Asylum by Moriz Scheyer & P. N. Singer

Author:Moriz Scheyer & P. N. Singer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography & Autobiography / Personal Memoirs, History / Holocaust, History / Jewish, History / Military / World War Ii
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Published: 2016-09-27T04:00:00+00:00

25

Blessed are the poor in spirit

OUR SOCIAL ENVIRONMENT HERE consists of two elements. On the one hand, the inmates of the hospital–the enfants, about eighty in number.

‘Enfants’, children: the word is here used to express a concept of neighbourly love. All the patients here are referred to by this term, from the youngest, five-year-old Monique, to the oldest, the nearly-eighty-year-old Marie Mass, who was brought here as a ten-year-old orphan by the Assistance Publique. Marie Mass has lived within these walls for nearly seven decades: many thousands of identical days and nights. Were it not for her terrible fear of death, however (for she is mentally ‘normal’), Marie Mass would be completely happy.

On the other hand we have the convent, the communauté of fifteen Sisters, under the guidance of the Mother Superior. It is a microcosm in which worldly values and standards have no place. The microcosm is, however, no less full of work and trouble, of dramas great and small. But all these are borne in the belief that our days on earth are no more than a fleeting, trivial pathway to another life, the life eternal. This belief gives the Sisters the strength to do without any earthly thanks or reward; and this applies to the twenty-year-old Soeur St-Félix just as much as to the eighty-five-year-old Soeur Marthe, who still works in spite of her age.

And these two little worlds–the mentally ill, the ‘abnormals’, and those who look after them with so much dedication–intertwine to form a whole, in a way which has taught me to be less ready with a number of received ideas that one tends to go about with.

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