Listening Well: Bringing Stories of Hope to Life by Heather Morris

Author:Heather Morris [Morris, Heather]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, Personal Memoirs, Language Arts & Disciplines, Writing, Nonfiction (Incl. Memoirs)
ISBN: 9781250276926
Google: PrA9EAAAQBAJ
Publisher: St.Martin's
Published: 2022-08-02T20:38:44+00:00

Asking the Right Question

I’m often asked, how does the listener know what is the right question at the right moment, what do people want to be asked, or what question will unlock a story? How do we sense what is a gentle prompt, an indicator that we’re prepared to listen, and what might instead be intrusive?

When I consider these questions, I always hear the words Lale said to me when we first met. He asked the question, “Did you know I was the Tätowierer?” I had to say no on two counts. I had just met him, and I did not know what his story was, and I had no idea what a Tätowierer was. He replied, “Well, I was, I was the person making the numbers on the arms at Auschwitz-Birkenau.” He pulled up his shirt sleeve and placed his left arm inches from my face. I kept my expression neutral as my eyes followed the fading green numbers he was pointing to: 32407. I now knew what a Tätowierer was.

I knew the key to learning Lale’s story was to listen, not interrupt. The few times I asked a question midsentence, he would get cranky, lose his way in the story he was telling, and struggle to reconnect. Instead, I had to work with his broken story lines, fired at me often at bullet pace, with limited or no connection from one to the other. As you can imagine, with so many disjointed facts, emotional and clinical, there had to come a time when I needed to ask questions, get clarification—a deeper understanding of what he had witnessed and experienced.

The day Lale said, “Have I told you about Cilka?” has become a watershed moment for me. When I said, “No, who was she?” he responded with the simple statement: “She was the bravest person,” wagging his finger, “not the bravest girl, the bravest person I ever met.” He then became distressed and wouldn’t talk anymore about her other than to say, “We couldn’t save her.”

I let the conversation end there, knowing I would come back to Cilka when I felt the time was right. In fact, it would take several months for me to get any details about her and her role in Birkenau because Lale would always become distraught when he recounted what she had endured there and during her subsequent imprisonment in a Siberian Gulag.

On one visit with his friend Tuli, Lale mentioned that Tuli and Cilka had come from the same town, Bardejov. I immediately asked Tuli what he remembered about her. He told me he knew her in their hometown, knew what she was doing in Birkenau, and felt sorry for her. He was the first person who said to me that Cilka did “bad” things. When pressed, he said he only heard what she was doing. She was, however, kind to him and took a risk to get him warm clothing and a blanket the first winter when he nearly died from the cold. He credits her with saving his life.

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