she played to the hilt, living with 14 cats in a candlelit apartment filled with rare knickknacks, Indian tapestries, and the like. She served me wine in a silver goblet, and told me about her decision, at age 30, to become a witch – up to then, she’d been a Catholic nun. Then she read my Tarot cards. It was all very interesting – no more than that. I thanked her and went home. That night, she appeared to me in a dream in which she seemed to be trying to take possession of my soul. I managed to fend her off and never saw her again.
My job as women’s centre coordinator began in a blaze of light, but ended in dishonour. First, the Hamilton Spectator sent a reporter to interview us for a feature. She quickly took a deep dislike to my two co-workers, and focused on me. When the article came out, quoting me liberally, while describing the other two in disparaging terms, there was hell to pay.Intensely bored with feminist politics, I decided to quit.
I found another job, a few doors away, writing a booklet on the history of York Street for a citizen’s group that was protesting the demolition and redevelopment of the neighbourhood. That kept me employed until mid summer.
I was riding my bicycle down York Street in the direction of downtown, having just dropped off the finished manuscript of York Street: a People’s History. I’d also collected my final pay cheque. I was suddenly, once again, unemployed, but that hardly mattered, just then. The sun was slanting through the trees, glinting off the windows of old abandoned buildings as I pedalled east in rush hour traffic. I passed the natural foods store, where I had worked for a few days earlier that spring.When I stopped at a traffic light another cyclist came up on my left. He looked to be a boy of about 19, small and scrawny, with lank black hair tied down with an Indian headband to reveal one pointed ear, like that of an elf.
"So, where you goin'?"
The light changed and I took off, ignoring him.
"Aw come on, " he persisted, cycling alongside. We exchanged a few brief sentences. Somewhere downtown, where we parted ways, he expressed his wish that we meet again sometime.
The next day was a Saturday and I was parking my bike at the market, when he showed up again on his bicycle. "Why’d you take off so fast? " he asked referring to the previous evening. We chatted the length of time it took for me to lock up and get away. He reminded me of some grinning, undernourished street kid, the kind that attaches himself to you in a foreign country and begs to show you the sights. I found him unthreatening since I towered over him in height. I didn't need anyone to guide me around Hamilton. I was already familiar with its constricted social life. All the well-off people lived up the hill, overlooking the downtown where the rest of us went about our lives. Hamilton had a light and dark side. It seemed you were either a practicing, fundamentalist Christian – one of the saved – or you were like this boy. One of the damned.
At the time, I had made friends with a woman my own age, a devout Christian running an agency called “Adopt a Grandparent.” From an old, Anglican, Hamilton family, Margi was one of the few people I had met, so far, with whom I could actually talk.
The following afternoon, a Sunday, Margi and I decided to cycle over to the Botanical Gardens and around Hamilton escarpment. We were crossing the Queen E. bridge, where we had a view of a park called Cootes’ Paradise. Midway across the bridge, I caught sight of a familiar figure cycling toward us in the opposite lane. He screeched to a halt an did a U turn. " "Three times in three days,” he said. “Must be a reason!" He was wearing a little cap, this time, and carrying a beat-up knapsack. By now, I almost felt I knew him.
There was no dissuading him. He came along with us on our ride and kept up a stream of conversation, first with me, then with Margi, who had a softer disposition and bigger breasts. We came to a densely wooded area, and as we passed a cemetery, our friend threw down his bike and told us to wait while he crossed the highway and headed for one of the grave stones. He stood by the grave for several minutes. From where we waited by the roadside, we could see his lips moving as if in prayer.
Jumping on his bike again, he told us he'd been talking to his grandfather, who had passed away some years earlier but often still appeared to him in dreams. A little farther on, he stopped again, pulled a hunting knife out of his backpack, and disappeared into the woods. We wondered if we should wait this time, or keep going, but after a minute or two he came crashing through the brush and was back on his bike. "Got a trap in there I was checking," he explained. "And now I have something I want to show you girls. It's a lookout at the top of the escarpment, where you can see for miles. A fantastic view of Lake Ontario and a 500-foot drop to the ground below."
We said, No thank you. We needed to be getting home now. We'd skip the view, and the 500-foot drop, this time around. We turned around and an hour later we were back downtown, but still he clung to us. He said he was suddenly feeling very sick, and needed us to come home with him, now. We offered to take him to the hospital. He rode off in a huff.
At her front door, Margi wondered why I’d befriended him in the first place. I said I’d never befriended him. He’d attached himself. He’d turned up three times in three different places in three days. “Maybe he’s following you,” she suggested. Given the locations of our encounters, especially the last one, in the middle of a long bridge over a ravine that divided Hamilton into two separate halves, I didn’t think so. “Well, you attracted him,” she concluded.
I braced myself for the prospect of running into him every day for the next few months, but I never saw him again, the rest of that summer, fall and winter. In September, I found a new apartment on East Avenue, not far from downtown. In November, my father died, and my mother came to stay with Margi and me. I was working a split shift as a proofreader at the Spectator, correcting wire service copy and front page stories which were often about gangsters and terrorists in Quebec, stories that painted a bizarre picture of Montreal as a violent, crime-ridden place – although I remembered it as a place where art and culture flourished.
Then came spring, when my mother and I decided to move back there.
I had packed up my belongings, and was arranging the final details. Margi would take over the apartment at 72 East Avenue North, # 2.
A few days before we were to leave, a misdirected letter arrived in our mailbox. It was an official looking letter, from National Steel Car and was addressed to a James Brewster, 72 East Avenue. Apartment 2. I had never received any of James Brewster’s mail before, but I assumed he must live at 72 East Avenue South, a few blocks away across Main Street. I pencilled in “South” but forgot to mail the letter. It stayed on the table in our hallway until the day before we were to leave, when I dropped it in a mailbox on my way to the laundromat.
When I walked in with my bags of dirty laundry, sitting in a chair near the door was my little pointy-eared friend. He looked surprised, as well as pleased, that our paths had crossed again. I avoided his eyes as I loaded up the machine, added detergent, shoved in three quarters. “Want to go for coffee?” he asked. I declined, and hurried out the door. Then I made sure to stay away for at least two hours, so he would be gone by the time I went back to use the dryer.
I half expected my clothes to be gone, too, by then, but instead, on my machine I found note in ballpoint pen and round, childish handwriting:
“Come on over to my place and have a beer with me.”
It was signed:
“James Brewster, 72 east Avenue South. Apt. 2.”
I reread the note several times, not quite believing it. I wished to God I had not mailed that letter! Otherwise, I would have shown it to Margi along with the note, and got her reaction.
In a city of 500,000 people, what were the chances that any individual you randomly met on the street even once would turn out to be living at the mirror image of your own address? One in 500,000… I guessed. And the chances that person would show up three times on three successive days, and attach himself to you for no apparent reason, and that this person would also be someone who speaks to the dead, carries a knife, and tries to lure you to his apartment, not once, but twice. And that he would resurface a few days after you received a letter for him in your mailbox, and 48 hours before you were to leave town for good –
The odds of all that happening, by the normal laws of probability, were infinitesimal.
Even if I had wanted to go over to James Brewster’s for a beer, there was no time – we were leaving. And even had there been time, I would not have answered this invitation. I had read Jung, and thought of myself as a connoisseur of strange coincidences. But this one set me on edge.
I couldn’t even prove it had actually happened. No one but me had touched, or seen, the letter addressed to him that had arrived at our house. Other than me, no one but Margi had met James Brewster – and she had only met him once, eight months earlier, not three days in a row, as I had.
Had we gone home with him that day, last summer, when he told us he was sick and needed our company, we would have found out where he lived. But that did not change the fact that, a few weeks later, we would move into our new place, at almost exactly the same address.
It was not just the improbability of such a series of coincidences occurring in the order that they did. It was my sense, even back then, that they were not coincidences, but something else, for which I had no proper name and no explanation, except one that whispered that there were “forces” out there, capable of arranging such a series of events. That it was up to me, the single witness, to figure it out. And most important: it was up to me NOT to get involved in asking How or Why. Because at the bottom of it all, lay a powerful Joker who might not be joking. One does not pop over for a friendly beer with such a joker, or his representative.
Not that, of course, James Brewster would have known the answers . I suspected, rather, that he was someone who dabbled in strangeness. That he liked to flow with the dark currents that ran through town. In the 18 months I'd lived there, I had heard enough. People had told me about the covens that met at the University or on the escarpment where a friend’s daughter and her friends had stumbled on animal bones from a recent sacrifice. Another friend’s upstairs neighbour had been writing a sociology paper on one of these covens, when she was warned to abandon her project. She didn’t, and soon after she fell three storeys, and was now a vegetable.
And there was Nairn Galvin, and her silver chalices, and those chronically angry women at the Women’s Centre. And the people who took my black cape as a sign that I was one of them. And the lost-looking creature I sometimes saw, when I worked the night shift, prowling the downtown streets in sequins and platform shoes and David Bowie hair. There was spooky Dundurn Castle and the Masonic Lodge, and the Pentecostal Church, and the cloud of depression that hung over Hamilton, a city that seemed to exist on the dividing line between heaven and hell. All of it was strange. All of it suggested a world of secrets and closed doors guarded by powerful entities – some of this world, others not.
I closed the door on all that on the day we left for Montreal. Every now and then, on a very few occasions, I told this story to someone, always drawing the same blank stare. “What do you think it means?” I would ask.
No one had a thing to say. Except Leonard Cohen, who nodded. “It’s good you told me that story, because I’m one of the few people around who might understand it.” He never elaborated, however.
John Lilly, the neuroscientist who liked to spend time in flotation tanks on LSD and Ketamine, at around the same time Leonard was in similar experiments at McGill, came up with a theory that there are entities in the universe who arrange these mind-bending coincidences that can change our lives. You can read about them here.
I know nothing of those entities. I do think there are dimensions we can enter, however, in which the laws of cause-and-effect are scrambled.
Another just happened to me when I published this blog.
I was looking for an image to represent "Hamilton" and found several depicting the Mohawk leader, Joseph Brant. That's how I learned that good old James Brewster bore an uncanny resemblance to one of Hamilton's legendary personalities, Joseph Brant.
Brant was a peculiar figure, with traits that normally don't coincide: he was both Mohawk and Mason, as well as a United Empire Loyalist. Originally from Ohio, he fought with the British against the American revolutionaries who were making raids on the Canadian border, and in the area around Hamilton on Lake Ontario. He would have been very familiar that old Indian trail that later became a military road and later, York Street.

The resemblance is so outstanding that in the first seconds when the image of Brant came up, all I could see was the face of James Brewster grinning out at me.
I wonder where he is now... and why it has taken me all these years to write this story.

Mind Control 101

2011-09-02T00:41:00.000-07:00

The man in the photo, taken at McGill University in 1951, is 17-year-old Leonard Cohen. He's wearing a blindfold, and his ears, fingers and hands are encased in padded restraints which prevent movement and cut off all sensory stimulation. This is one of Dr. Donald Hebb's famous/notorious sensory isolation experiments, for which student volunteers where paid the then-princely sum of $20 a day. Some of the volunteers were unable to stand this torture for more than a few hours. Some tore off the bandages and banged on the door of the isolation chamber, screaming and crying to be released.

Back in the 1980s, when I lived next door to him, Leonard Cohen once told me he enjoyed these experiments. He said he learned to dissociate, leave his body, and go on long voyages through the universe. The experience was so pleasant, that later, he volunteered to be placed in a flotation tank while on LSD. He enjoyed that, too.

We now know that D.O. Hebb's sensory isolation experiments became the foundation for torture techniques used by the CIA etc. in its secret prisons around the planet. Hebb, a neurologist, had CIA clearance, and also allegedly experimented on small children, mainly orphans and aboriginal children who arrived in his laboratory courtesy of McGill and the RCMP. Having access to human guinea pigs made Hebb's research that much more impressive. He also, of course, worked with rats and monkeys. It seems quite likely that his famous "rat" study on the effects of sensory isolation on IQ, would have been based on his experiments with children. McGill, at the time, was controlled by a network that included many British-trained, mind controlled pedophules with an interest in eugenics -- and probably still is today.

In 1951, when this photo wss taken, Leonard Cohen was 17, i.e. still a minor. One wonders who signed the permission slip -- his mother? Or perhaps they just didn't bother with those little details, back then.

Leonard Cohen went on to become a poet of note. In fact, that same year, 1951, he published his first book, Let Us Compare Mythologies. It would be interesting to do a textual analysis of all of Cohen's writing - someday when I have more time I plan to do that -- combing his poetry and novels for references to the secret program that he has been part of for most of his life. Up to now, his biographers seem to have overlooked all the references to hospitals, (Nazi) doctors, psychiatric experiments, electroshock, etc. They also have failed to adequately explain the missing years (mid-1950s, i.e. peak years of the MKULTRA program) when Cohen did smoe sort of graduate work at Columbia University in New York.
McGill and Columbia happened to be co-epicenters of MKULTRA research into mind control. As were certain studios and filmmaking teams at the NFB, the arm of British intelligence that brought our Leonard to national attention in 1966, with the film LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, MR. LEONARD COHEN. As wss the Silva Mind Control organization, where Leonard met Suzanne in the late 1960s. As was Nashville, where his musical career took him later. And let's not forget the Chelsea Hotel, where he hobnobbed with musicians and CIA programmers like Kris Kristofferson, always mentioned whenever Cohen introduces his song "Chelsea Hotel" -- about the time he had sex with mind-controlled singer Janis Joplin, who, that night, was apparently looking for Kristofferson one of the "handsome men" she preferred, according to the song, one of the creepiest in Cohen's repertoire in my opinion.

It's very obvious to anyone who happens to have followed Cohen's career, that the singer-songwriter who composed I'm Your Man has spent most of his life surfing the mind control circuit, that took him from McGill to New York and then Europe where he connected with one of the Rothschilds.

Let's just say that early on, he "volunteered" and the rest is musical history. This is a topic for a long article, but for now I'll keep it small and personal. Lately I've been thinking back to times when I witnessed Leonard Cohen's programming either in operation, or failing to operate properly. That is, when I lived next door to him and one or more of his handlers. By the mid-80s had many people grouped around him who seemed to be there to smooth things over. He also once told me depended heavily on doctors and psychiatrists at the (notorious MKULTRA hospital) Allan Memorial Institute, a half hour walk from his house near Saint Laurence Boulevard. In fact, during those years, he frequented the swimming pool behind the Allan, where doctors, nurses, and other hospital staffers hung out with people from the Entertainment scene -- I was told by a former orderly that the purest cocaine from the hospital pharmacy could be bought beside the pool on just about any summer day.

It is one thing to meet and get to know Leonard Cohen. It would be hard to imagine or find a more charming, generous, affable, funny guy to have as a neighbour. Unfortunately, though, that's only one of many personas, or "alters" -- Cohen has many. I wouldn't like to guess how many. I suspect there may be hundreds. What this means is, getting to know him is virtually impossible, because his various alters are not necessarily aware of one another. This explains why, while living next door, I witnessed events that sometimes made no sense, and would have been impossible if Cohen were a normal person, with a single core personality.

Mind controlled entertainers and public figures -- and this also applies to certain mind-controlled politicians, like Pierre Trudeau, a friend of Cohens -- require handlers to help them manage situations caused by their having various alters that don't all work together. These handlers, e.g. Kris Kristofferson, who likely was Janis Joplin's programmer -- are there to coordinate and conceal the fact that these public figures are "programmed multiples."

An incident comes to mind that occurred in about 1985, when I had been living next door to Cohen for two years. During that time, I had rarely seen him. I was busy, in those days,making a living by writing and editing. I also had a weekly program on local community radio, went out with friends most evenings. I had little to do with my neighbours who, in many ways, behaved like members of an exclusive club.

The incident I'm thinking of happened out of the blue, one day. I got a phone call from Leonard, whom I hadn't seen in several months. He invited me next door for tea. Cautiously pleased with the invitation, which seemed to suggest we were back on a friendly footing, I rang his doorbell, he opened the door, and we drank tea in his kitchen. We chatted, he may have played me a new song or two, or showed me a drawing. Just like in the old days when we'd been friends.

Then he said he had an appointment somewhere and needed to take a bath. I offered to leave. He said, No, just sit here for a few minutes in case the phone rings. He got in the bath, I sat in the kitchen, and sure enough, the phone rings. It's Hazel, the woman next door. I tell her Leonard is in the bath, and to please call back in a few minutes, which she does. At this point, the story becomes a bit extraordinary. I am standing a few feet from the phone, and I can hear Hazel shouting. I can't make out what she's saying, but she is screaming what appears to be verbal abuse, and Leonard, who has his ear to the phone, becomes rigid and just listens. The screaming goes on for, maybe, half a minute during which he does not move, does not respond, or react. When the screaming stops he says "OK" and hangs up. The phone rings again, He picks it up. More of the same shouting. Once again, he listens without affect, without moving, and says "OK." Then he hangs up, turns to me, and in a blank tone says "You'd better go now." Which I do.

But I'm upset with Hazel, so I phone her when I get home, and leave a one-line message on her answering machine suggesting that she stop doing whatever it was she was doing when she phoned him, shouting like a drill sergeant.

Later that night, there is a meeting in his front room. I happen to walk by, and unusually, the blinds are up and I see Leonard, encircled by the people I thought of as his "cult followers". He is speaking to them, gesturing dramatic. I only get a glimpse of this meeting as I pass the window, but my snapshot impression is that he is asking for their help in some difficult matter that is causing him great anxiety.

And sure enough, half an hour later, I get a phone call, from a woman called Birgit, whom I know quite well, but consider to be a fairly hardcore Cohen groupie. She has come from the meeting. She arrives as I'm cooking supper, sits in my kitchen, and goes straight to the point. I have to move from the neighbourhood, she says, and stop harrassing Leonard Cohen. I'm, well, stunned. It's the first time anyone has spoken to me in two years about how I came to be living next door. The first time anyone has suggested it might be a problem. But I'm not stupid. I'm quite aware that my presence in the neighbourhood has caused concern for certain people. The fact, however, is, that I am there as the result of a peculiar coincidence. That there is no way I could have found this apartment on my own -- I'm there, and I can't really explain how it happens, in a city of 1 million people, I manage to move in next door to Leonard Cohen -- it just happened. That's it, that's all.

I also knew, back then and today, that nobody in Cohen's circle believed this. And neither do I, to this day, really understand how things like that happen. But that day, he hd invited me over, as if letting bygones be bygones, and it had appeared, for about an hour, that relations were back to normal -- until Hazel called, that is, and shouted into the phone, and he went numb.

And who called the meeting? And what was it about? No explanation was ever given. Another cult member, Charlie, phoned me the next day and invited me across the street to his place, for tea. We sat in silence. I didn't feel like talking until someone explained to me what was going on on that block.

No one ever did.

Looking back, in the light of what I know now, but had no notion of back then, I would say: yes, there was a cult. Leonard seemed to be at the head of it. His word held great weight, then and now. But the man who invited me over for tea and chatted normally earlier that day, was not the same man who addressed the meeting later that evening.

These were separate "alters" that might not have known of each other's existence. The alter that addressed the meeting did not recall having phoned me that day, and may not have recalled the two phone calls that came from Hazel -- which was when they "switched" --

A few years later, when I had all but forgotten this incident, Leonard phoned me again from next door. This time, he told me, he was in very bad shape. "I can't get from one second to the next," he said. "Can you come over? You're the only one who understands me."

Worried, I rang his doorbell and he let me in. He asked me to go shopping for him, to buy food because he didn't feel able to leave his house. "I'm on this new anti-depressant, but it's not working. I'm in an incredible state of anxiety."

Remembering that other day, five years earlier, I said "You must be doing something wrong. You need to be in some kind of therapy to figure it out."

That suggestion just seemed to alarm him. "The doctors at the Allan are doing everything they can for me. Drugs are the only solution."

That was in about 1990. It was one of the last times I saw Leonard in person. Every so often, I'd read an interview with him, but over the next 20 years it seemed he just kept giving the same interview over and over.

We live in an age of totalitarian Mind Control, and entertainers like Leonard are front-line soldiers -- as well as victims. We listen to them at our own risk.

Mysterous Doctor Fischer

2011-06-25T07:19:00.001-07:00

Another doctor who came to Canada from Nazi Germany is Dr. Martin Fischer, whose stellar career left a "harmful legacy" that some of his students are apparently still sorting out.

I learned about Dr. Fischer last year in a roundabout kind of way, when a judge, living in a small city in south-eastern Germany, suddenly contacted me. The judge, whom I will call Henry, had heard I was writing about secret Cold war experiments on children in Canada.

Henry appears to have been born in a Toronto mental hospital in 1959 or 1960, one of a series of illegitimate children fathered by Dr. Martin Fischer in a series of bizarre experiments at Lakeshore Psychiatric Hospital in Toronto.

When Henry was nearly 50, his adoptive parents told him the truth they had somehow managed to hide for decades: that he had been adopted, after his mother, a patient at Lakeshore, died in childbirth or shortly after. "Your real father was a Jewish doctor," said his mother. "They were experimenting on pregnant women at that hospital." After these cryptic remarks, his mother refused to speak any further on the question of Henry's birth, and remained silent til her death last year, in Germany, of cancer. His father had already died some years earlier.

Not long after the funeral, Henry flew to Toronto, and began contacting people there -- including the Jewish Genealogical Society, who told him the most likely candidate, and the only Jewish doctor at Lakeshore in the 1950s, was the celebrated Dr. Martin Fischer.

Anyone looking at Henry ought to have noticed he bore no resemblance whatsoever to the couple who had masqueraded as his parents all his life. But he happens to look quite a lot like Dr. Fischer, who became an influential figure through his work with the Children's Aid Society and later as the founder of the Canadian Art Therapy Institute with branches in Toronto and British Columbia. Dr. Fischer died in 1994, and his children, including a daughter who is a plastic surgeon in Toronto, refused to meet with Henry -- but sent their lawyer to question him.

During his brief conversation with the Fischer family attorney, Henry gathered that he was only one of a series of illegitimate Fischer children who have turned up over the years, looking for their father. He learned that Dr. Fischer came to Canada as a refugee from Nazi Germany in 1940, and spent time in a POW camp in Quebec before studying medicine in Toronto where he was "famous" for a time, after appearing in the 1967 NFB film, WARRENDALE.

Henry also learned a few strange facts about Toronto's Lakeshore Psychiatric Hospital, and its associated cemetery which contains the unidentified bodies of 1500 "patients" who died there during the Cold War.

Not knowing what else to do with these disturbing bits of information, Henry returned to Germany, where I met him last June.

He showed me documents which reveal his adoptive parents both worked at Lakeshore Psychiatric, and were in Canada during the exact same period -- 1953-64 -- when the MKULTRA program was in operation. His birth certificate, dated January 1960, appears to be a fake -- he believes he was actually born in 1959, and showed me a bizarre home movie from 1960 in which he appears as a large, talkative baby in a high chair at their home in New Toronto. His arrival was filmed by a friend of the family, and there is a voice-over narrative in German and broken English: "Der ist der Vater; this is the father; Die ist die Mutti -- she is the mother." Seriously, who films their own baby with a voice-over stating "I am this baby's mother" --

There was other footage of Henry as a boy on the ship back to Germany in June 1964 -- looking more like a 6-year-old than the 4-year-old he was supposed to be, not to mention that he was big for his age and very blond, unlike either parent.

Back in Germany, the family spent a year in Gottingen, and then moved to a town near Mannheim where they bought a new car and a large house. Not your typical struggling hospital workers. His father, a jack-of-all-trades who sidelined as a smuggler, went back to work for I.G. Farben -- yes, his dad had been an employee of the famous chemical firm in the early 1950s. Henry's mother went back to nursing, and with money that mysteriously arrived every month in a special bank account in Bremen, Henry was sent to the best schools in Germany. After a stint in the Air Force -- he failed to pass his officers' exams and was judged 'too emotional' for a military career -- he studied political science and co-founded the German Liberal Party with its current leader. From there, he began a career in media, which foundered when his partner suddenly died. In his late twenties, he went back to university to study law and is now a judge in Child Protection court.

Ironic, perhaps, that he now sometimes takes children away from their parents and places them in foster care.

Henry suggested I write about his story. But he strongly recommended I not mention anything about Nazi medicine. "Everyone is tired of hearing about that," he said. "And you need to make money."

Instead, he recommended I tell the story of his adoptive parents, and how his mother came to Canada aboard a refugee ship with several hundred patients who, Henry believes, were Jewish concentration camp survivors who spoke German. This would explain the fact that many of the nurses and staff at Lakeshore Psychiatric were German speaking. Henry believes these Jewish patients, for whom all records were destroyed in 1962 by the then-director, are the same people who are buried, three-deep, in unmarked graves in the hospital cemetery, which a group in Toronto are now attempting to "memorialize."

His theory: they were too badly damaged by their concentration camp experience, too sick and insane, to function anywhere other than a mental hospital run by German staff. Sending them on a ship to Canada was the easiest way to get rid of these victims, who otherwise would have posed a burden on Germany's struggling post-war economy -- or Israel's.

Henry's mother has a letter from a Jewish Refugee organization showing she had worked at one of their hospitals in Munich. The letter is signed by a doctor whose first name was Moses.

"Make it a story of hope," Henry exorted me. "Jewish refugees, insane and disoriented, travelling on a ship to Canada, to be taken care of for the rest of their lives at a mental hospital on a lake. Listening to the doctors and nurses, and looking out the window at the lawn and the trees, they probably think they are still in Germany."

"And the experiments on pregnant woomen?" I asked.

"Yes, mention those. And the fact that all 1500 of them ended up in a mass grave, with their names missing."

"And the fact that this hospital was run by doctors who worked for the Canadian military?"

"Yes, but leave out the Nazi stuff. Nobody's interested. And for the conclusion, you can add my other theory," continued Henry, who has a computer-like mind which he claims actually whirrs like a hard disk when it's working at top capacity. "That they destroyed the records in order to steal these Jewish patients' identities, and gave them to war criminals who were trying to enter Canada."

"War criminals, such as Nazi doctors."

"Yes, probably," said Henry. "But I want you to sell this book -- so leave that part out of it."

Dr. Ruth

2011-06-23T01:00:00.001-07:00

This photo shows a group of doctors standing on the steps of a notorious Montreal orphanage, ca. 1960. Circled, from left to right, are Dr. Ewen Cameron (CIA-funded head of psychiatry at the Allan Memorial Institute), Dr. Ruth Kajander (Lakeshore Psychiatric Hospital, Toronto) and Dr. Heinz Lehmann (Head of Research at McGill's Allan Memorial, Director of the Douglas Hospital, Verdun).

A survivor of military mind control now living in Ontario helped identified Dr. Ruth, the only woman in the photo. I later learned more about her through another survivor living in Thunder Bay, where Dr. Ruth, now in her mid-80s, still practices psychiatry.

If you google her name, you can find out what her patients think of her here:

According to survivor advocate Lynne Sharman, Dr. Ruth (Koeppe) Kajander's career began in Nazi Germany where, as the grand daughter of the "father of German pediatrics," and daughter of a Nazi physicians, she studied medicine at the University of Gottingen. An auspicious beginning: Gottingen had an interesting relationship with Columbia University in NYC, where much MKULTRA research was conducted. After the war she moved to Finland where she married her husband, Arthur Kajander. She emigrated to Canada in 1951, taking a job at Toronto's Lakeshore Psychiatric Hospital, which she soon left for a better position in research.

Why does a young Dr. Ruth Kajander appear in a photo on the steps of a Montreal Orphanage in 1960, along with another Nazi-trained psychiatrist (Heinz Lehmann) and MKULTRA programmer Ewen Cameron? What kind of "research" was Dr. Kajander doing on children in Canada at the time?

Allegedly Dr. Ruth Kajander has programmed children at Lakeshore Psychiatric in Toronto, and elsewhere around Canada, including Thunder Bay where she recently celebrated her 50th year in psychiatry and was honoured for her contribution.

I also recently learned Dr. Kajander was also awarded the Order of Canada on June 30, 2011, only ahttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif few days after this blog post first appeared.

A NOTE ON REMOTE VIEWING

Dr. Ruth first surfaced on my radar during a remote viewing experiment I participated in with Harley Monte in Montreal. At the time, I had never heard of her -- and neither had anyone else in this remarkable remote viewing session. Harley and other remote viewers described a group photo in which a woman bearing a remarkable resemblance to Dr. Kajander appeared with several other MKULTRA doctors associated with McGill in 1960.

Harley even came up with her husband's first name: Arthur. With amazing accuracy, Harley and others described her as looking very much like Cruella DeVille in Disney's 101 Dalmations -- due to her severe hairstyle, and pronounced widow's peak. The information he and the group spontaneously channelled suggested she was involved in experiments on children, along with Lehmann (named in the session as "Leeman") and several others, possibly part of an international team of scientists conducting lethal experiments on Canadian children.

Remote viewing is used by the military for various purposes, and one of MKULTRA's covert aims was to train children as remote viewers. I view information that comes through remote viewers as a form of witness testimony, not a substitute for fact-checking. In my experience, Harley and his group score high in accuracy. Here is a sample of their work from that session:

PARTIAL TRANSCRIPT OF REMOTE VIEWING SESSION, November 2004.

Just let me take one more look around here. Oh! On the wall there’s a picture of six men in white coats. You want to meet the doctors?

There’s a Chinese doctor. The names aren’t there that I can see, they may have been added later but at this time when the picture was taken they’re not there.

There’s a short man, wide shouldered, blackish grey hair, glasses.

The older woman, the shape of her face. You know the 101 Dalmations? The actress? Very similar there, the eyes... there is a situation in her own family at the present time and she’s not bearing up very well, rumour has it she will be leaving in the next month or so.

She’s not Canadian is she?

She looks very British but it’s more just how she has made herself up to be, and her shoes are weird, I have never seen shoes like that before, you know the old type that button up the side, she has a mark on her hand, right here.

Birthmark?

No it’s an injury. I don’t know if she had her hand crushed or something to an extent, and when she writes she writes like this. And there’s something happening to a child in her family at the present time. The time, wherever I am (1960).

I’m getting a name Leeman...

Arthur. There’s an “Arthur” here.

Cold, very cold. A lot of cold air around him. A mean person. I just feel he was totally disconnected, had no empathy, no, just cold, no feelings for these children.

Was he doing a job or was he out to make a name for himself?

I’m not sure, I just know whatever happened did not bother him at all. They weren’t human to him. They were like animals. They were like subject for tests.

I’m getting Russia. I think one of the people, maybe Arthur, I’m seeing a coat with long, buttons all the way down the front, double breasted. I think experiments, lots were going on there, I see snow, I see very wide steps, a very large building, very big square stones and very wide stairs where there are railings not just two on the side, more railings, going on, I got the word “government” -- whoever, someone wore that coat, it’s like an army green. Drab green and brass buttons wool coat

Dr. Mengele Comes to Quebec, 1949

2011-06-13T04:40:00.001-07:00

These photos from a yearbook published in 1949 by Hopital Saint Michel Archange in Quebec city, were sent to me by a friend in Ontario. I believe the man on the left in the first photo, bending down to examine a boy in a wheelchair, is Dr. Josef Mengele, the “Angel of Death” of Auschwitz, who had interned in pediatrics at the University of Leipzig.

My friend Jane obtained the yearbook from the daughter of a Duplessis orphan who lives near Ottawa. It lay in a trunk for years. I'm extremely grateful to the women involved in bringing these images to light.

The other two images, from the same section of the yearbook, show recent achievements at that hospital in the field of neurology at the time.

Saint Michel Archange Hospital is notorious as a place where many Duplessis orphans disappeared in secret experiments. Its 1949 yearbook is festooned with dedications and photos of Quebec Premier Maurice Duplessis, then Canadian Prime Minister Louis Saint Laurent, and various dignitaries of the Roman Catholic Church including Cardinal Leger. This is not entirely surprising, since Dr. Mengele escaped Europe in 1948 with the help of the Vatican "Rat Line" which brought him safely to Argentina. From there, he moved to Brazil, Paraguay, and points beyond -- including, some have said, Montreal.

There is a stunning similarity between these photos, and my 2004 interview with Duplessis orphan Silvio Day who worked as an orderly in 1960 at another Quebec hospital, where he transported bodies of children murdered in Nazi-style medical experiments from the operating room to the "Locker Room of the Dead" and burial behind the hospital. The scenes he describes from memory – of nuns and orderlies in a zombie-like state, working together with doctors in experiments on young orphans – are perfectly illustrated in these photos taken ten years earlier. It's also interesting that a man bearing a strong resemblance to Dr. Mengele appears in both Day's account, and the yearbook photos.

A bizarre discovery – but is it proof?

I went to the Montreal Holocaust Memorial Centre with the photo of Dr. Mengele examining the boy in the wheelchair, and they quickly dismissed it for predictable reasons: the vast quantity of bogus Mengele sightings, and the poor quality of the jpeg image I produced.

On the other hand, these experts could not prove it is not Mengele. The white-coated man in the photo appears to be exactly the right age (late 30s), slim build, and general appearance (note the hairline) as Dr. Mengele who was 38 in 1949, had escaped from Europe that same year and gone into hiding in South America. Mengele is known to have used various aliases, as well as his own name, and to have travelled around North America and Europe during the Cold War years when he allegedly worked for the US Department of Defence and even (for a time) McGill University.

His sponsors at the Vatican were high officials and member of the P-2 Lodge, which helped many leading Nazis escape prosecution for war crimes. Quebec’s Prime Minister, Maurice Duplessis was known for his pro-Nazi sympathies, and had corresponded with Hitler's Foreign Minister, Von Ribbentrop, before WW2, when the Nazis offered to send some of their young scientists to Quebec.

"So what if it's Mengele?" asked one of the Holocaust experts -- a question that had not occurred to me.

My guess is, the hospital published this yearbook, and included these photos, to demonstrate that it was making progress with the secret program laid out in 1944 at the Quebec Conference, the year Maurice Duplessis, re-elected as Quebec premier, sat at the table with Roosevelt, Churchill, MacKenzie King and Allen Dulles, to iron out details of a clandestine agreement by which Quebec’s orphan population would be placed at the disposal of the British and American military in their top secret program of chemical and biological warfare weapons development, some of which was based downriver at Grosse Ile. Some of these experiments involved psychosurgery, e.g. lobotomies, which witnesses like Silvio Day say were performed on orphans. Mengele’s work at Auschwitz involved Trauma-Based Mind Control would become the basis of the covert MKULTRA program in 1953, signed into effect by Allen Dulles in 1953, a few months before thousands of Quebec’s institutionalized orphans were relabelled “mental patients” and transported to hospital like Saint-Michel Archange in Quebec City, where many disappeared in drug trials and other criminal experiments.

Fascist-leaning Maurice Duplessis would have been happy to allow Mengele enter Quebec, in return for a place at the table of the Secret Government. So goes the “conspiracy theory” that explains how Canadian officials sold out a generation of children in order to profit from illegal weapons research

Below are photos of Mengele, probably taken in the late 1930s when he was graduating from medical school.

THEIR SATANIC MAJESTIES

2010-05-07T12:15:00.001-07:00

Here in Greece, my friend and I have been making little orgone generators to try to improve the energy field around our house, because there is so much electromagnetic radiation coming from the cell phone towers and the military, making people sick. These orgone cones are quite easy to make if you have quartz crystals -- and we do -- and after I had made a few I started "distributing" them around to the tower sites within a 3 or 4 km radius of our house. I used a pendulum to help me find the right spots to leave the generators (also known as Holy Hand Grenades, named by Don Croft who devised the method I am following) -- the first few times, I was impressed at how helpful the pendulum was at directing me to places which turned out to be perfect, and which I could not have found on my own. We also have noticed a major decrease in the negative energy we are feeling, and since we started doing this the whole area seems to be changing -- it's hard to say if this is really happening, but it just seems that things are more harmonious, and nature is looking more and more beautiful.
So last week, I suddenly felt the urge to visit Samothrace, a 2-3 hour ferry ride from Lemnos. Themis tried to discourage me, by telling me that there is a lot of black magic on that island. He mentioned reports that members of the British Royal Family are frequent visitors to certain sites on the island, where they participate in secret rituals. My intuition still kept telling me to go, and to bring along one of our orgone generators and plant it there, to improve the energy and foil the dark schemes of Charles and Camilla...
So on Saturday at 6:30 am I took the ferry, and after a very gloomy voyage through fog, landed in the port of Samothrace where the sun finally appeared. The sea was throwing off sparks unlike any I have ever seen before. It seemed the whole island was shimmering with energy and light.
Once off the boat, though, it was just another typical Greek island, with bars and cafes and men sitting around drinking coffee. I had not done any research, so I bought a guide book in one of the shops and quickly read about the ancient mystery site on the north coast of the island, a mere 11 km. from the port. I found a bike rental place, rented an old clunker for $6, and took off pedalling along the coastal road in the direction of the ruined temple of the “Great Gods.”
The sites on the north coast of Samotrace were used by a mystery cult which was second only to the one at Eleusis, involving the goddesses Demeter, Athena and Cybele (Artemis or Diana), with Hades (Pluto) and Persephone in there somewhere. There's a ruined temple, and various circular ruins where initiations were enacted.
It took me about half an hour to reach the archaeological sites, but for some reason were all locked up and the entire mountainside was enclosed behind high fences. It was only 10:30 a.m., and I figured all I had to do was get somewhere near the place where the Royal Family held its rituals. So I kept on cycling, enjoying the beautiful weather and the waves crashing on the beach.
I came to a forested area which seemed to be heavily populated by black goats peering from the hillside as I pedalled past. Normally in Greece I like to be around goats, but these were a different breed, and it seemed very creepy that they should be showing up on the way to an ancient mystery site of animal sacrifice. The guidebook didn’t say anything about human sacrifice, so I was thinking “I will let the pendulum guide me to an appropriate spot on a mountainside, perhaps overlooking one of the ruins.” I specifically asked to be taken to the spot used for rituals by the Prince of Wales and his sweetheart. I visualized some hilly area in the open, with lots of old stones baking in the sun, but really I had no idea where I was headed or what I would find.
At some point I stopped to check again, and the pendulum told me to continue on down the main road for another 260 meters. I walked the bike so as to pace it out exactly. At 200 meters, I came to a shaded roadside picnic-type area with a rushing spring. I asked the pendulum if I could drink the water as I had forgotten to bring any. It said no, continue on for 60 - 70 more meters.
The north side of Samothrace is relatively lush, and has sulphurous hot springs in the mountains. I was approaching this wild area, where there are lots of very spooky-looking "plane trees" which can grow very big and twisted and often have hollowed-out centres, and some of them look almost human like the Ents in Lord of the Rings.
At 60 meters, the 2-meter high wire fence (preventing people reaching the ruins illegally by circling back through the forest) suddenly dipped to less than half a meter, and I was looking up at a sandy cliff, about 5 metres high, covered with trees and brush. I noticed there was a very narrow path, possibly a goat track, winding upward from the bottom. It was easy to step over the fence, hide my bike behind a bush, and then I climbed to the top of the sandy bluff, being careful to grab onto bushes and not slip off the edge.
Up above was the forest. I was now standing in a small clearing, with lots of wide, low bushes that spread in circles along the ground like large clumps of ferns. The pendulum told me to hang a right, although this meant walking into some taller, dead bushes with spreading branches that blocked the path in all directions. The pendulum insisted that I get past these dead bushes and into another spot where there were some very large trees. With each step I took, branches were snapping loudly, and it occurred to me these bushes were there as a barrier, i.e. no way an intruder could forward without making a racket and sending a warning to whoever might be gathered in the space ahead.
It was 11 a.m., broad daylight, and there was no one to hear me as I crashed through and found myself in a deserted grove which I immediately recognized as the site of something really awful. There were three large boulders on the ground set in a semi-circle, one of them rectangular and very flat and smooth, another one round, and another taller more irregular at the far edge of the thicket.
These large stones stood facing two huge hollowed trees which guarded the cliff edge. Both trees had their backs to the sea, and were shaped just like human beings with upraised arms, and the hollowed out part of each tree was large enough to hold a fully grown adult. It was impossible to look at them without imagining someone being tied to them. On the ground near the boulders were two round pits which had been recently filled with twigs and leaves, neatly arranged.
I have never seen or felt anything like the place where I was standing, clearly the site of something awful. It also felt ancient, like a space designed by nature for a twisted purpose, not nature as we know it, but something Gothic, almost alien. I've seen similar places in the woods England, and also Louisiana, but never before in Greece. The trees might have been 100 years old, but maybe more. The three boulders could have been brought in from the archaeological site. The square flat stone definitely looked like it was designed for ritual slaughter -- maybe the twin fire pits were for roasting organs and entrails! My imagination was running a bit wild but there was a horrible vibration in this clearing. I had been guided to this spot in the midst of a forest overlooking a road which was used mainly for ordinary rural traffic -- and what little tourism there is on Samotrace -- but whatever happened in this grove was not for tourists.
Not only was the space defended on all sides by thick circular bushes, and invisible from the road because it was perched on a fenced-off cliff -- the likelihood of coming across it by accident while tramping illegally through the forest was virtually nil -- but even if you lost and crazy enough to stumble onto it, you might not notice what sort of place it was. You would have to be led there, or you would never find it.
I was taking all this in, breaking out in a cold sweat, wondering where I should put my Holy Hand Grenade so I could get out of there. Just then, I heard something go "Baaaah" from right nearby and nearly jumped out of my skin. About 10 metres away at the edge of the clearing, a white long-horned goat stood watching. Up to that moment, there had been a frozen silence. Next, a bird suddenly made a very disturbing, broken-up noise from one of the treetops. I felt surrounded by fearful animals who had witnessed something here and were waiting.
I started desperately looking around for an obvious place to leave my orgone contraption. There were several possible spots: I went to the tree, but the pendulum said no, not there. It directed me to the farthest of the three boulders where there was a space with loose dirt and small stones -- a good place to bury a small object, which I did, in about two seconds. Another birdcall came from overhead – I recognized the pigeon that the Greeks call "Dekaocturo" because it makes a soothing sound like "Dekaocturo" which means number 18. This seemed to be the all-clear signal because then other birds started singing, and I could feel the fear dissipating.
I backed away and stumbled through the crackling bushes, breaking lots of branches in my hurry to leave. I looked down from the top of the bluff, saw the road and then saw my bike still down in the gully. Getting back down the crumbling sandy path seemed a lot harder than coming up, but before I had time to think, the rocks and gravel simply gave way and I slid all the way to the flowing stream at the bottom. What a relief to get out of there fast, without any scratches.
I jumped on the bike and pedaled as fast as I could along the road till I came to another picnic spot, also totally deserted, and stopped to catch my breath. It was 11:30 a.m. I was in a state of total amazement that all this had happened, and what did it mean? On the way back to the port, I saw only one black goat. It was kneeling by the roadside. This also seemed weird at the time. I had never seen a goat do that before. It seemed to be saying, Hats off to you, Lady, and thanks for dropping by. I wondered if some of those wild black goats are actually human victims trapped in animal bodies.
When I got back to the port, I had a swim near a little roadside chapel dedicated to St. John. For the rest of the day, I did healthy, tourist-y things, such as climb Mount Saos in the scorching sun, arriving half-dead at 3 pm in the beautiful village of Chora which hangs off a mountainside, where I had lunch. For that hour or two it was like being in heaven, and I partly forgot about the Satanic grove by the sea. In general, Samothrace seemed like a wonderful, unspoiled place, full of lovely people -- except for one local man who sat near me in a cafe, who acted bizarrely, inviting a passerby to play cards with him and then cheating -- he wasn't drunk but his speech was slurred and he wore this permanent smirk -- later it occurred to me he might be "possessed." The locals treated him with caution although the waiter told him off after he apparently blurted out something obscene in Greek and scared away an older lady.
The pendulum continued giving me good, accurate directions for the rest of the afternoon: predicting where I would eat lunch, and the reliability of my rented bike, and several other little "tests" that proved it does work. It told me not to visit the sulphurous springs, and also not to try to eat lunch in the village on the south side of the island which has a miracle chapel dedicated to the Virgin Mary -- which I later found out was mainly empty and deserted.
So I feel certain that place really is connected to the British Royal Family. I asked to be guided to the site of their secret rituals -- imagining this would lead me to the entrance to some archaeological relic, or maybe a lodge in the hills with sunburned people lawn-bowling then sneaking off at night to some tacky ceremony with torches and silly costumes. I certainly never imagined I would end up in the epicentre of evil.
I hope I don't sound hysterical! I have no doubts about the meaning and purpose of what I saw.
I got back to Lemnos on the boat at 10 pm, exhausted. Themis and I went out to a taverna and I told him all about my strange adventure. He’s never really surprised by anything, so he just said to be careful, as I could “lose power” if I keep this up.
The next day, the energy was a little crazy. We went picking mulberries and Themis had a flat tire. Later, I dreamed about Samothrace and being at the Church of the Virgin Mary in the village of Chora, and everywhere were bright, pink flowers. I also dreamed someone handed me a sealed, thick glass container filled with creepy, crawly centipedes and other poisonous creatures -- they were visible inside, but could not get out. And I hope this is a metaphor for the future: that these dark secrets will be known, but not unleashed on an unsuspecting world.
Today I'm writing this -- later, I'm going to make 2-3 more orgone generators. They clear away negative energy, which I am noticing more and more. They work in spirals. When placed in areas where there is a lot of negative, or even Satanic, activity, they first neutralize the area and then they turn it to positive.
"Buckingham Palace" came up in a couple of remote viewing sessions, as the source of the secret experiments on children and others. I did not try to "remote view" the scene in the grove last night, although I was tempted. Instead I asked for protection and fell asleep. Around midnight, in the opening moments of 06.06.06, I suddenly felt a strong jolt of energy which woke me up. I have no idea what that was -- it was a bit like a gun going off in my head. I'm just hoping the Holy Hand Grenade in the Glade had a dampening effect on the proceedings.
And that Charles and Camilla had a nice weekend, lawn-bowling,

Diana on Hydra, August 1997

2009-07-22T18:02:00.000-07:00

I also happened to be on Hydra when Princess Diana visited in her yacht, just two weeks before her death. It was early August, 1997, at the height of the tourist season, and from my rented apartment, I barely noticed the noise of a helicopter circling the island. Airborne paparazzi were keeping tabs on her from the sky, and later than day they caught her strolling along the road to Mandraki, the same road I had walked on the day John Lennon died. The photos of Diana on Hydra were sent out over the internet, and appeared in media around the world the following day. I met a store-owner who said she had come into his shop to browse, but he hadn’t recognized her until someone pointed her out. She and Dodi Fayed had sailed away soon afterward, and the excitement of her visit slid into the back pages of Hydra gossip.

Two weeks later, a few hours before she was killed in the Alma Tunnel, I went on one of my aimless walks along the sea wall. I was feeling decidedly strange that night. I’d just mistaken what day it was, thinking it the night I had agreed to gallery-sit for a friend who had a show of paintings at one of the hotels. But when I arrived, the gallery was closed, so I thought I would go have a beer somewhere and watch the sunset. Arriving at a seaside tavern, which was deserted, before I even sat down I felt a sense that things in the world were about to shift. I can’t quite explain what I experienced that evening. I didn’t see haloes or auras, but nature and the objects in it suddenly appeared flooded by some invisible substance. There was a one-ness about everything, as if I were viewing life through the lens of death. Not “death” in the sense of loss and sadness, but death as the dead experience it: a liberation into a world where boundaries dissolve and things – like the little fishing boat that was chugging into the harbour – merge with their surroundings as if we all partook of the same great Mother. I looked around for someone to share this feeling with, but I was completely alone. I drank half my beer – the feeling persisted. It had nothing to do with an alcoholic buzz, or a sense of well-being. It was rather as if the structure of reality had reorganized itself, or my own brain patterns were being altered by a sudden tidal wave of insight into how things really are. I really can’t put words on it, nor could I then, so I stood up and continued walking, thinking I would pass report this experience to the first acquaintance I laid eyes on. Which is what I did.

Seeing Roger Green at his usual table in the Pyrofani, I invited myself over and said “I just want to go on record this evening, as having had a very strange experience while I was looking at the sea.” He listened and said he’d take note of it. Before I left him to finish his dinner in peace, I added, “I just have the feeling, that some major event, or shift, is about to happen, and we need to prepare for it.”

I woke up the next morning at about 5:30, at the first light. Normally I would have turned over and gone back to sleep, but something didn’t feel right. I went to the front door and opened it onto a cloudless morning. Usually, the local cats were waiting nearby, but this morning they failed to show up screaming for scraps. I imagined the worst: that the neighbours had poisoned them, and now they were gone forever. Not just the cats, I suddenly thought, but everything in my life that had ever meant anything, had now come to a sudden, sad end. It was as if I were staring down the length of a long tunnel that led straight into nothingness. Compared with my sense of lightness the previous evening, this was dark and disturbing, like my dreams during the night which had woken me several times.

All day, I stayed indoors, and saw no one till evening when I was due to meet my friend at the gallery. At the hotel, the television was on and they were showing images of Diana. I soon caught on to what had just happened.

A few days before, I’d been at the magazine stand in the port of Hydra, looking at the headlines from all over Europe and the UK. The British papers, in those days, often carried photos of the princess, but that day there was a computer-generated image of her with her mouth zipped up. One headline screamed “Diana has gone too far!” Diana had been speaking about landmines in the House of Lords that week, and the press was up in arms, it seemed. Along with the rest of the British establishment.

It was the second time in two decades that an earth-shaking death had occurred while I was on Hydra – and each time, I had picked up the signal beforehand.

What was it about that island that seemed – to me, at least – to link it to the sudden, violent deaths of people who proposed to change the world? First Lennon, then Diana.

First, we take Manhattan

2009-07-14T12:07:00.000-07:00

On the day John Lennon died, I was living on the Greek island of Hydra. Hearing “Try to See it My Way” sung by a 20-something girl sitting next to me on the hydrofoil going back to Hydra just last week, I suddenly realized that song – whose lyrics I barely remembered until she started harmonizing with the Beatles on her IPod – had once been important to me.

“Try to see it my way – only time will tell if I am right or I am wrong. Why d’you see it your way? There's a risk that we may fall apart before too long. We can work it out. We can work it out...”

It dawned on me that those half-forgotten lines were woven into my way of looking at the world. And that until John Lennon was shot, it had never occurred to me that things would not get worked out, in ways that did not include putting on uniforms and marching off to destroy other people in distant countries in order to “defend our way of life.” Or the assassination of gentle, confused souls like Michael Jackson.

But all that seems to have changed – at least in the outside world.

On the day John Lennon died, December 8, 1980, I happened to be living on Hydra. I had been in my room for days, reading, writing or trying to write. It was cold and damp and all I had to heat my room was a small electric coil heater, which Leonard Cohen had lent me two weeks earlier. I was afraid to plug it in because electricity was so expensive on that island. So to stay warm, I began taking afternoon walks. A two-hour walk up a mountain would generate enough body heat to last until evening when I could either go out to the only taverna that had a stove, or bundle up in bed and read myself to sleep.

Since the end of September, I had been visiting a few Greek islands, and travelling around Egypt and Israel.In Tel Aviv, in mid-November, I had hooked up with Leonard and his band, who were performing their final concert after a two-month tour of Europe. Now I was on Hydra, and so was Leonard. I was planning to spend the winter, writing a novel. What else does one do on a Greek island in winter, and what better place than Hydra? I knew the island from a 3-month visit the previous year. And this time I had a Canada Council grant, enough to cover rent and food for the next ten months, at least.

I had been living without a radio, let alone TV, since arriving on Hydra in the third week of November, at about the time the weather changed, making it necessary to find permanent shelter and a warm haven to work through the winter.

On the afternoon of December 9, I had had enough of writing. I needed a break from my tiny cement room, which had nothing in it but the basic necessities: bed, table, frig and hotplate. I decided to take a long walk northeast along the sea coast to the village of Mandraki.

It was a cold, windy day and the sky was streaked with clouds. Here and there the sun would break out without really warming the earth or the rocks. After half an hour I reached Mandraki, with its beach and scattering of houses abandoned for the winter. At the limits of the village, the road ended abruptly, so I turned right and continued on up one of the hills where I found a goat path to follow. The rocky slopes around Mandraki are known for quartz deposits, and chunks of crystal lie scattered on the ground. It’s said the crystal layer on Hydra is closer to the surface than elsewhere on earth, which gives rise to the idea that the island acts as a kind of radio receiver/ transmitter. People who come to live there often say they notice changes in their patterns of dreaming, or increased sensitivity to psychic experiences.

On that day, I was too engrossed in my own thoughts to notice crystals or rocks, let alone a shift in energy. I was feeling lonely and anxious, wondering how I would make it through a whole winter on this increasingly gloomy island. Once I reached the top of the hill, I sat down on a boulder to ponder the view: sea the colour of iron, stretching all the way to the bleak shores of the Peloponnesus. I could have walked along the ridge all the way to the nearest monastery, but smoke rising from a distant fire told me shepherds were camped up there. I decided to stay put and just meditate for a while.

Suddenly, out of nowhere, I began thinking of John Lennon and Yoko Ono. Where were they? What were they doing? I had not thought about them in years, really not since their “Bed-in for Peace” when they came to Montreal in 1969 and stayed at the Sheraton Mount Royal Hotel, talking to the media and entertaining guests. A friend of mine had gone downtown to meet them, and had spent a few hours in their room.

Since then, I had lost track of Lennon and his music, especially after the breakup of the Beatles. I much preferred Leonard’s style of music, and his songs. Still, for some reason that day, I could not get John and Yoko out of my mind. I heard the news of his shooting some hours later, either from the newspapers (which always arrived on Hydra from Europe and America the following day) or through a friend on Hydra who heard it on the radio. And then, like everyone else, I set about absorbing it.

My first thought was, it’s not true. And then: Lennon could not be dead, because I had just been talking to him on a mountaintop in Greece. Forever after, I would associate John Lennon’s death with climbing that hill at Mandraki, and sitting down on a boulder in a clearing on a remote island seeming to float between sea and sky. On the rare occasions on Hydra when I ran into someone of my generation, I told them that story. It made me feel better, to focus on that incident rather than the actual assassination.

Alone in my room, I told myself it didn’t matter that he was dead. His music would live on -- they were playing it everywhere in the cafes and bars that week and all through December. Besides, John had never been my hero, I thought, or even my favourite Beatle. I never had a favourite Beatle. The most I could say was thatI had liked him the way you might like an older boy several grades ahead of you in school, who was goodlooking and performed in the Christmas recital. I had listened to him sing, laughed at his quick, ironic wit – my friends and I had absorbed and tried to imitate his Liverpool accent and brand of humour. The Beatles had blown into our lives via the Ed Sullivan Show, and their music accompanied us through puberty and high school and later university, where it lost ground to the darker, more dangerous Rolling Stones. Ten years older than my graduating class, who in 1980 were just turning thirty, the Beatles were still too young to die. Their music defined our environment and values in ways we rarely stopped to think about.

I hadn't been following Lennon’s activities in New York, where he was becoming more political. Whatever I thought about his campaign for “Peace” – which struck me as a bit simple-minded – I never doubted Peace was worth fighting for, in non-violent ways, because it was better than the alternative. War in our time is for robots, not humans -- I still believe that, although ideologies have changed since 1980. What Mark David Chapman did that day was an act of war, and it was fuelled by a massive delusion. Whether or not he was a mind-controlled patsy – I believe he was -- Mark David Chapman failed miserably in his supposed mission. He ended a life that could have gone on to accomplish great things: we’ll never know. But he did not kill John Lennon – he shattered the vehicle in which the soul known as John Lennon was getting around at the time. It was a pointless act that accomplished nothing, unless the goal was to traumatize innocent fans and others, like myself, who were bystanders.

In death, Lennon grew larger than life. He symbolized lost hope, and the images generated by his murder worked their way into the structure of our thoughts and feelings. Thirty years later, I feel I am still processing the effects of that event which coloured the following decade in ways that were hard to fathom at the time.

Lennon’s assassination came a few weeks after the election of Ronald Reagan, about which I felt much cynicism and also foreboding. But at that time I was far from Washington, where schemes were being laid to alter the future. I was on Hydra, a paradise of isolation even in winter when it can be so cold and damp at night, you shiver till your bed rattles.

My bed had been rattling only the week before as I lay alone in my empty room, under a pile of damp woollen blankets, unable to sleep. That’s when I’d got the idea of going over to Leonard’s place for comfort and consolation. After all, we were friends. It wasn’t yet midnight. Maybe he’d still be up, reading. Maybe he would invite me in, make me a hot cup of Ovomaltine – the Greek version of Ovaltine -- as he had a few days before, with his characteristic friendly humour. His place was always warm. He could afford things like electricity.

I slipped out of bed, pulled on a couple of sweaters and headed up the stone road that led to Leonard’s L-shaped stone house, which stood at the top of Donkeyshit Lane, the main thoroughfare connecting the port to the labyrinth of narrow lanes that form a kind of amphitheatre on Hydra. In no time I was at his door. The upstairs windows looked dark, but I knocked anyway. Several times. I called out “Leonard! Are you there?” Finally, a muffled voice from the upstairs bed room answered, “Leave me alone! I need to get some sleep!”

I hadn’t expected such blank rejection. I turned, devastated, and ran back home. The run warmed me up. Back in my clammy bed, I felt had blown things, badly. I resolved not to bother Leonard again, not to visit him, or cook him another vegetarian dinner. Instead I would wait until our next chance encounter in the port – which might be days or weeks away. In the meantime, I would keep on running and walking to stay warm. I would get down to business, write my book, survive on my own.

For the next few days I stuck to my resolution. I wrote in my room. I worked at making other friends among the tiny population of winter residents clinging to the rock called Hydra. And I made sure my walks took me away from the town and the embarrassment of another encounter with Leonard.

John Lennon was shot on a Monday. The following Sunday, I was out for another walk, this time through the port, just as a hydrofoil from Athens was pulling away from the dock. Some pieces of baggage were piled on the quayside, awaiting a donkey. And Leonard was just sitting down in one of the nearby cafes. He was dressed in black, and wore dark glasses and I saw he had been growing a beard since I last saw him, 10 days before. His children, Adam and Lorca, 8 and 6 years old, were with him.

His odd appearance, along with the presence of his two young children, made me shy so I paused some distance away. He saw me, and waved. It felt very awkward, but I went to greet him. I had thought he was still on the island, all that time, avoiding the weather by staying in his house. Were those his bags on the quay? Or were they his children’s? Had they just come from their mother’s place in Paris on their own, or had he gone to get them himself? I started to apologize for not coming to see him for over a week. I'd been in my room writing, I said.

He seemed to hesitate. “Oh, so you’ve been inside?”

He seemed to be peering into me, as if trying to pick up on my thoughts. I found his behaviour off-putting. The last time I’d gone around to see him,he hadn't exactly been friendly. Now I wasn’t sure he even remembered my coming over in the middle of the night, or what he had shouted from the upstairs window.

I remember thinking he looked unwell. Thinner, almost exhausted. Was he recovering from the flu, I wondered? He didn’t tell me he had been away, or where he had been. He walked me away from the cafe tables and over to the corner where a closed shop window displayed an old collection of Greek military medals. We stood there for a moment and to lighten the tension, I joked: “Leonard, you look like you deserve a medal!” He seemed startled, as if he read some other meaning into this comment.

Just then the donkey driver arrived. He left me standing there as he strolled back to the cafe where his children were waiting to be taken up Donkeyshit Lane, to the house.

A few days later, I ran into him again and we had coffee. It was two weeks since the tragedy in New York, and I had hardly spoken to anyone. I said, “Too bad about John Lennon.” I was expecting him to weigh in eloquently on the deeper meaning of that event. All he said was: “I never liked the Beatles."

He happened to be carrying a copy of TIME magazine, which had articles on Ronald Reagan’s recent victory, paired with news and commentary on Lennon`s death. He had me read the article that quoted a poem Reagan had written in high school. One line rang particularly sappy and ironic: “Life should be a song.” I handed it back. But Leonard appeared impressed, or at least he praised the new president for his support of Israel, his bold new vision, his approach to the economy. Seeing my opposition, he pointed out the cowboy theme in Reagan’s career – this was something they shared in common, because Leonard had been in a cowboy band at one time. He even sang a few lines from “Red River Valley” to make me laugh.

The unexpected news that he was a fan of Ronald Reagan suddenly made me want to cry. Tears streamed down my face and I wiped them away with my fingers. Maybe I was just overwhelmed by the cold and isolation, my general sense of being a castaway on an island in the middle of nowhere, or maybe I was still getting over my mother’s death the previous February.

Seeing my fragile state, Leonard tried another line of argument. According to the Kabala, he said, the Messiah would arrive either in a time of light, or of great darkness. This almost made sense. It sounded like the Leonard I knew, and calmed me down like a magical formula. I took it to mean that Reagan’s victory was a catastrophe that would end up generating a powerful reaction toward the light. Perhaps things would turn out well, in the end. Perhaps what we all needed was a jolt of Reaganomics, a return to fundamentals, a visit from the Headless Horseman to scare us into shape. Maybe my generation was spoiled and lazy. Maybe that was why John Lennon had to die...

The more I thought about it, though, the more I felt Leonard was panicking about his finances, grabbing at straws, supporting a charlatan like Reagan. He told me he was seriously embracing orthodox Judaism, and suddenly suggested I also convert – especially if I wanted our relationship to continue. A strange thing to say, I thought, and it made me uneasy.

I later heard he had started hanging out with a group of drinkers and gamblers on the island. One was a former mercenary who, when drunk, would boast of killing blacks in the Congo in 1962. It was easy to see why such people would seek out Leonard’s company, but what could possibly draw him to theirs? By then, I had made other friends to help me through the terrible Greek winter. I saw Leonard rarely, and feared our relationship was over. Part of me wanted it to be. He used to read me snippets from the libretto he was composing for Lewis Furey, and reassure me that this peculiar situation on Hydra was only temporary. Meanwhile, other women sometimes stayed at his house, and kept coming and going all winter.

I survived the next several months,alternating between hope and misery. When I stayed away from Leonard, and just wrote, things went back to normal. But social life there was so sparse, I often withdrew into my own world, and in such places that can be dangerous. I was turning 30, having to face many unpleasant truths. I saw Leonard occasionally, and he would talk, or rather lecture, on various subjects: the Bible, the Kabala, Sufi poetry. Once he said the world was created 6,000 years ago, from a collision between black and white fire.

He never told me about being in New York on the day John Lennon was shot. If I brought up the assassnination, he changed the subject to Ronald Reagan’s victory, how it signalled the start of a brand new era.

“I never liked the sixties," he said, although his career began in that decade. Or was he the anti-Beatle? Had he come along to lead a lost generation back to the straight and narrow path of religious and political orthodoxy? I found that thought embarrassing. I lay awake, sometimes, asking myself what sort of future awaited me with a man who adored Ronald Reagan.

It was 15 years later that I reviewed Ira Nadel’s biography where I found a line stating that on December 8, 1980, Leonard Cohen had been in Manhattan, “putting on phylacteries.” John Lennon’s assassination on that same day is not mentioned. In 1995, when I reviewed the book, I thought the biographer had got his facts wrong. I was a witness to the fact Leonard could not have been in Manhattan, because he was staying on Hydra at that time. I forgot about the second week in December, when I hid out in my room, writing, purposely avoiding Leonard’s house, or the encounter in the port a few days after Lennon’s death, when I saw him arriving with his children from some unknown destination – possibly Athens airport, or Paris, as I imagined at the time.

And why would he leave Hydra and travel to New York that week, when his kids were living in France with their mother? Unless he had some special business in New York. And why would he keep his New York trip – if it actually happened -- a secret back then? Unless he did not want people to know he was there when Lennon was shot. On Hydra, such tantalizing news would have become the talk of the island, because any item about Leonard was precious currency. Leonard in Manhattan on that day? What a coincidence. Like the time he was in Cuba just in time for the Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961.

I kept a notebook in those days, where I recorded encounters with Leonard and others on the island. It was mainly an exercise to get me working on my novel. I had nothing to do but write. I lived just down the lane from a man who used to be such amusing company, but seemed to have lost his sense of humour. Now he was pressuring me to change my thinking and climb on the neo-conservative bandwagon because “Money is the long hair of the eighties.” Sometimes he hinted he might soon be creating his own religious movement, and wouldn’t mind having me as a disciple. It seemed we no longer had a personal relationship, or perhaps I had imagined that -- although he implied we would again if I would quit being a child of the sixties, and grew up. I could help take care of his children, and gain readmittance to his household. But even that would not erase the 17-year age difference that separated me from his generation, and its way of thinking.

All these questions and differences played havoc with my mind. As winter dragged on, I began having nightmares, and what seemed an intense flashback to my death in a past life in Nazi Germany. It was as if time were shifting backwards. A huge gulf had opened between my old life in Montreal, and the one I was living on Hydra. The shift began with John Lennon’s death, which was a turning point. It was as if a crack had opened allowing much darkness to flood my world – although Leonard might have preferred to call it “light.”

(From a memoir in progress)

On the subject of Decapitation and "Who is responsible?"

2009-03-05T11:39:00.001-08:00

There are a number of details in the story suggesting Vincent Li, the man who decapitated Tim McLean and then ate his victim`s flesh on a Greyhound bus last July, may have been a mind-controlled, programmed assassin:

His zombie-like behaviour after the killing, and the fact that he doesn’t recall his actions — suggest he was programmed and/or in a hypnotic trance at the time.

Hearing the voice of God: he may in fact have been hearing the voice of a handler communicating with him in a number of different ways, including an actual “voice to brain” electronic transmitter.

An early report mentioned that in June, Li had disappeared from his job, delivering newspapers for CanWest, for an entire month.

By a strange coincidence, Li’s CanWest supervisor’s brother in law just happened to be riding the Greyhound bus on which McLean was murdered.

Li had left Edmonton on a Greyhound two days before, disembarked at the Manitoba border, and waited 24 hours for the bus on which Tim McLean was a passenger. Was Li waiting for his handler to arrive in the company of the designated victim? Was this scenario pre-arranged?

Was Tim McLean, who was a carnival worker in Edmonton, chosen to be a sacrificial victim in a ritual killing with racist undercurrents. Tim McLean was a 22-year-old Metis man whose nickname for himself was “Jokawild.” He had posted a photo of himself on MySpace, made up like Heath Ledger’s Joker character in the film DARK KNIGHT.

http://copycateffect.blogspot.com/2008/08/jokers-card-jokawild-and-decapitations.html

Ten days before Tim McLean was murdered, on July 20, an article appeared in the Edmonton Sun about a noted ethnologist who had written a book on the Windingo: a mythical, humanoid creature with an insatiable appetite for human flesh.

“Windigo Psychosis” involves a fear of being possessed by the spirit of this creature, and going on a cannibalistic killing spree.

It’s not impossible that the newspaper article in the Sun was part of whatever triggered Li to commit this bizarre crime in front of a busload of horrified passengers.

It’s also not impossible that Tim McLean’s MySpace page played a part in his being selected as the victim in a crime that involved decapitation, which is what the Joker does in DARK KNIGHT.

Was this a Satanic ritual killing, designed to traumatize not only the victim, his family and friends, and witnesses on the scene — but Canadian society as a whole, and perhaps most particularly aboriginal Canadians?

Letters from Josef

2009-02-25T16:39:00.000-08:00

Back in Canada, I felt worlds away from war and the un-wept tears flooding Germany and Eastern Europe that summer. I was convinced that I had somehow resurrected my own corpse, over there in Poland, simply by returning to the gas chamber and walking out of it alive. I was finally, totally free.
Of course, I couldn’t talk to anyone about this. I read the books I bought at the bookstore in Auschwitz-Birkenau, and waited for something to happen. It seemed logical to think that, having visited the place where I had died in my last lifetime, I had smashed a barrier, shredded a veil, taken a walk between worlds. This event would resolve some ancient issues, and help me gain new perspective on my life. Maybe, magically, something would surface that would light the path ahead of me.

I was right. Something did surface. Of course, it was not quite the “resurrection” I had in mind.

One evening I browsed the internet in search of holocaust memoirs. I came across a website belonging to a young man in Pennsylvania who said he was the reincarnation of Dr. Josef Mengele.

The website, which was dedicated to “the greatest war criminal of the twentieth century,” had been up for a few months. I was curious

A 22-year-old man in Pennsylvania, Joseph Muller, was claiming to be the reincarnation of Mengele. I can think of very few novelists who could spin a convincing story out of something so outlandish, even trite. Here, however, was a 22-year-old who had put together a documentary, including much detailed research, archival photos, and his own personal writing about being Mengele. It took all evening to read from beginning to end and was almost a book in itself -- well beyond what one would expect from a young man in his early twenties.

Not that parts of it were not disturbing, to say the least. If it had not rung at all true, it would have been a terrible waste of creative energy. What was so odd, was that this boy obviously believed he was Mengele. He also seemed, at times, to be fully aware of what that meant, in terms of the need to explain himself. Quite clearly, he was trapped in the overwhelming irony of having to account for deeds which, at their core, were unspeakable.

As I read, I recalled how the clinic at Auschwitz remains closed to the public, an indication of how little we really know about this man and his ugly career. But here was some kid living in Nowhere, Pennsylvania, trying to bring it out into the open. At times, he might have been writing from Transylvania. Part of him was a cartoon, yet even that part bore a disquieting resemblance to reality.

Joseph Muller was obsessed with details of Mengele’s life. He seemed to bask in the reflected notoriety of a man everyone hated, whose crimes were beyond imagining and perhaps were best kept secret and hidden from humanity.

Stubbornly, with an air of preaching, he spelled out his politics in prose which could be colourful, pompous, or dry, depending. He was not a neo-Nazi, he said, and had no respect for those who embraced the ideology of the Third Reich without having lived through its madness.

One thing was certain: he was not kidding. Whatever his shortcomings as a writer, Joseph Muller never slipped out of character, or veered too far into caricature. He always came across as exactly what he pretended to be: a young man in Pennsylvania, burdened by memories of having been a notorious monster.

He opened his autobiography with a photograph of Mengele’s son, Rolf, as a little boy, and a letter asking for forgiveness and understanding in language that conjured all the defensiveness and self-pity of an ageing war criminal, who nevertheless suffers from the fact that his own son has turned against him.

He went on to relate how he was born into this lifetime out of wedlock and unwanted by his mother, a young nurse in Pennsylvania who eventually placed him in a foster home. How, at age 11, in 1991, while his history teacher was talking to the class about the holocaust, he first saw a photo of the famous war criminal and found he somehow knew more about the man than was normal for a kid who, until that moment, had never even heard of Dr. Mengele.

Afterwards young Josef began writing poems and making drawings which seemed to unearth buried details from what, in his mind at least, could only be a past life as a doctor at Auschwitz.

He could call up horrific scenes, including memories of a field hospital near Stalingrad where, as a young doctor in 1942, Mengele dodged bullets on the battlefield while performing operations to save the wounded and dying. Awarded an Iron Cross for bravery in combat, he describes how as a 30-year-old SS doctor, officer and decorated war hero, he underwent a terrible transformation after the disastrous defeat of the German forces in Russia.

This, he writes, was when he lost his personality and became the embodiment of evil, totally indifferent to suffering and bloodshed – probably as a result of post traumatic stress. Having witnessed so much death and destruction, he lost the ability to feel anything for anyone. By the time his superiors in Berlin dispatched him to Auschwitz, in the spring of 1943, he was a psychopath, albeit a high functioning one. How could he care about trainloads of Jewish refugees filing past on the railway platform, on their way to a quick death? He had already seen so much suffering, their lives meant absolutely nothing to him.

Many people would recoil at the spectacle of a “reincarnated” war criminal trying to excuse himself by invoking a plea of insanity. At the beginning of 1945 Nuremberg trials, psychiatrists weeded out those deemed too deranged to stand trial, but Mengele never stood trial – his American captors released him supposedly by mistake.

Here is the reincarnated Mengele, who escaped justice for over 30 years, using a term, PTSD, that gained currency decades later, and using it in self-defence. And although I took young Muller’s confession with numerous grains of salt, and often with a shudder of distaste, I could not completely dismiss it. People who have never lived through violent combat are in no position to judge others, who have.

Of course, Josef Muller hadn’t really been in combat, either – unless you believe in the possibility that traumatic experiences can be transferred, or recalled, from one lifetime to the next.

What gave Josef’s story a touch of extra credibility at the beginning, was a testimonial by Eva Moses Kor. A former Mengele twin and Holocaust survivor, whose twin sister perished in Mengele’s clinic at Auschwitz, Kor is the founder of C.A.N.D.L.E.S. holocaust centre in Minneapolis, and has an international reputation as a writer and advocate for healing through forgiveness.

In her statement, published on Josef’s website, she describes their first contact, her initial reactions and questions, and how she gradually came to believe that Josef Muller might well be who he claimed to be.

Another “note of authenticity” came at the end where Josef included his e-mail address at hotmail.com, a combination of letters and numbers drawn from Mengele’s name and a certain model of BMW which Josef liked to drive at high speed around Pennsylvania -- at least until his accident.

I decided to see if this address actually worked. I wrote a message, and fired it off.

To drjosefm325i@hotmail.com

Subject: Dear Dr. Mengele
Date Tue, 25 Jun 2002 203314 EDT

Today I found your website, and after reading almost all of it, I have just come across your e-mail address. I was Visitor Number 101. To my surprise, I found I was quite moved by your story.

I am 51 years old, and have been having flashbacks to my death in the holocaust since childhood. I have just returned to my home in Canada from a trip to Poland, where I visited Auschwitz-Birkenau, and in particularly crematorium I, at Auschwitz. This gas chamber is identical in size and shape to the one I found myself in during a hypnotic regression in 1998. I believe I arrived in the hospital wagon of a transport from (possibly) Breslau in the winter of 1941-42. Something tells me it was in mid-February.

I was a woman of about 30, and I had been involved with a group of young Poles from the cities who were blowing up German trains carrying supplies and soldiers en route to the Eastern Front. As I had been attacked and beaten in the train station, I could not walk and was taken immediately to the gas chamber. I was alone at the time of my death, and I remember noticing that the interior walls of the chamber had just been freshly whitewashed.

I am just beginning to write my own story, about my past life as a young German/Polish woman who was connected with the resistance. Like you, I am coming to terms with the effects of that lifetime on this one.

At Auschwitz I bought Dr. Nyiszli's book, I was Dr. Mengele's Assistant, and finished it about a week ago. The photo of Mengele in that book surprised me, as it did not seem to be the face of an evil man. I sometime give creative writing workshops. I believe writing is the most effective therapeutic tool for healing trauma.

Your memoir is very impressive. I believe it will help a lot of people to forgive themselves. Thank you for writing and publishing it.
Sincerely,
Ann D.

After hitting “SEND,” I waited nervously. At hour later, his reply was in my mailbox. It was as if I had pressed a button on a coffin, and out popped Count Dracula.

I read, with a mixture of disbelief, fascination and irony:

Dear Ann,

Thank you for the compliments. I would like to go back to Auschwitz-Birkenau, and Eva and I do plan on returning there in the upcoming years. We also plan on visiting my hometown of Gunzburg. I did intend on going back into medicine and science, but with the way HMO's are treating people in America, I do not wish to have my hands tied behind my back when I must save someone's life. What many of these people do not realize (the ones who choose to limit what a doctor can and cannot do) is that they are only hurting themselves in the end when it will be their turn to receive medical care. Also, my dream was to correct congenital defects while in utero, so that the woman won't need to bother with an abortion, and that a healthy baby will be born. This way I would create a win/win situation. Yet, I'm limited there as well due to the "Religious Right". Since medicine is not medicine anymore (with the exception of rare circumstances), and scientists have too many restrictions, I chose to focus on teaching the Holocaust. Back in April, I believe, I noticed in the paper that there are Ph.D.s for Genocide studies. I figured that, since I tend to be a bit "overqualified" for teaching the Holocaust, I might as well utilize my experiences to teach other people. In the end, I would like to become a "Holocaust Professor".

I might as well make the best use of being reincarnated, and I really couldn't think of any better way. I keep in touch with another reincarnated 'victim' of Auschwitz. Our friendship has brought in many ideas, and has done much healing, despite the fact that we're on opposite ends of the Atlantic. If you'd like to keep in touch with me, feel free to do so. And if you have any questions about the camp, experiments, or things related, don't hesitate to ask. Ironically, I've gotten along better with reincarnated 'victims' than one of the other reincarnated Nazis, who was a member of the Einsatzgruppen. I know, it's strange but true.

I'm still working on my book, and since I've become the official field doctor for a Feldlazaret, you'll start noticing photographs of me with the German Red Cross nurses (DRK nurses) popping up. I already have a collection that I will add next month from this year's WW2 re-enactment in Reading, Pa. Personally, my book will never be 'completely' done since the memories will go on forever. Currently I'm trying to finish getting my 1938 Inaugural Medical Dissertation on the book. I only have a few more pages to go, but...it tends to be a pain in the gluteous maximus, if you know what I mean. I'm glad that you find my memoir healing. Writing it helped me understand myself better, and I believed that I just could not die and not have done this since I know that it will have a big impact on many. I would like to have more than just a tombstone to my name when I die. I don't intend on re-reincarnating either. I've had enough, and seen enough...it's nothing against the good people I've met, but I would like to spend my "spiritual life" back in Gunzburg, and with my brothers who I really miss. Therefore, I fully intend to make the best use of this time on earth.

Sincerely,
Josef

He was certainly a complicated fellow, prone to operatic mood swings, hypersensitive to anything that could be taken as a personal slight, unforgiving if crossed: traits that also applied to the real Mengele. He boasted of having super-human powers: he could murder people just by focusing on them, mentally.

In my second e-mail, when I was still uncertain how to approach this correspondence I had flirted with his darker side:

Really, apart from my fear of rejection (as an older woman, I have to worry about such things), I'm also afraid that if we got involved and it didn't work out, you might give me a lethal injection. …Oh, I forgot to mention that I am a twin in this lifetime.

Perhaps he took this as a come-on. His reply was definitely peculiar:

I would have no reason to give you a lethal injection. Cripes, my criminal record is clean...well, at least this half is, and I'd like to keep it that way As an SS officer, we were not to have criminal records at all Therefore, all this SS discipline does pay off in the end.

Misericorde Hospital

2009-02-24T14:40:00.000-08:00

I have been researching and writing about the dark side of psychiatry particularly in relation to secret Cold War LSD experiments on children in Montreal at McGill and elsewhere across Canada.

I have a photo of Doctors Ewen Cameron and and Heinz Lehmann standing with a group of other doctors outside the Misericorde hospital in Montreal in 1959. This was a hospital for. unwed mothers and also an orphanage. At the time Lehmann was directing the research institute of the Allan Memorial. What are two Mc Gill psychiatrists doing in a group photo on the steps of this hospital? What legitimate reason would they have to be there?

I am guessing the secret reason is they are setting up an agreement to get children for use in experiments. We know there were orphans living in a sealed off wing of the Allan in those years.

Cameron and Lehmann were key figures in what appears to have been a eugenics program operating out of McGill. Lehmann had trained in Nazi Germany at precisely the universities where the infamous T4 eugenics program was developed. He came to Quebec in 1937 and was soon placed in charge of a major psychiatric hospital known as a place where patients were zombified with drugs and ECT.

There was also a link with New York and Massachusetts hospitals and military bases like Plattsburgh AF base known to have used trafficked orphans from Quebec in classified experiments. Some of this information comes from surviving orphans.

Cameron worked with Dr Nolan D C Lewis from the NY Psychiatric Institute where a Nazi doctor Franz Kalman had run a eugenics program since the 1930s. Lewis worked with Cameron giving LSD to children in the 1950s at McGill.

They needed a lot of children in those days and Quebec was a baby factory, with the highest birth rate in the western world.

Comments?

Allergic to Gas

2009-02-19T16:29:00.001-08:00

May 30, 2002
I didn’t plan on visiting Auschwitz on the 59th anniversary of Mengele’s arrival at the clinic there. If such had been my plan, I could have waited another year, and then it would have been the 60th anniversary, a more significant marker. Not that that occurred to me – and even if I had known of it at the time, I would not have chosen to commemorate the Angel of Death’s first day as medical director of a death camp. And anyway, I was marking my anniversary, not that of the “Angel of Death.”

The day I went to Auschwitz -- May 30, 2002 -- also happened to be Corpus Christi, or Feast of the Pentecost. Not a holiday I normally celebrate at the scene of a mass grave. In fact I never celebrate it at all, although I have no trouble believing the Holy Spirit can descend on us at any time and cause us to speak in tongues, or no human language . Looking back, the timing of that also seems appropriate.

Dr. Anna Novak, the cousin of a friend of mine, came along with me to Auschwitz that day. Anna is an allergy specialist. This was one of those odd coincidences because in a roundabout way, my allergies had brought me to Poland. For much of my life, I had suffered from respiratory problems. Childhood pneumonia at age 3, followed by chronic bronchitis at 11, and later, allergies.

Anna proved very open to my eccentric notion that some of my lingering respiratory issues stemmed from my death in the gas chamber at Auschwitz in 1942. Allergic reactions, she told me, can be triggered by all sorts of things – even a photograph of a plant or flower to which one is allergic. So it made sense, to Anna, that I was allergic to gas chambers. Especially if I had died in one.

Because it was Corpus Christi that day, and Poland is a devoutly Christian nation, the road that wound through the countryside after we left the main highway from Krakow, was strewn with flowers from a procession that had passed an hour before. We drove those last few kilometers over fronds and scattered petals. Overnight it had rained, and clouds still hung overhead but you could see the sun trying to break through the curtain of mist in places. I remember I had a sense of floating in the dampness of a dull yet dreamlike landscape. Anna was driving, and I was gazing out the window, trying to make something of the scenery, which was lush, chaotic and formless -- nothing like the disciplined German vegetation I was more used to.

We came to the town of Chrzanow – familiar through a friend whose mother was deported from that village, along with her six sisters, none of whom survived the war. My friend had asked me to look out for that place-name on the way to Auschwitz, and here it was.

As we cut through the shabby centre, I looked for signs of a cemetery, or other remnants of the pre-war era, but there was only post-communist greyness and decaying modernity as in a project which has been aborted or abandoned. There was life, but I knew it was nothing like life had been back in the days when it had been her mother’s village. That old life was gone like the people, and existed only in photographs like the one I found on a wall later that day in one of the buildings at Auschwitz, showing men and women of Chrzanow being led away by German soldiers in caps and steel helmets. It looks like a morning in early spring, and the people wear their coats unbuttoned as they file to the train, unaware that they are leaving this familiar world, forever.

Anna and I had been on the road since yesterday morning. Our sightseeing trip had taken us from Anna’s home in Wroclaw the day before, over to the capital of Warsaw to visit a government office where she was applying for a visa to Canada.

After having coffee in a famous cafe, we continued south to Krakow – a circular marathon through countryside flooded in many places from the heavy rains that year. Along the way, we stopped to buy strawberries from local farmers at a roadside stand. For a few zlotys, you got a large basket of the juiciest, most delicious fruit imaginable. But here on this small rural road, which had just seen a religious parade go by, there were no fruit vendors. It felt like Sunday although it was Thursday. In no time, it seemed we had left the mist behind and arrived at the village of Oswiecim – less than 2 km from the infamous death camp. I remember passing the abandoned slave labour factory that had once been IG Farben’s, at the edge of the village where the rails veer off to the left.

Parallel to the tracks, the road ran to the entrance to the parking lot of Auschwitz. We were at our destination. Walking away from Anna’s car, I almost ran to the Arbeit Macht Frei gate. I had expected it to be enormous, but it was much smaller than I had imagined.

I had brought the wrong clothes, thinking the weather would be hot, but in defiance of all the predictions it remained wet and freezing. In the photos Anna took, my hair is flying out from my head. I’m dressed as if for a camping trip where bears made off with my clothes leaving me in my pajamas. In some photos, I seem detached from surrounding reality. Often I am smiling, as if actually “enjoying Auschwitz” although that was not my intention. The truth was I didn’t want to be photographed and would have preferred to drift around the place, invisible, just taking it in.

In a way, I was glad to be “back.” Sixty years had passed since the day in February 1942, when a transport arrived carrying hundreds of Polish workers, labour organizers, intellectuals and resistance fighters to their deaths. The Final Solution had been formulated by Himmler at the Wannsee Conference one year earlier, and it would be four months before mass deportation of Jews from their ghettos to Auschwitz began the following summer of 1942. Before it was used to exterminate the Jews in their millions, the system had first to be tested on other enemies of the Reich who were being rounded up in great numbers at that time.

That transport had left Wroclaw on Valentine’s Day, 1942, and arrived late the same night at its destination. Had “I” been on that train? The full horror of that trip had surfaced four years earlier during a past life regression, back in Montreal, and was hard to dismiss or ignore. Under hypnosis, intended to pinpoint the source of certain fears and unconscious phobias that were interfering in my life, a few faint images had coalesced into a nightmarish physical reliving of a ride in a freezing box car that ended at the gas chamber.

When it was over, there was no doubt in my mind that what I had just relived was real. I was sweating from every pore, as if I had just run several miles. In reality, I was lying on a mattress on the floor, the therapist next to me pounding on my back and urging me to cough out all the gas that remained in my lungs from that other lifetime.

More details came up as I researched the period. Further flashbacks took me back to wartime Europe. I saw myself as a woman in her twenties in a long black trench coat, bicycling from place to place delivering money and papers to people in the underground. Some were young people from the city, who had moved into the woods and were blowing up German trains with homemade explosives. I saw myself involved with a young Wehrmacht officer who was helping the Resistance by providing information about things like Nazi troop movements and plans. We would meet in a small single-room building near railway tracks in the countryside. In fact, these small buildings, which might be storage facilities, can still be seen beside the railroads in Germany and Poland. That life had come to a sudden end in a train station in a city which might have been Wroclaw, where we were rounded up early one February morning and shipped to Auschwitz.

On a quest that became an obsession, I decided to travel back to Poland and retrace that long day’s journey sixty years earlier. I would go there in my new, or slightly “used” 50-year-old body. There would be much to catch up on and explore.
We began with the photographs of thousands of camp inmates, attached to identity cards lining the walls of the first exhibit. I stared into one face after another, thinking one of the faces might trigger another memory or flashback.

There is much to see at Auschwitz. A day is barely enough. There is the famous room with its glass display of shoes and human hair. Outside are the trademark guard towers, the encircling barbed wire fences stretching into the distance, and the endless rows of barracks. Auschwitz is a ghost town with its own literature and history, and of course its own architecture of repression and torture stretching back into the nightmare that gave rise to Nazi Germany.

I had my limited, personal agenda. I wanted to verify a number of peculiarities from my regression, four years earlier. I wanted to walk the same route I would have travelled in 1942 as an injured woman on a transport carrying hundreds of others. By my reckoning, it took less than two hours to be hauled out of the hospital wagon and straight to the gas chamber, in a small cart that ran on rails alongside the train tracks.

The first thing I looked for at Auschwitz was that small set of rails running parallel to the main tracks where the transports unloaded their passengers. They were there. As for the cart, I found one at Birkenau later that day.

The former kitchen was in a large building now housing an exhibition of photos dating from the war. I was reading the captions and moving from photo to photo, when I came to a halt in front of one. At the centre of the blurred photo, a small ragged band of Jewish partisans were gathered in the woods. Some proudly displayed their guns. Many were smiling for the camera. All of them were likely long dead. Oddly, I began reacting to the photo before I had even made out what it was. Tears welled up, and a feeling of sobbing and choking – which made it hard to decipher the caption before I bent forward to see the faces.

Outside, I pulled myself together. It seemed I had just met my old friends. Continuing my walk through the streets with their brown brick buildings, built by slave labour, I came to the Wall of Death, which stands to the left of the Gestapo prison also known as Block 11.

Next door to this bleak courtyard where prisoners were shot after being interrogated and tortured in the prison on the right, is Block 10, the infamous clinic operated by Auschwitz’s “Angel of Death,” SS Doctor Josef Mengele.

A black sign with white letters, reading “HOTEL KRANKENHAUS -- CHIRURGISCHE – ABT,” marked the facade behind which experiments were done on dozens of children, many of them twins. They’ve since renovated it, remodelled the steps, painted the door a rusty brown, reopened the two small windows which were bricked in the day I visited, and removed the black and white signs. The day I visited, there was also a No Smoking sign – I’m not sure why -- and the street number 21 was clearly posted out front. The clinic remains closed to this day. The horrors that went on inside, considered beyond the pale of the imaginable, exist in a category of inhumanity defying description or inquiry.

In this photo, taken by Anna, the door behind me appears to be standing half open. It seems possible to look inside, or even enter the building although I remember it being permanently closed to visitors. Until now, I never looked carefully at this photo, never noticed the half-open door or the reddish fog spreading down from one corner of the roof. It looks as if blood is staining the branches of the tree and the brick wall of the building. On the left is the digital date “5 30” – day of Mengele’s arrival exactly 59 years earlier. If you look closely, a figure like that of a doctor with a handlebar moustache, wearing a two piece suit, seems to be peering out of the left-hand second floor window. In the window on the right, skeletal faces and bodies are pressed against the glass.

But of course, these are all mere illusions, tricks of light or bad film processing. Holding my guidebook, posing for Anna on the steps, I am oblivious to whatever is behind my back. I look unreal and almost transparent, in contrast to the building which seems tortured and alive, its mismatched bricks and glaring windowpanes bursting with secrets still trapped inside. Even the shadow of the tree on the cobblestones seems to be pointing a scissor hand at the entrance to this house of horrors. Though much of the reality of this medical torture chamber was unknown to me at the time, I felt the need to stand there marking the spot. Looking at the photo, I am reminded of all that happened later.

The last detail I hoped to verify was the gas chamber. At the climax of my hypnotic regression, I had found myself lying on a bare cement floor. The room surrounding me was small, no bigger than a one-car garage, and the walls were shiny and wet from recent whitewashing. I also noticed a small round object just overhead, which fascinated me, until the gas began to pour in and I began choking. As the air became deadly and un-breathable, I abandoned my body on the floor and went hurtling into space. (And strangely, once again, as I type this description I find my lungs becoming congested and I am sneezing – not the first time this has happened!) I t turned out these details, too, were correct, down to flakes of old whitewash that still clung to the walls. I touched them, but took no photos.
The Crematorium was right next door. I had no memory of that room – after all, I would have been already dead when I entered it. Like countless others who ended there, had I gone up the chimney as smoke?

In the regression, I experienced what people often report in near-death experiences: hurtling down a long tunnel at high speed, I couldn’t stop laughing at how simple and funny it is to leave one’s body. At the end of that long corridor, as if from the wrong end of a telescope, I saw a round image of my future parents. My father wore wire-rimmed glasses; my mother’s hair was long, dyed black and parted in the middle. They seemed taken aback, as if they had just received notice of a pregnancy. For them, it was 1950 and they were not expecting twins. We arrived a few months later.

Had my trip into my present lifetime with these parents begun in this crematorium? Were death and life so intimately connected that we can step out of one body and into a new one, almost as easily as shedding our clothes? As I stood looking at the ovens, other tourists were coming and going, taking photographs of the room where so many lives had been reduced to ashes before their time.

Anna was waiting for me outside when I emerged. We had lunch in the car: sandwiches and juice.

Then we drove the short distance to Birkenau, a huge, desolate expanse which swallows up visitors as it swallowed inmates in the past. The sister camp to Auschwitz, with its wide gate perpendicular to the train tracks, is familiar from photographs. I walked back and forth for a while on the siding where Dr. Mengele used to stand in his uniform to meet the trains, calling out “Zwillinger, Zwillinger” as he scoured the crowds for twins and other victims for his experiments. While Anna waited in the car, I ran inside, following the signs directing visitors to barracks and gas chambers. A few minutes were enough.

I joined Anna for the long drive home to Wroclaw that would take us north through the coal mining region of Silesia.

In the bookstore, I had bought two books. One was I WAS DR. MENGELE’S ASSISTANT. I carried it with me back to Canada and read it in one sitting the following week. I had the whole summer to read and go for walks and bike rides – and look for another teaching job. It turned out no job materialized. The following autumn, my belongings would go into storage as I began a process of investigating themes that had surfaced for me at Auschwitz. I had left Auschwitz behind, but a ghost had followed me home.

Latter Day Zombies

2009-02-17T16:08:00.000-08:00

I rarely go to church but last Sunday in Vancouver I attended the occupation of Saint Andrew's Wesley United Church by survivors of Canada's residential school genocide.

About twenty aboriginal men and women entered the church just as I was sitting down, and lined up in front of the altar holding a banner calling for the return of the 50,000 missing children's remains, and a proper burial.

The church, which had been humming with pre-service chatter, suddenly became silent. After conferring quickly, the minister and one or two other robed officers approached the group and talked with them. For a few moments, the atmosphere was tense and uncomfortable.

Then the minister addressed the congregation and welcomed "our friends" who had a message to deliver. He did this in a superficially friendly and grandstanding way that showed he was on top of the situation and knew exactly how to deal with it.

The native men and women stood holding their banner. In contrast to the minister, none of them were smiling. They looked as if they had just absorbed another insult. No one in the congregation moved or responded. All eyes were focused on the visitors and the minister who stood awkwardly rubbing his hands together in one of those ritualized gestures expressing benevolence and Christian tolerance.

The church seemed suddenly filled with the disappointment and anger of the native people. I felt tears welling up, inside and around me.

When they all slowly turned and began silently filing down the aisle towards the front door, it was as if they had had enough of this place. I felt like running after them, but a family had just sat down next to me, blocking my exit.

Once the natives had disappeared, the minister was all smiles again, calling on the congregation to "wave your hands wildly" and shout requests for favourite hymns. The heavy mood had lifted, and now we were going to be entertained by the Holy spirit. For the next hour, I squirmed in my seat as he nimbly ran through his scripted Sunday routine. First came a children's pantomime about Christ healing a paralyzed man, performed with stuffed bears and children led by the pastor. Next, a sermon about his weekly struggle to make his sermons relevant to parishioners.

At times he raised his arms and threw back his head as if receiving inspiration from heaven. He digressed briefly into a commentary on the "guests" who had interrupted the service, and from there he talked about "illness" and the case of the paralyzed man who was saved by the holy spirit descending through a hole in the roof. He talked about "sin" as the root cause of sickness -- an ancient belief that still has meaning today. Never once did he address the theme of guilt, or atonement for crimes against humanity. The United Church has nothing, apparently, to say about that.

When we were asked to turn to the people around us and shake hands and greet one another in the "spirit of the Lord," I was forced to look into one smiling face after another. As mouths repeated the ritual line, eyes told another story. They were eyes I would instinctively have avoided, filled with coldness, fear, secrecy.

I started to think there was something strange about this church and its congregation. I turned my head once or twice to look at them, standing in their rows, astonishingly alike in Sunday clothes, as if they knew what was expected of church goers. In his struggle to be relevant, the minister seemed almost like a marionnette, calling on us to stand up again and make a "joyful noise to the Lord." It was, he said, our time to "rock." The guitars came out and the middle-aged choir put on a pathetic show of belting out a few "contemporary expressions of faith." The minister joined in the rapture, shaking to the Muzak, letting it all hang out for Jesus.

How people manage to go through these motions week after week without choking, is beyond me. It takes a stronger person than I to take part in an orgy of phoniness, and walk out feeling at one with God's love and light.

By the time it was over, I understood my place in the universe: out on the street with the native people who must know by now to expect nothing from a church that has been taken over by latter-day zombies.

Loving thy neighbour

2009-01-29T12:33:00.000-08:00

I have been watching a slow change come over some of my friends. It has probably been happening over decades. and it's connected to the political evolution of the state of Israel.

I actually used to defend Israel, back in the 1980s before the politics of that country hardened into present-day policies that now seem to include genocide of Palestinians. While Israel was drifting towards extremism, my friends were drifting into the psychological equivalent of gated communities. Many now live behind their own version of the Wall that separates Israel from Palestine. For some, children of holocaust survivors, it's a well-earned state of peace.

Psychologically, it also can be a no man's land where if you squint, you can see barbed wire and heavy artillery. An arid landscape that does not lead to flourishing friendships. So these days few people I know ever bring up the subject of Israel.

When the war in Lebanon was raging in 2006, communication was often reduced to e-mails calling on me to "defend Israel" from rising anti-Semitism. My position by then was: Israel needs no help in destroying its image as a bastion of democracy in the Middle East. Shelling civilian populations in Lebanon and Gaza have pretty much accomplished that goal.

Some e-mails even suggested the bombing of Lebanon was really a "feminist" campaign against a medieval culture that mistreats women. Rather than inspiring me to join the clash of civilizations and defend western culture against radical Islam, these mass maiings were making me sick to my stomach, triggering unpleasant flashbacks as well as doubts about the moral IQ of the people sending them -- people I thought I had much in common with. Now I began to wonder.

Even back then, dialogue was almost extinct. When I replied to one woman, a kind and generous person (in the past), she was shocked and sent me an URL about the oppressed Jews of Iran. Nobody was bombing and shelling them at the time, none of their women and children were being buried under rubble. I had a friend who happened to be an Iraqi Jew. He also was no Zionist and told me the Iranian Jews e-mail was a propaganda hoax, discredited some months earlier. I asked my friend why she found that community's history worth sharing at a time when Israeli rockets were pounding civilian villages in the south of Lebanon?

She explained that all these dead children were nothing more than "human shields," and switched to an interrogative tack. "Do you or do you not think Israel has the right to exist?"

It was like talking to someone who is using a handbook. Were we in kindergarten? I spelled out my answer: The right to exist is not the right to wage war on innocent people. When did existence become synonymous with mass murder?

This woman was not Jewish. She was a Scottish Canadian, a former nurse and one of her great qualities is empathy. Put this woman in a Gaza hospital, and she would be racing around saving Palestinian lives. But her friends in Montreal were telling her Israel was being attacked, and that the horrific images on TV were manufactured in some Hezbollah PR office at the UN.

The discussion ended when she struck me from her "support Israel" e-mail list. The next time I saw her, she was as friendly as ever. We talked about everything but Israel. By then of course the Wall had been built. It has served a symbolic purpose in hiding unpleasant realities that don't jive with a self-image, built up since WW2, of the Jews as a suffering people with a deep sense of ethics.

This may still be true of many Jews, but it is definitely not true of the Israeli government. This disconnect between historical suffering and present-day criminal policies, really needs to be addressed for the sake of our sanity. But no one seems to know how to initiate an inquiry into how whole nations end up sleepwalking toward mass murder.

I have many Jewish friends and for the most part they are moral people, or they could not be my friends for very long. Lately, though, some of these friends have dropped me. Others have suggested I should be less vocal, mainly by quietly un-friending me on Facebook. Israel's human rights violations, which some are calling war crimes, are not a polite topic on the street where I live.

In a way, Jews are collateral victims of every new Israeli offensive, with its echoes of Second World War atrocities in European cities and villages. "Collective punishment" is something I take personally, especially when friends try to justify it by pretending it isn't happening.

It's as if they're saying: "Love thine enemy. OK, we tried that, and it doesn't work!"

Collective punishment on the other hand, works. I guess that makes it a desirable weapon when you are wishing for a world of peace. It silences resistance by destroying everyone in an area where one's enemies are thought to be operating. It makes no distinctions of gender, age or political affiliation. Anyone can become a human shield without volunteering, and be made to pay equally for the actions of a few, whose bodies need never even be identified.

A few years ago, my former neighbour told me that universal collective punishment for the holocaust is justified, even inevitable. He predicted a time was coming when all of humanity would end up paying for the crimes the Nazis committed against the Jews. It was, he said, part of a divine plan revealing the ultimate purpose of human history. God was angry about the continued suffering of his chosen people, and how world opinion was turning against Israel. So, when the time was right, He would commence revenge killings and destroy all life on the planet. In those days, there would be a great trouble, followed by victory for the chosen.

He seemed to be presenting me with a choice: you are with us or against us. Speechless, I went home to think this over. It could not be a joke, because it had the quality of religious conviction rooted in poisoned emotions. Later these kinds of statements were made by some evangelical Christians and neo-conservatives leaders. And certain Israeli politicians. And of course, extremists.

You don't debate such statements, and there is no answer for them. They come from a fenced-off zone of total negation, roamed by uniformed children with automatic weapons. They have the ring of fanatical racism, and lead to methods which have been shown to work when you are terrorizing a population and preparing the ground for mass murder.

To hear such a statement coming from a former friend is the kiss of death. If not retracted, it erodes all trust, and defeats every possibility of dialogue. Maybe some families can function without dialogue. But a friendship, no. Friendships are based on choice, unless they're friendships of convenience.

"Kill or be killed" is not a human choice but it's an increasingly popular worldview shared by the criminally insane. Like secret abuse, it punishes the innocent, turns supporters into hostages and collaborators. So almost overnight, I lost a friend. And I left town.

A criminal gang have made it clear they believe in collective punishment as the key to their own survival. No exodus is possible in this closed-in world. Inside this walled enclosure, genocide is simply a fact of life because humans by their nature are genocidal. Faced with encircling evil, what choice does a "democracy" like Israel have?

Kill or be killed.

The indiscriminate killing of Palestinians is not only inevitable, it's also insufficient. It evokes international rage and condemnation -- which only reinforces the lonely path of "self-defence" that Israel is following. And once on that path, there is no going back. You don't embark half-heartedly on war crimes. Just ask Hitler. Once unleashed, Blitzkrieg imposes the necessity of carrying on to a conclusion. So in the end, Germany was reduced to smoking rubble, along with the neighbourhood. Logically, inevitably.

The same thing could happen to Israel. If it does, it will be the working out of the same "collective punishment" doctrine that decrees we all must die for the crimes of a few.

Letter from an Israeli friend (verbatim)

2009-01-21T18:15:00.000-08:00

I received this letter about a week ago, i.e. mid-January, at the height of the Israeli bombardment of Gaza. I am putting it here, verbatim, while I think it over. What can one say? I did reply, as quietly and reasonably as possible, but my response came nowhere near dealing with the core of M's message. Clearly, she believes Israel is defending itself from terrorists, and that no one in the outside world can possibly understand what her people are experiencing. She also seems to believe that Israel's "humanitarian aid" to Gaza has gone ignored due to "human nature." Clearly, she feels herself to be living in an island of sanity in the midst of an ocean of evil.

I am reminded of how the people of Nazi Germany were conditioned to think of themselves as totally isolated, surrounded and under attack by evil enemies -- when in fact their leaders were using mass media and deception to build support for acts of extreme aggression against their neighbours.

I just don't know where to begin in trying to make sense of this, so I'm starting here.

Ann

****************************************************************

Dear Ann

I deeply appreciate your reply and thank you for mentioning my emotional approach.

The numbers are so horrifying because the Hamas use the people and the children as a source of shelter. They shoot the rockets from homes, hospitals and know that Israeli attitude (even as hard to believe it now) is NOT to hurt civilians in any case.

I am so so so sorry for all the loss of people on both sides, but the Hamas have been sending rockets for years!!! The South of this tinny country lives in constant terror, The farmers say for years that they feel like in a "Russian rulet" every day while working in he fields, people died lost houses, what about all the walking bombs we fear constantly - is that OK?The world seems at peace with that, WHY?? is it OK to kill Israeli people? Is it Ann?!,,,and many more stories and reasons for the strong action that you and the world are seen. You know that they have the headquarters under a Hospital - How sick can people be??? Apparently very (and you know that).

I get very upset when I see that people as you only see one side of the picture.

Do you really think I feel safer or good knowing that so many people/children lost their lives? Well I don't but we can not live with so much daily fear of s bloody deadly rocket falling on you in the country (they reach most of Israel between the Hezbollah in the North and the Hamas in the South), enough the danger along the borders.

I just think that you see one side and take a side with out really understanding that it is about human nature and not Hamas/Israel/Hezbollah /Iran/Bosnia/Tibet/..... and so many other countries.

How come this was makes you so active and not other wars?

what about horrifying situations in so many other parts of the world?

Why Israel vs Palestine?

Is it sexy to take part here?

Have you heard of the idea that Gaza is entirely bomb trapped: homes (with family's inside, schools even the animal cages in the zoo!!!!!I mean come on...and you know why? well that Hamas may be a big bunch of bully's but they know that the Israelis have a human heart within, no matter what and they starved the people and animals - knowing wed fall into the trap, while giving supplies and aiding.

Of course you never hear of the help; the ceasefire so they can get water and food supplies(including the Hamas), no rape, no beating up or cruelty towards the people face to face.

Give one example of a nation who does not hurt the civilian's? rape, kill, rob.....while in face to face contact? You know that the Israeli soldiers give them food and water? the hospitals treat whom ever shows up , even at a time of war because we understand that they are lead by a bunch of Hamas bullies/

So I may send you some stuff may not- as I am so tiered of explaining ...but that may be a small part that I need to do, since I am not fighting nor sitting in a protected room, as thank God the rockets have not reached the area I live in.

So think before taking such strong sides for or against -- and of course do what ever you want to. My approach is the human weakness, how cruel humans are towards each other....

Tell me Ann: How can an armed man take a child as use him as cover?

I hope it will soon end - the war, but the Hamas and the Hezbollah are still arming and look around the world...see what is happening.

You want to help - no shortage of places and people.....why spread hatred towards any side? Do you really think that will improve any thing?

Any how

Do what ever you think is right for you.

As always

Take care and be safe and happy,

in peace

Marcelle

HOW STEPHEN HARPER STOLE POETRY

2008-12-11T11:44:00.000-08:00

Everybody left the room an hour ago
Only you have failed to have your fortune read
It's time to pack it in, put out your Marlboro
Everything that gathered here is dead

Forget that tune you're plucking on your mandolin
Forget that song you sing inside your head
The piano doesn't need your variations anymore
It's time to put your fingertips to bed

Put out, put out your cigarette
The stores are closed, the streets are wet
There's nothing that can stop us from destroying you
The jackets are all hanging from their happy little hooks
There's a party in El Salvador
The screams are coming through the floor
It's not your turn, so close the door
The Kommandant is calling you to bed

You thought by hanging round you might learn something more
Or by sticking out your hat you might get fed
Or by rifling your bureau drawer
You might turn up some metaphor
That no one's ever thought about or read
Forget it. Everybody's gone to bed
And everything that mattered here has fled.

Put out, put out your cigarette
Pick up your gun, the streets are wet
There’s nothing that can stop us from deploying you
There’s a coup d’etat in Ecuador
The boys are marching 4 x 4
They used to be alive but now they’re dead

This is where you come down hard
In boots you bought on credit cards
This is where we sever
The affair you thought would last forever

Darling, you're not one of us
You should have boarded that last bus
When everyone got wind that we were here
You should have scattered with the rest
You hung around, you failed the test
You're just a bitter aftertaste
A steaming chunk of human waste
You feasted on our charity
It's time you saw our Face
You're coming to the end of our embrace

(Ann Diamond)

Every time I think of someone, they... get shot in a Mumbai hotel

2008-12-03T17:54:00.000-08:00

I was thinking of Montreal actor Michael Rudder just last week. I hadn't seen him in several years, but on Monday he just popped into my mind and I asked one or two people where he was. Has he been in any new plays lately, I wondered? No one knew. In fact, I barely know him, but in the old days we used to bump into each other on a street corner and chat.

The answer came a few days later from an unexpected source: the television news. Michael made headlines last week, having survived the November 26 attack at the Oberoi Hotel in Mumbai, by playing dead.

I hope Michael comes home soon. He's one of my favourite Montreal actors.

I am one of those who think the events in Mumbai were carried out by "non-state actors" -- aka mercenaries -- working for corporations, intelligence agencies, and governments who have a lucrative stake in promoting conflict in South Asia and the Middle East. Sorry -- nothing short of definite proof will make me think any different.

These mercenaries in designer jeans, barely out of adolescence, are a new kind of soldier being deployed around the world at this time. I suspect many of them have been subjected to various kinds of mind control training, designed to turn them into deadly killing machines, who commit mass murder with a smile. The role they are playing on the world stage is to spread fear, confusion, chaos -- and give our rulers another excuse to expand their wars and tighten their deadlock on our minds.

It takes courage to stay sane, grounded and humble in times when psychopathic kids with guns are running amok, their hatred fuelled and funded by well-organized global gangsters who own both the weapons of mass destruction, and the media of mass deception.

Actors like Michael Rudder, on the other hand, practice theatre for reasons that have nothing to do with greed for power. Michael's humanity and self-deprecating sense of humour were on display while he was being interviewed from his hospital bed, with tubes up his nose. He's never been one to scream or over-act.

If only our leaders would enrol in that kind of acting class...

Atheo News: Double Cover: Beyond Ridiculous

2008-12-03T17:53:00.000-08:00

Atheo News: Double Cover: Beyond Ridiculous

Is it just me, or is it getting English-er out there?

2008-11-21T10:01:00.000-08:00

GLEAMS THEATRE presents The Bald Soprano at Geordie Space
THE BALD SOPRANO is about the peculiarity of English life, English fires, English food, English chairs, English socks, English men, English women and everything English.Yes, all this is shocking, especially the first time you encounter it. After the war, Eugene Ionesco, who lived in France, began studying English, and wrote a play about the experience. Presumably he had also noticed how autistic, even catatonic, phrasebook-English speakers appear. Perhaps he felt lost without his native Roumanian and French - continental languages that entwine around reality, while English boxes it. Or perhaps he feared the world was growing Englisher day by day.This is where the Bald Soprano began: a reaction to culture shock. But Gleams Theatre's director Constantin Sokolov takes it a few steps farther. There's an introductory sequence that includes a fascinating monologue from another Ionesco play, THE CHAIRS, followed by a sequence in which the actors announce there will not be a play because the theatre is empty. Actor-ushers order the audience to get up and move to the other side of the theatre. Without a word, everyone cooperates, exchanging glances. Do these people know what they're doing? Is this a play? or something else? Should we leave now to avoid further embarrassment?The cattle are reseated. The play begins. A scene in London. A couple, seated in chairs. The husband is doing a crossword puzzle. The wife is darning socks. We know they are English by their accents, although their cellphones keep ringing, forcing them to switch to their real-life personas, before becoming British again. These improvised interruptions help emphasize the awkwardness and absurdity of the play.Inevitably the wooden English characters and their absurd dialogues become nearly comprehensible, and by Act Two we're almost interested in their 'story' -- which goes to show it's practically impossible to write something meaningless. Despite our best efforts to eliminate it, meaning creeps into everything. Time and habit create the illusion of familiarity and repetition builds suspense, even as Big Ben chimes 17 times whenever it pleases. Characters move like mechanical toys, changing chairs with no rhyme or reason; nevertheless, before long, they seem almost alive and the audience begins to care what will happen next. Somewhere between tension and total boredom, we await the grand finale of nonsensical lines shouted into space by maniacal robots on amphetamines.Despite a few gimmicks too many, this play was strangely satisfying. Could it be because, since 2001, we've been living in wartime? Or a simulation of wartime? In the beginning, wasn't Theatre of the Absurd a response to war and the psychosis it unleashes in every little corner of our lives? Didn't absurdity come into vogue between the wars? Aren't plays like this a way to relax and let go and indulge in a little controlled insanity after you've been trapped for too long inside the real, out-of-control kind?I'm all for more surrealism and absurdity in theatre. Nothing in the world is as solid or structured as an English play or English "life". No solid threat is real unless we allow it to entrap us in the fear of it. Down with television and newspapers. Down with the prison called English. The best response to the English Terror is a sense of irony and the absurd -- usually acquired after real immersion in a foreign language.

Oh India

2008-03-17T16:44:00.001-07:00

An Awful Thing

2008-01-10T05:21:00.000-08:00

Vermont was a white cathedral swept clean by a winter storm, the first time I heard Ray Carver read his work, along with John Irving and Grace Paley.

I knew nothing of Carver till that January, 1978 at Goddard College. Carver was the last reader that evening. He got up, awkwardly, and read "Fat." Then he read "Why Don't You Dance?" The room seemed to go still after he finished.

I doubted I’d get accepted into his workshop – everyone seemed to want to study with him. The following day, though, I was in.

The frozen sunlight in Carver’s office that morning nearly blinded me. I felt lifted out of my real life, back home in Montreal. We talked about what I would do over the semester. We talked about writers we both liked. Kafka, Isaac Babel, Milan Kundera, Rainer Maria Rilke.

Sparing with advice; generous with encouragement, he seemed to see that we all had to find our own way in this business. Whatever business that might be.

"Never write a line that you don't mean." He’d been reading my work, so that line really hit me, as if it were aimed at me personally:

"And don't ever imagine drinking will make you a better writer,” he warned. The thought had never even occurred to me. I didn't even drink, I told him, and he seemed surprised.
We were miles apart, I could see that.

We said goodbye and I went home to my secretarial job and chronically ill mother. For the next six months we would work by correspondence, communicating every two weeks. I would send him my writing, reports on my reading, and he would send me comments and recommendations for reading.

On the bus home, I had started reading his first collection, "Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?" nominated for a National Book Award. By the time I reached Montreal, I’d had a taste of what it might feel like to be born suicidally depressed. Maybe I should have chosen another mentor.These bleak rooms were not my world, and I had to force myself to finish the book.

In Vermont, Carver had said” "Always try to write a story in a single sitting. Even if it's only a first draft, put it all down. When you get to the end, you’ll know."

I sent him a piece I had been working and reworking for over a year. Within a week, I had his response – the first of those 3-page single-spaced commentaries. He typed them the way he talked, piling up impressions, questions -- sometimes groping for phrases and worrying a topic until he had pinned it down right. He was concrete in his thinking, repetitive in a rhythmic way, like a character in one of his stories.

He said parts of the story I’d sent him – which had been short-listed for a prize in Toronto -- were interesting, but overall he found the piece “mawkish.” He advised me to get to work on something new.

For the next six months, I tried to write about my life in Montreal, but the more I wrote, the less fascinating it began to seem. My characters often babbled and did inexplicable, self-destructive things and I had no idea why. Carver commented that I was stuck at the surface, not going deep enough. I needed time to find my real material he said. I’d just have to allow my life to unfold.

He recommended I read a southerner called Barry Hannah for his gorgeous, natural style.

The first story of mine he read, and liked - "A Journal of Mona" – had been accepted by a Toronto magazine.

"Now that Mona's gone, I feel the need to reconstruct her," it began. It was about a self-conscious night club dancer who couldn’t get her act together.

"Write more about that world up there, where you're from," he said, at our first meeting. "It's sophisticated and fascinating. Don't be tempted to get involved with theory, though -- it will distract you Just write your stories."

Carver came from Port Angeles, Washington. I tried to imagine such a place, a blank far corner of America, gaping out at the Pacific. I couldn't see how people lived or how they wrote there. Montreal surrounded me with its gyrating mysteries which, on paper, lacked form and direction. A prisoner of layers and textures, I was trapped in a crammed mansion, but there was little natural light in there.

The second and last time I saw him was in June or early July – I had returned to Vermont to wrap up the semester.

I thanked him for all this letters and comments. It had been a great experience but I had decided I couldn’t afford to continue paying the high fees at Goddard. I was dropping out of the program.

It was hot. I wore a dress that looked like a nightie. He seemed worried about me. I had been working as a secretary at a college, taking care of my mother, writing in my spare time while trying not to be too influenced by Ray Carver.

Usually shy and taciturn, this time he was talkative. He was finally done with drinking, he said, having fallen in love with a poet named Tess Gallagher. That was why some of his letters to me had been mailed from Texas, where she lived. And also from other towns in America – he was invited all over to give readings, lectures.

By then I had come to admire his stories, how they reveal a tiny cosmos feeding on deep currents of malaise. His characters often seem handicapped by a spellbinding ignorance -- a crippling fear of the vast unknown. Each a living pebble, in the desert of the greatest country on earth.

I told him I could never write like that -- and wouldn't even try. I’d leave it to him to squeeze the world into a space the size of a diner.

I had noticed some of the other workshop students had started sounding like Ray Carver -- but none of them were. In his understated way, he could overwhelm you. It was dangerous. Silence in his stories suggested great depths underneath, but students were falling into the trap. Hoping if they imitated his style, they could also absorb his secrets, by osmosis.
He heard me out. "Never mind. They’ll never know what you know."

It sounded like a compliment, whatever he meant by it. I had no idea what I knew – only what felt true and false in the moment.

He still smoked, and his voice was muffled and hoarse. We sat in the noisy cafeteria for our final conference. I had to strain to hear what he was saying. He was a mumbler, I was a jumbler. His words dissolved before they reached my ears. Several times I asked him to repeat himself – he acted as if communication were a frustrating, painful thing, not his forte. He was really a very shy man, built large like an extrovert who has abdicated the role.

His lips were moving inaudibly. I leaned forward. "You know, it's an awful thing –“ The rest of the sentence came out clear, but made no sense.

After a pause, I asked: "Did you just say, ‘It’s an awful thing to take a bite out of an old Arab?’”

”No,” he laughed. "No, I didn't say that.”

In retrospect, it could have been an opening line for a Ray Carver story: like “A man with no hands came to take a photograph of my house.” It also described what it felt like to study with Carver.

He started to repeat what he’d actually said, then stopped to laugh some more. And so our last meeting dissolved in wave after wave of silly giggling. At least I’d made Ray Carver laugh.
Before we said goodbye for good, there was one further item of business. Because of all his moving from place to place over the semester, he’d mailed his evaluation a few days before he received my final package which was late. There was a sentence in his commentary that needed deleting, as it suggested I had not completed my work. He said I should contact the Records Office about that, and get it fixed.

He said he could get me a scholarship to Iowa, if I wanted to go there. He thought I should. All the best young writers graduated from that MFA program. If I enrolled, I’d have it made, he said.

I said I’d think about it.

I never did contact the office or get that comment removed, so it’s probably still there on my record. Maybe he was right the first time -- something was unfinished. It didn't seem to matter then. My mother was dying; I knew I would not go to Iowa. Anyway, where was Iowa? I was a city girl from Montreal where there was plenty that was fascinating to write about -- exotic tales that could light up all the diners of America. Or so I thought, not knowing what lay ahead.

A few years later, when he was very famous, I tossed our entire correspondence into a black plastic bag and left it on the sidewalk for the garbage men to collect. I still didn't want Carver’s influence -- or anyone else's -- in my life.

For a while, life got the better of my writing. For which, I think, I'm grateful.

Early in 1988 my first novel, based on that first short story -- was accepted. The publisher asked me if I knew someone who could write a blurb for the back cover. I found a paragraph from Carver's 1978 evaluation. I wrote to Carver for permission to quote from it, but never heard back. Soon afterwards, he appeared to me in a dream. Yes, he remembered me. No, he couldn’t be of much help. Then he waved as if to say, Good luck!

A few months later, I heard he was dying of lung cancer. Come to think of it, I never wrote a short story after that. Instead, I wrote personal essays, book reviews, novels.

“Never write a line you don’t mean.” The few times I repeated that advice to my students, I tried not to make it sound like a death sentence. Hard as I try, I can’t think of a more awful thing than sitting down and finishing a story in one go, the way he did it.

Hello and Welcome

2007-11-30T10:12:00.000-08:00

Before I begin, here are some links to my other sites:

http://anndiamond.net
http://anndiamond.blog-city.com (closing December 31)

An interview with Duplessis Orphan Silvio Day

2007-10-26T15:55:00.000-07:00

An interview with Duplessis Orphan Silvio Albert Day

November 2005
Interview and translation by Ann Diamond

Q: When you were working at St Jean de Dieu, you were responsible for –

When I worked at St Jean de Dieu, I was there as a patient. I worked in the Vestiaire des Morts -- the Locker Room of the Dead, where they wash the bodies and put them in the refrigerator. One bathroom was for washing the dead bodies. That was the washroom. And all around were refrigerators.

Q: And there were corpses of children--

Yes. I worked for a year and four months in the Vestiaire des Morts. All I did, I went to get the bodies from the operating room. I didn’t go into the operating room, but the nuns and the doctors there had masks on their faces.

A nun said to me, “Monsieur Silvio.”

“Yes, sister.”

“Could you stay there, and wait in the hallway?”

My buddy and I waited.

And the nun said, “Okay, Mister Silvio, would you please go get the stretcher?”

I said, “Yes, sister.”

So then they got the person, and it was a child. They put the child on the stretcher. They rarely covered it with a white sheet. So I went towards the elevator, to go down to the basement. The Locker Room of the Dead was down in the basement there.

Once I arrived, the nun said, “Mister Day.”

And I said, “Yes, sister.”

“Mr. Silvio, you took your time.”

I said, “Sorry. The elevator wasn’t working well, and I had to wait.”

So then the nun took charge of bringing the body to the washroom. There was a big sink where they put the dead bodies to be washed.

I took the arms and my partner took the legs and we put the body in the big flat sink, it was a flat sink which had a drain for the blood to run out.

In the beginning, she had said to me, “Go ahead, do your work, and I don’t want you talking!”

So I used to put the body down in the sink, but very rarely I removed the bonnet, because these patients who were operated on always had a blue bonnet and a blue jacket, and a pair of white socks. So anyway, this time I took off the bonnet, I removed the bonnet, and there was a flap of skin, and then the flesh of the brain was hanging there in the sink in front of me. It just sort of poured out like a tap, and it was all over me.

I let out a scream. There was no hair, it had been shaved all around, which was why the skin was hanging like that, swinging back and forth.

I was shocked. “Mother of God!”

My partner didn’t do anything. We had an orphan there, and he was supposed to take care of that.

“Silvio, you better not make any noise.”

It was my job to wash the bodies. But I didn’t know there had been an operation. Once I saw that flap of skin, which hung there, moving and getting soft, and then I saw the brain, I didn’t say a word, I took the bonnet, and I picked up the piece of brain, and I put it back in the bonnet.

In fact, there was a paid worker there who said, “Listen, stay where you are and don’t open your mouth, don’t talk about this. Everything here, stays in here. It doesn’t go outside.” He was the one who put on a bandage to hold in the brain. I started washing, and when I finished, I put the body in the refrigerator. The freezer.

Later, in the evening, the telephone rang. A nun said, “Well, Mr. Silvio?”

I said, “Yes, my dear sister.”

“Would you go to the operating room again? Yes, again! And keep quiet. If you’re late, you will be punished. You’ll be sent to the cells.”

I took the stretcher, and made a dash for the top floor. The operating room was on the fifth floor. We got the stretcher, and headed for the elevator to the fifth floor, and then we went down a passage which led to the operating room.

“Well, well. Hello. You sure took your time.”

“I did my best. There were people in the elevator.”

“Please leave the stretcher there. Go sit down.”

“Pardon?”

“I said, take a seat and don’t touch anything.”

“No, I won’t touch anything.”

The stretcher rolled away all by itself. We didn’t say a word. We sat down. And it took a long time. I watched the clock in the hallway. And eventually, it was 3:30 am.

The two nuns said, “Mr. Silvio, would you mind…”

The doctors wore gloves and green uniforms, and there was a man there, and some others, and there was a lot of blood.

So I got up and I was going to take everything away.

“No, don’t touch those!”

I backed off, and waited for the other guy, and then I headed down to the Locker Room of the Dead, and once I was in there, I said “Oh, Lord, not another one!”

I removed the white sheet, and started pushing the stretcher toward the sink. I took off the jacket – another child, around 10 or 11 years old.

Anyway, I took the patient, and put him on the stretcher or the big flat sink, and I said, “Okay, I’ll take off his jacket and his pair of white nylon socks.”

I took off the cap, and the other guy said, “Hey, those are holes, as if a machine had drilled through his head like that …”

I froze. That’s when our boss said, “Mr. Silvio.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Don’t say a word and do your job.”

So I washed the body, and I took the bonnet and put it back on, and then I took the jacket. And I used the method the other guy used: I stapled a ticket to the jacket, to identify them by name.

Q: And how many times did you have to transport dead bodies from the operating room?

Around 60 times. I worked a lot of hours per week.

Q: And what year was this?

In the 1960s, 50s.

Q: You were how old?

I was born in 1942. And at that time I was about 18, 19.

Q: Did you undergo any experiments yourself? Were you drugged?

Well, one thing: I was treated with Largactil, 25 mg. After that, you’re like a vegetable. We were like mummies; we walked like mummies. At one point they wanted to send me for electroshock, but they said I wasn’t ready yet. So then they said they would give me a new treatment, Largactil pills, 25 mg. After that I became a vegetable. Later on, they changed the pills so I would be better.

That’s when the doctor asked me, “Mr. Silvio, would you come to the office?”

“Yes, Doctor.”

This was Dr. George Gravel, a psychiatrist. He was the one who first asked me if I would like to work in the Locker Room of the Dead.

I said, “Yes, Doctor.”

If I refused, I would get punished, I’d be put in the cells, like the others.

I said, “Am I obliged to accept?”

He said, ”Yes. Do you agree?”

I said, ”Yes.”

They sent another guy to watch over me. “You will be accompanied by a worker and a guardian.”

A guardian and a guy who worked in the Locker came to get me. I didn't feel good about it – we went straight to the Locker Room of the Dead.

He said, “Well, here we are. That’s a dead body. Whatever happens, I want you to keep your mouth shut. I don’t want anything repeated outside this place.”

I said, “Okay.”

“If you speak, you’ll be punished.”

I said, “Okay.”

Up to that point, on the first floor, we'd taken the elevator. But now we took the staircase.

Once I was downstairs, I took the passage that went to the Locker. I noticed there were coffins in every compartment, like in a funeral parlour, and on the left was where they put the dead patients in refrigerators.

Then he said, “Now we’ll show you how to wash a dead body.”

They started washing a child, a really small child about 4 years old.

I let out a scream.

They looked at me. “Are you afraid of corpses?”

I said, “No, but it’s the first time I ever saw something like this.”

Then, once they had washed it, they said they were going to put it in the fridge. I opened the door, so they could put the child inside. Once it was inside, it moved on rollers, so then they said “Okay, that’s just the first step. Now you’ll go with him – the other guy -- follow him.”

“Okay.”

“Just one thing: we’ll show you how to clean up.” I would be in charge of moving the coffins and washing the floors.

But then the other worker told me, “No, I’m not going to train you to clean up. I’m going to send you where they transport the bodies and wash them.”

So the nun said, “Mr. Silvio, take the stretcher and go to the rooms in the back.”

“All right.” I knew that meant the operating room –

“I want you to understand -- you are not to do any dishes.”

“No, sister. I promise.”

So off we went.

Q: She meant, no touching the dishes after handing the corpses?

Exactly. So when I got to the room, I hadn't realized the doors were locked and I needed a key.

“Excuse me, can I have the key ???”

“Yes.”

“Is it all right if I hold on to it?”

“Yes. Oh, excuse me – I have to answer the phone.”

He took a look at the stretcher, and went away.

Once I was inside, I continued towards the cells. They opened the door, and I saw someone hanging from the bars. The person in charge, who had let me in, said: “You have no business looking at that!”

It was an adolescent, 14 years old.

Later, another one hanged himself, I think he was about 25. When I got to his cell, they said, “You’re not allowed to look!”

I said, “Well, but I saw him.”

They let it go.

“All right, okay. Don’t say a word about it. Take the stretcher.”

I came back with the stretcher. The nun said, “Mr. Silvio, late again?”

I said, “Sorry, Sister. This door isn’t big enough to get the stretcher into the cell. It’s not my fault you’re fat.”

She said, “Watch what you say, or you’ll be punished.”

I'd expected her to say that. So I got my coworker and we went into the cell. We picked up the body, and put it on the stretcher. That’s when I saw traces of acid in the hole. But I wasn’t allowed to touch the linen. They took away the linen and threw it in the garbage can.

Q: I’d like you to tell us the story about when you met Father Joseph, aka Dr. Mengele, in the hallway of St. Jean de Dieu hospital.

Oh yes. Yes yes yes. I was getting to that.

Well, one day when I’d finished working in the Locker, the nun said, “We’re giving you three days’ off."

So I was off work, I had three days to rest, and for the first time I had time to wander around the halls. I was drugged, because of these pills, and so I was walking like a mummy.

Also, there were a lot of doctors, for example there was Dr. Camille Laurin. I saw him one time but I wasn’t sure if it was him that I saw. There was a Dr. Archambault and Dr. LaRoche, and there were other doctors. But the doctor I saw that day was only so tall, with his hair combed back like this, and he had a moustache. Well, since I had seen so many war films, when I saw his face I thought, “My God, he looks like Hitler!”

So when I saw this doctor, I raised my arm and said: “Heil … Hitler!”

He blinked his eyes at me, and made a sign with his hand: “Take this guy and go lock him up.” So they grabbed me and this time they put me in a cell. Then they said “Go to the doctor’s office.”

Not the same doctor who had been there in the hall. Another doctor. A French Canadian. We went into his office and I said, “Is anything wrong?”

“Would you repeat what you said?”

So I repeated it. “Heil Hitler!”

“Stop saying that! Why are you talking that way? Why are you walking and moving your feet like that?”

I realized it was because I had been watching war movies. So then the doctor – I think it was the one who had invented the 25 mg. drug – Largactil.

Q. Dr. Heinz Lehmann?

Yes. You had these people there, who studied children, orphans, and did experiments, operating on the patients and using these patients like guinea pigs. Besides practicing on animals, they practiced on human beings. He was the one.

Q: But the first doctor, the one in the hallway. You said he had a moustache. Did he speak French?

Yes, he spoke French but not much. He always held his hands like this (straight down at his sides). He had … his hair was always combed back, you know?

Q: And how tall was he?

I would say about 5 foot 6. Yes.

Q: Dr. Mengele was 5 foot 8.

Well, he was slim. Black hair, brown eyes.

Q. Mengele was slim, with black hair and brown eyes.

I used to talk to him, and he talked to me, but I didn’t understand him. Still, he made an effort to speak French. He gestured to the other doctor, who was his assistant, Dr. Georges Gravel. Gravel spoke to me so that I could understand, because he also understood me. Dr. Gravel spoke English, German and Russian.

So finally he said, “Why did you insult him? What did you think you were doing? Why do you say he’s the one who is doing the experiments?”

I said, “Listen to me, Dr. Gravel. I wasn’t going anywhere, it was my day off. I saw him in the hallway near the operating room. He wasn’t wearing a mask. He had on a blue jacket, you know, like a uniform. I saw him leaving, but he was alone and didn't speak to me, but he still looked at me like this, with his great big eyes, you know…”

Q: But do you think Mengele was doing operations there, himself?

Yes. Yes. Yes. Well, he was the one who talked to the others, to the surgeons. He used to walk around in -- the place where I went when I got sick (the infirmary) and he would walk around with a tall doctor, a surgeon with a mask, and the conversation went like this:

“Does this boy have a family?”

The nun answered, “Yes.”

“We won’t touch him for now. What about him?”

And the nun said, “No, he is an orphan. He has a file, this orphan.”

“Okay, that’s good.” He’d found one. “We’ll study this one.”

That’s how they did experiments, studying the ones who had epileptic seizures – not really epileptics, but they passed them off as epileptics. They did experiments, but instead of on animals, they used humans instead of animals, and I saw it, but not with my own eyes …

Everytime I think of someone, they die

2007-02-18T20:15:00.000-08:00

In future, I'll be careful to think of NO ONE.