Chris contrasts his currently comfortable existence with the contents of his grandfather's journals from the refugee camp after World War II. He explores the weirdness of history and the differences between generations.

Chris discusses the importance of understanding history to gain perspective on the future. He shares his connection to his family's refugee history and the theme of displacement and lack.

Chris emphasizes the power of storytelling and the need to honor and learn from our ancestors.

Takeaways

• History can provide perspective on our own lives and the future.
• Understanding our family's history can help us make sense of our own experiences.
• Stories and art can give meaning to historical events.
• Honoring our ancestors and their struggles can inspire us to overcome our own challenges.

Chapters

00:00 Introduction and Personal Reflection

01:27 The Weirdness of History

04:11 Ancestral History and Family Journals

06:27 Life as a Refugee

09:14 Connecting Personal Experiences to History

10:39 Intergenerational Patterns and Lack

14:00 Perspective and Honoring Ancestors

16:23 The Power of Stories and Artistic Practice

17:20 Conclusion and Call to Action

So I started putting together this episode as I'm sitting here in my living room in Southern California. I started writing on my iPad. I'm listening to music with my son. He's working on his graffiti hand styles. Our existence is pretty comfortably middle-class. I mean, we all get to do what we want. We're safe. Everything is pretty good. And I say that because it wasn't always that way.

And it wasn't always that way in my family. And so it was weird because I had this moment where I'm enjoying the comfortable existence that we've managed to create in our family. While at the same time, I'm looking on my iPad, my grandfather's friend had sent over a bunch of journals that my grandfather had written after World War II. So these are journals he was keeping while he was a refugee in a camp in Germany after World War II.

And I couldn't help but notice how different his existence was from my existence, how strange he would actually think my life is given that time. And kind of looking back into history and seeing all of the stuff that my ancestors went through and reading about it firsthand as I'm sitting there in this comfortable existence. So that's kind of what I'm talking about today. I wanted to talk about history. I wanted to talk about how

History is weird. You have ancestors, maybe one or two generations removed. I mean, my grandfather was talking about my mother as a child, and that's just one generation before me. So different, they're in a camp, they're in a refugee camp after World War II. So it's so different, it's so weird. And it kind of weirds me out sometimes. And I think a lot about how you have these ups and downs in history, these great tragedies, these great triumphs. And then a generation or two later,

everything can change, everything can be completely different. So that's where I'm at today. And I'm just curious where things are going to go in the future. I think a lot about the future and, um, I really think to get perspective on the future, it is a good place to start in the past. So we're talking about history and the weirdness of history today on HyperMemoir. I'm Chris Waldheims and this is the HyperMemoir podcast where

We're talking about a lot of different things. We're talking about creativity. We're talking about storytelling. We're talking about history. We're talking about writing your own story. So I've been going onto a lot of different topics, but I think the thing that unites everything is that we all have a story and they're all connected. And these stories are all threads in a much larger tapestry that we can explore and we can learn more about. And the more that we learn about each other's stories, the more that we share our own stories.

I think the more we can find common ground. I think the more we can find compassion and learn more about other people. So I'm all about that. And that's what this podcast is all about. If you like that, if that sounds like something that you wanna get behind or you're interested in, you can subscribe to the podcast. That's easy. You can also subscribe to the email newsletter I send every week. So every single week when I do this podcast, I also send a newsletter. Sometimes I go a little bit more in depth into topics.

Other times I kind of just leave it as is and say, hey, here's the episode, enjoy it. But either way, I try to give you something good. I don't wanna clog your email box with anything crappy. So I do my best and I hope you enjoy that. And it helps me to kind of learn what you like and sharpen my skills and get better at doing all of this. I just started being a podcaster in the last year and I started writing a newsletter in the last year, really loving it. So thanks for everybody who's listening and leaving reviews and.

messaging me and connecting with me through this. It's been amazing, so thank you for that. So it drives me and it drives me to this episode, which is about history. And if you've listened to this podcast before, you know that history is a big part of my life. My ancestral history, my family history, the history that's come before me, I think a lot about it. And I think we all should because we're all products of history in some way or another. And I think the more that we can...

dig into it and look at it, even if it is difficult. And I've talked about the difficulty of looking at history. The more we can look into history and look at it with an eye of compassion and gratitude and all the things that we can bring to it, we can get a lot out of it. And I think we actually owe it to the past and to the future to do that. So as I was saying in the introduction, when I started this episode was...

My grandfather's friend, Yves, sent me translations of journals that my grandfather kept in the years right after World War II. So during that time, my mother, my uncle, my grandmother, my grandfather were all refugees in a camp. So they were from Latvia, and I guess Latvia had become part of Soviet Union, so a lot of people from Latvia did not wanna go back. So that left them as part of, I believe it was what, two million refugees, including

Jewish people and people from a lot of the Eastern Bloc countries or Eastern Europe at least who didn't want to go back home, couldn't go back home and somehow needed to be somewhere else. So there's this period after World War II where I don't actually hear a lot about where I think maybe five to seven years where millions of people were essentially stateless, homeless and kind of looking for a new place to go. So my family ultimately ended up in North America. My grandfather in Montreal and my mother.

and grandmother in Michigan, but it all started here. And I think they were refugees from their home country. So this wasn't an easy time. There's a lot of talk about rations and sickness and work permits and bartering and internal conflict. And a lot of it is stuff that I can't relate to. I've never been in a situation where I've had to barter for food or get a work permit to do what I want. I can basically do what I want, but.

Here they're in a very controlled environment. They're far from home. They're not in a place that's stable. They're not in a place that they probably want to be. And I can tell this by reading the journals. I can tell that life was obviously very difficult, as it was for the millions of others in Europe at that time who was going through the same thing. And it's also the same thing for anybody else now who's been displaced because of some kind of armed conflict. It's not over. There's a lot of people in this world right now who are living through what my...

grandparents and parents live through. So again, we're talking about how can we connect these things? These are not things that only happened in the past. Now for me, for my family, our life is different. We've shifted something. Something's changed in that time. It's about 70 years ago that this was all happening. My life is not like theirs. And it's so funny because when I talk about there being 70 years of history, it's amazing to think about how much has changed since the late 40s, early 50s to now.

This is 2024, this is January of 2024. And we have computers, we have internet, we have a lot of social changes. The world was a completely different place, the political situation is different. What countries are on top or on bottom or whatever is completely different. How we relate to one another is different. What we talk about, our social morals are different. It's a completely different world. But I think what you can see underneath it

are the things that are always gonna be in common, like emotions and emotional experiences. And I was thinking about that as I was reading through a lot of this and reading about how much frustration and annoyance and disillusionment there was around a lot of the things that my family was experiencing. I was reading all these parts of my grandfather's journal where he's talking about, I guess, election of a government in exile, because this is an exile community of Latvians and Lithuanians that...

were forming a government because the government that was existing in Latvia at the time was part of the Soviet Union. So these people who have left, my grandfather and my family among them, weren't really people who subscribe to whatever the Soviet Union was doing. So they were forming their own political situation. And I don't know too much about it. I just know that there's a lot of conflict. And I think my grandfather was somehow involved in a lot of it. He had his opinions. Other people had opinions. I think the politics got pretty tense at the time because you're dealing with

all the displacement, all the frustration and annoyance of not being able to be in your home country. So I knew about a lot of this stuff before, but the journals were newly translated, so this particular part was new to me. It was really interesting to read about passages where my grandfather talked about my mother. My mother, it looks like she was sick a lot of the time or there was a lot of disease in the camp or something like that. Or just him being a father, it was really interesting to see him being a father.

looking through these journals and seeing him trying to raise his children or provide a good childhood for them, along with my grandmother, in a refugee camp situation. I couldn't even imagine who knows how that is. There's a lot, like I said, there's a lot of people today who do know that experience and are living that. And. Yeah, it was it was just a lot. So I don't know.

how much detail I'll go into about all of this stuff. But what I will say is it was a window into history. And it was a window into history that I, here's what I find weird about the whole thing is coming from my perspective where I'm at, a relatively well situated person in United States, I have a good career, I have a good family, everything's fine. I mean, I really don't have much to complain about in terms of my everyday life. But when I look back at these journals from the 40s, I know because I have the...

When my mother was in the journal, she was like seven years old or something like that, or 10 years old. So she's a young child. And to read about her childhood gives me a little bit of perspective. I don't know if it's the entire perspective, but the more that I know, I feel like the more I understand. And it's interesting because I noticed that for her life and for my family's life, there's this theme of displacement and lack, for lack of a better term, I guess you could say.

where they're away from home, they're in somewhere unfamiliar, and they don't have what they need. They don't have the stability they need. They don't have the material things they need. And that's something I can actually relate to, because if we talk about things like intergenerational patterns, I hear a lot of people talking about that. And I've talked about that in previous episodes. You can see these things repeat. I've also told you all that I had kind of rough childhood. I was in foster care for...

to look at them as not something that happened to me or something new that I received that came from nowhere. But these are things that were happening before me. And perhaps even before that, perhaps even before the 40s and the 1910s, when there was World War I, my grandfather was involved in that. He wasn't a fighter, but he was a boy during World War I. So these things seem to happen over and over and over. And somehow...

knock on wood or glass or whatever, I've managed to shift a lot of that, where my children aren't experiencing that same kind of lack that everybody else in my mother's side of the family experienced. My father's side of the family had a different situation, but I'll talk about that in future episodes. But here I'm focused on what my mother's family went through as they emigrated from their home country by force, essentially, to a new country, which is America and Canada, as I mentioned.

So all of this led to my situation. So, you know, if they hadn't struggled and survived and dealt with the things they dealt with, I might not have been born. So it's kind of this weird thing where, again, you know what hardships are coming for them, but then I also know that for me, at least, I feel like things turn out okay. And obviously there's things I wish hadn't happened in my life and there's things that I wish I could change. I wish...

There's certain things people hadn't done in my life or mistakes or whatever, but I think that's also part of history and it's not to discount anything I've been through or for, you know, and anyone to actually even play that comparison game of who had it harder. I think that's a pointless game. It's kind of zero sum and doesn't make sense, but I think what we want to do is pull our experiences and relate them to the experiences of the people in history. And again, the more we learn about history, the more we can find things that are in common, even if our lives are different.

one cool thing, you know, and I've talked in the past about honoring the ancestors and what they've done. And that's been really important for me. I think that was a few episodes ago when I talked about it. What did they do? And I could see that my family, my ancestors were industrious people. They were doers. They were problem solvers. They were really out there trying to make the best out of a bad situation. And that's something I feel like I've inherited from them.

but it's really cool to see them doing it and then know that, okay, that's how I approach the world too. No matter how hard things get, I always wanna be in a situation where I feel like I'm being resourceful and trying new things and giving it my best. And I think a lot of people are like that, but that's something that I can really relate to. Yeah, so it's kind of hard for me, it's interesting because it's hard for me to complain about...

lack of opportunity. And I've had moments in my life where I feel like my opportunities aren't what they want aren't what I want them to be or life is too tough or whatever. But it's hard to complain when I see what my family went through. Again, that's not about comparing struggles. It's not to say that one thing is harder than others. I mean, I think there's things that we'd prefer. But ultimately, we all kind of end up with the same emotional response to things. And that's what we have in common. I don't think it's about comparing at all.

but you acknowledge your own struggles and then you keep them in perspective. And again, history gives you a little bit of perspective, but it also gives you distance because when you look at, like when I look at where my family came from, and again, my story is an extension of their story. It grew up from whatever they experienced. And so the more that I can see that, the more I can situate myself.

So I think that's what I'm here to talk about today. This is not like a long episode. I actually didn't even write out a ton of notes. I just wanted to kind of riff a little bit after I'd been reading these journals from the 40s. And I don't know what I'll do with those journals. I look at the journals and I think to myself, maybe there's someone who is better at things like writing history or writing stories or whatever. I mean, I think what they went through in these refugee camps.

could be a story in and of itself. I mean, I think in the hands of a good writer, they could write it out, they could make it into a story that it should be. Otherwise it's just kind of information. And I think when you take this information and you turn it into a story and relate it to other stories, that's when it becomes more powerful. So I'm kind of in the process of digesting a lot of it and seeing just what it is. And like I said, my grandfather kept journals throughout his life. So I have a lot of them. I have journals from the 60s and 50s, et cetera, when he was developing his artistic practice, which I've talked about before.

And, but it's interesting to see that this set of journals is actually from before he became the artist that he ultimately became. Before he developed his artistic practice, I can see that, I can see the struggles and lack of opportunities and lack of what's the ability to communicate or something like that. I feel like there's a lot of conflict around that exile community that he was part of. So

Yeah, that's it. I mean, it's just really, I was just kind of struck by the weirdness of how we can compare our modern technological, relatively comfortable life with the things that happen just, you know, a generation or two before. And so important to keep that perspective. So, I don't know, maybe this resonates with you in some way. Maybe you've had this experience where you've looked at things from your family and you've taken a moment to think about where they came from or what they've learned or...

what experiences they had. So that's all I have to share today. And I'm Chris of all times, and this is the HyperMemoir Podcast. And as I said at the beginning, if you wanna leave me a review, that's awesome. It helps me a lot because it helps other people know that the podcast is worth listening to. If you wanna share it on social, you can. Anything you can do to get it out there would be cool. No obligation, but I do appreciate it. But even if you just wanna subscribe to the newsletter, you can go on the show notes and you can see the subscription form.

and we'll send you an email, I'll send you an email that's hopefully good, something that you like, something that's interesting to you, and if you like what you're hearing here, it's more of the same, just a different angle on it. So thanks for listening, and I'll see you next time on HyperMemory.