Through and Through transcript

Text on screen:(from "3 Lives" by Gertrude Stein)

Ida is her name

She was thinking about it she was

thinking about life. She knew it

was just like that through

and through.

Acted sync momologues:

1) male: Ordinary bickering unnerved both my mother and father. They could not tolerate it. When we scrapped over little things, our parents intervened with anger themselves. It was as if a lid had to be put on our energy; otherwise it might get out of control... I felt it coiled up inside me, sometimes it caused aches and pains in my legs-there was so much of it.

2) female: My mother had me put away when I was thirteen. She couldn't control me. My father had left us, she was drinking and crying all the time. I kept running away from bad foster homes, and so she finally committed me to an institution.

...A doctor tried to rape me during a gynaecological examination and I was afraid to complain, afraid they'd say I was lying or crazy and give me shock treatments.

3) female: They executed my grandfather right after the war. Sometimes, when my mother goes completely crazy, she tells me that I'm possessed by the same devil as him and God will punish me also...He was kind of a big shot under the Nazis. I know him from pictures. He really looked great - the black uniform, the boots...

...I'm sick and tires of it. Enough that we Germans are always the bad ones - we started the war, we gassed the Jews, we devastated Russia. It sure as hell wasn't me.

4) male: At times my life seemed to be not my own. Hundreds of people lived through me. My life was not just an ordinary life...I felt like a vindication of their collective lives, not just an ordinary child like the others at school. I wanted to be ordinary, free of history.

5) male: When I watched war movies on television, I never associated them with the Holocaust. Whatever it was that happened to my parents was not a movie...What had happened to them happened because they were Jews, not because they'd done anything wrong. I assume my feeling then was: that's not right. Somewhere also I had the very strong feeling that it should never happen again. But I never verbalized those feelings. The only time I ever remember having verbalized them was just before the 1967 war in Israel.

(#1,3,4,5, are taken from books of interviews with children of survivors of the Holocaust and with children of Nazis by Peter Sichrovsky, "Born Guilty" and "Strangers in their Own Land"; #2 is from interviews with women mental asylum patients in “Women and Madness” by Phyllis Chesler)