The Moth - The Moth Radio Hour: PTSD, Lost Art and The Berlin Wall

Episode Date: April 21, 2021

The victim of a random stabbing struggles to reestablish his life while suffering from post traumatic stress disorder; author Nathan Englander describes coming of age at 19 while traveling through Europe to witness the fall of The Berlin Wall; and an artist and documentary film maker loses three years of work in an instant and finds it hard to continue. This episode is hosted by Moth Artistic Director, Catherine Burns. The Moth Radio Hour is produced by The Moth and Jay Allison of Atlantic Public Media. Hosted by: Catherine Burns Storytellers: Ed Gavagan, Ellie Lee, Nathan Englander

Attention Houston! You have listened to our podcast and our radio hour, but did you know the Moth has live storytelling events at Wearhouse Live? The Moth has opened Mike's storytelling competitions called Story Slams that are open to anyone with a five-minute story to share on the night's theme. Upcoming themes include love hurts, stakes, clean, and pride. GoodLamoth.org forward slash Houston to experience a live show near you. That's the moth.org forward slash Houston. From KRX, this is The Moth Radio Hour. I'm Katherine Burns, artistic director of The Moth, and I'll be your host this time.

We have three stories this hour. A man struggles to get back to normal after being randomly attacked by strangers. A young backpacker accidentally finds himself on the wrong side of the iron curtain, and an animator is haunted by the voices in her film. Our first story is from Ed Gavigan. Ed has told a number of stories of the moth, many of them sintering around the incident at the heart of this story. Ed told it at an event we did in conjunction with Oregon Public Radio and literary arts Portland Oregon. A warning, the story involves active violence

and maybe upsetting for some listeners. Here's Ed Gavigan, live at the mall. You know, you wake up in the morning, you get dressed, you put on your shoes, you head out into the world, you feel like you're gonna come back home at night, go to sleep, get up, you do it again. That rhythm creates the framework that you use to create a life and you make plans and you kind of count on continuity.

And John Lennon said, life is what happens to you while you're making other plans. And I woke up one morning, I wasn't wearing any of my own clothes. I had two chest tubes, I had a hose going up my nose down to drain my stomach. I had a catheter, a morphine drip, and I woke into this fog of pain. It felt like I had broken through the ice into a lake of frozen hurt. And at the end of my bed, I could see the surgeon who had spent all night saving my life.

And he was holding my foot. And he had given me about a 2% chance of living. Next to him were two homicide detectives. Now, they were homicide detectives because they had gotten the case because they didn't think I was going to make it and they didn't want to have to do the paperwork swap. And let me tell you, when you start your day with two homicide detectives explaining what happened the night before it's downhill from there, they began to explain to me, they had five young men in custody and they wanted me to identify them from the mug shots before I died. And I didn't know this,

but they just wanted me to make an X and next to the pictures. And what had happened is that these young men had come in from Brooklyn, they were part of a gang. And the initiation for them to move up into the upper echelons of their gang was to come into Manhattan and kill somebody. And they had set up this little ambush

where they had one look out at either end of the block. And the three guys would sit on a stoop and they had their knives open up their sleeve like that and the look out at either end and they would wait. And it was late at night and it was the night before Thanksgiving, so the city was really empty. And this guy walks around the corner and he heads down the block and the two look out and give the go ahead and the three guys stand up and start walking towards him and he has

his key out and he puts his key in the door and he goes into the lobby and the door closes behind him and they're locked out and he pushes the elevator button and he goes upstairs. And he gets undressed and he goes to bed. And he never knows what just didn't hit him. And I'm the next guy. I come down the block and one of the very lucky things from that night is when I was in University of Notre Dame, I was on the boxing team. So I got one good punch and not the middle guy out and they caught him and he gave up

everybody else, which is how they had these five guys at custody. So they, you know, nobody expected me to make it and I did. I lived. They took me off life support, moved me into ICU and the nurse comes in with the clipboard and she wants to talk to me about my insurance. I was self-employed at the time,

so I like to say I was insurance-free. And when she found that out, the next morning, the person that I saw said, it's amazing how well you're doing and we just think you ought to go home. And they gave me a bottle of percussette and a cane and a bag to put my stuff in. And the flowers hadn't even stopped, the wilted yet, you know. So I end up in my apartment at home in very bad shape. The nightmares were unbelievable. I couldn't eat. They had removed about a third of my intestines. I had had two collapsed lungs.

I was missing organs that I didn't know that I had. And things were very, very difficult. And in New York, if you can't go to work and make money and pay your rent, you don't get to stay in your apartment. I would try and walk down the street to do my job. I had a little business building custom furniture. And whenever I saw a young man that had any hint of menace, this feeling would hit me.

And the feeling was, you know, if you're driving late at night in the winter on a snowy road, and you're going a little fast, and you come into a turn, and you feel all four wheels slip, and you feel the car start to go, you see the guardrail and you know there's nothing you can do. And then all of a sudden you hit the dry pavement and the wheels grip and your backing control and nothing happened and then you get hit with this adrenaline feeling in the back of your knees and your palms and you taste in your, but you're driving and you're like nothing happened. And I would have that feeling seeing teenage kids on the street six, seven, eight times a day

if I tried to ride the subway and it wore me out. I was having, in the end, was a post-traumatic stress symptoms. And I ended up losing my apartment, and essentially then becoming homeless. I lost my business, and I went to the District Attorney's Office for an appointment where I had five attempted murder trials

that I had to handle. And I was, I had to handle. And I was, I broke down. I was crying. I was like, I can't believe, you know, I was so, so lucky to be alive, but now I'm, I'm homeless. And he gave me a number for the, a little late. I thought for the victim's assistance people. And, but it was because I didn't talk. Like I just kept it all in. And so I go and I talk to the, I sit there and I don't have an appointment or anything. I'm waiting and this girl comes out

and she's like Reese Witherspoon and legally blonde. She's got the turtle neck and the ponytail and she leads me back to her cubicle. And I'm in this really dark place and I have this feeling that we're not going to connect. And I get to her cubicle and pin up on the wall next to her monitor is that poster. I know you know it, of the kitten with the branch,

saying, hang in there, baby. And I just don't feel like she's going to help me. And she gives me this paperwork to fill out for Medicaid. And she gives me some more paperwork on how to get on a list for subsidized housing. It's an 18-month wait, but at least you're on the list. And another sheet with some addresses in the Bronx where I can go for group counseling that's free.

And I feel like a drowning man who's just been thrown a kit to build a boat. And I walk out of there, and I go to my favorite bartender who's this cute Lebanese Canadian girl who's a poet, and she lets me move in and stay on the couch. She's rocking this Simone de Beauvoir look and she's got this hole like she's smart and funny and the thing from those days that I would she she, which was amazing, because what people did, and they're all very well meaning, but they had one of three responses. And the first response was, when I tried to talk about my feelings and my fear and this turmoil on my head, they would say, well, everything happens for a reason.

And that made me want to punch him in the face and ask him if they knew what the reason for that was. And then the second thing that people tended to say was you've just got to get over it, man, you're alive, you're lucky, you've just got to put this in the past and just move on and gather yourself together. And that made me want to stab him six times and come back and talk to them in six months

and go, so how's it working out? You got any advice from me now because I could really use some help from somebody that knows what I'm going through. And the third thing that people would say, and again, they were a very well-meaning, it just was absolutely no help, was that whatever doesn't kill you makes you stronger. And the problem with that was that I felt like I had come to New York, I had started this

little business, I had built a life, and I had lost everything, I had lost a life and I had lost everything. I had lost my apartment, my business, I had gotten, I got no help. This girl that had become, that let me move in with her was getting a little worried because I was just so sad all the time. I felt like you could actually, I mean, I read Nietzsche, I went to college, I was up all night in the student union, And that I felt like you could actually,

I mean, I read Nietzsche, I went to college, I was up all night in the student union, drinking coffee, going, yeah, if it doesn't kill you, man, it makes you stronger. But I felt like I was actually broken that things could happen in your life, that would just break a man, and that you, not only you wouldn't be stronger,

but you would never have ever, again, what you had before. And I felt like things had slipped in a way that I would never be able to recover. And what I would do to try and make money and have a job is I would gather my little set of chisels and tools and go up to the Upper East Side Manhattan where there's always, you know, some billionaires working on his mansion and I could see a construction site and go up and knock on the door and ask if they needed anybody to work, just a day laborer. And the foreman, you know, he sees a guy with his own tools. He knows his way around the job site.

English is his first language. And they'd put me on a, they'd be like, all right, put him down there and see what he can do. And I go and I start working and I knew what I was doing. And I'd be in this incredible mansion being renovated. And I'd look around at the unbelievable materials. And I think of how lucky these people were to be living, when we were done at this work, they'd

be surrounded by beautiful materials and amazing craftsmanship. And I'd be there working and making a mortise for an offset pivot hinge in a rosewood door, and the beauty of everything that I was working on contrasted with my life, I would just start to cry. And so I'd be on my hands and knees sobbing in the library under construction. And one of the laborers would go tell the foreman, like, you know, that dude, you hire man, he's sobbing in the library.

And the foreman, you know, usually this Irish guy would come and you know, I edit here. I was going to pay for the day, go have a drink, man. We don't need you anymore. And then that would be it. I'd get fired. And I was getting fired again. And again, and it was always, you know, these people didn't know what happened to me. They just knew they couldn't have some guy weeping in the basement and I couldn't hold the job and I

was getting angrier and now, you know, she's my girlfriend, the Canadian poet Bartender, but she's worried because my attitude is not so good. I leave after being fired yet again, I walk out on to Park Avenue. I've got my little bag of tools and I see this guy walking by and his hair is perfectly quaffed and his air meds tie is not ed and his shoes or shine, his impeccable suit with his shiny briefcase. And I see that guy and I just want to tackle him and just kneel on his chest and punch him in the face and go, you know, you're not good. You're just lucky, man.

You're not, you think that all of your assumptions and everything you know and all you're doing is keeping you where you are. You're just lucky, because it can all just be gone. You can lose it and I have this rage at him. I don't do anything. You know, he let him keep walking, but I realize as I have that feeling that I have just wanted to hurt an innocent stranger passerby to make a point about what is wrong with my life.

And in that moment, I realized I've become more like the kids that stabbed me. I've lost who I was before. And I go, I'm like, it's a, it's an incredible feeling to feel like you're not who you used to be. And that the feeling was that I was slipping down into some place where I was going to, I was going down a road where I was going to meet the guys who were my attackers.

And I was going to be in hell because I would go there alone. Like note that that path was just a bitterness and there was no way out. And at the same time, for the first time, as I was sitting there thinking about these feelings of what was happening to me, I realized I can never get back to where I was. That guy, that business, that whole life is just gone. I lost it. But I had never believed that I had lost it. I always thought I was trying to get back to be that guy.

And as I sat there and I thought about, I realized I got to do something new. And it felt liberating. It was like, all right, I can't go back because that's gone. And I don't want to be evil and bad. And I'm going to do this new thing. And I'm like, I can do it. I can do it. I have this girl and I run home and I'm like,

okay, I'm not going to be the sad guy. I'm not going to be the mad guy. I'm going to change and we're going to work this out. Will you marry me? And she's like, no. You're like, you got to do, you know, you need a little more work here. But she's enthused by my enthusiasm.

And she knows I'm never going to ask her again. So after about another year and a half, she feels like we got something. And so she asked me to marry her. And so we do and we end up building this routine again and setting up a life and now I have a two year old daughter and I put her shoes on in the morning and I head out to work.

Thanks. That was Ed Gavigan. Ed designs and builds home furniture for people all over the world. His work has been featured in architectural digest and the New York Times. I recently sat down with Ed to talk about the effect telling the story as had on him. So the stories you tell involve very painful memories and how do you prepare for telling them? them. There are certain memories that are bound up in having post-traumatic stress and that those memories are unlike anything else. Those memories live in a different part of

the brain. I think even neurochemically, it's a completely separate vault for the post-traumatic stress memories. Those memories come up in a way that is just in high-def and extremely vivid and I go back to that moment and So to kind of prepare for that you can't in a way. Like you just have to, you say to yourself, I don't want to lose my composure, but there's almost no way to, uh, to not have that hit you. I was wondering about the cathartic effect of telling these stories over and over. It seems like you fully inner each story with each telling that helps you in some way to go back there and share these memories by taking with inside and putting outside.

You're liberating what's private and making it public, especially shared before a big warm audience of fellow humans. And I was wondering what you think about that. The thing that I didn't anticipate was that by telling the story I remind myself to be grateful, to be grateful. To hear more of my conversation with Ed Gavigan, go to themoth.org. While you're there, pitch us your own story. Many of the most beautiful stories on the Moth mainstage have been told by people who called our pitchline. In a moment, writer Nathan Englutter will have a story about the hazards

of traveling behind the Iron Curtain with only a mixtape, a few bucks, and a Ural pass. The Moth Radio Hour is produced by Atlantic Public Media in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, and presented by PRX. This is the Moth Radio Hour by PRX. This is the Moth Radio Hour from PRX. I'm Catherine Burns. Our next story is from writer Nathan Englander. We first met Nathan at a writers festival in Perth, Australia. And we knew after just a few conversations that we had to get Nathan to tell a story for us. Here's Nathan Englander, live at Vermont. For those of you who are less than 100 years old,

I want to tell you there used to be something called the Soviet Union. They were our arch enemy and we were locked in a perpetual state of Cold War with them for, you you know my whole life And you know until I was an adult to contrast that to our perpetual war on terror that we're now in you know going around The city we're all afraid something's gonna blow up that might blow up well back then we were afraid Everything was gonna blow up. We were gonna melt the whole world into a tiny glass marble The symbol of the this you know split between East and West was the Berlin wall, which not only divided that city, it literally divided the planet. And I think about

it now, it's hard to go back to that, but it was really people would die trying to cross. They were literally trapped, they would literally dream of freedom, they would hide in trunks of cars or dig or try to hang light and they would just be shot dead. That's how serious it was. So in 1989, I'm on my junior year in Jerusalem studying abroad and suddenly word comes just out of nowhere. The wall has been breached. It's open. There's a crossing between East and West. People can move freely. You know, and it's not like today where, you know, Hall of Burton for $100 million, you know, you pause the thing down. where, you know, Halliburton for $100 million, you know, you pause the thing down, people are a little ripping it down

with their bare hands, with hammers and chisels. This is just unbelievable. And you know, the only thing I can think of it in terms of today, it literally, like I say to you, like I'm announcing right now on stage, but, you know, we have peace with Iran. There's peace in the Middle East, you can go take like an al-Qaeda bus tour of Kabul, you know, go see Osama bin Laden's coffee shop, you know,

that kind of stuff, you know, it was justama bin Laden's coffee shop, you know, that kind of stuff. You know, it was just, it was just literally mind-boggling. Well, within like two seconds, people start showing up back in Jerusalem, friends and stuff, start showing up with pieces of the wall. They're going to be part of history. They're going over, they're chipping out,

they're helping, you know, put the world back together. And this girl I have a crush on, she shows up and she gives me a piece of the wall and I'm holding it, and it's like holding moon rock. I mean, I'm holding it, it's got the graffiti back together. And this girl I have a crush on shows up and she gives me a piece of the wall and I'm holding it, it's like holding moon rock. I mean, I'm holding it, it's got the graffiti on it. I just can't believe I'm holding it. It's such an amazing thing to be a part of, except I ain't, it's like clear to me in an instant.

Like I need to go be a part of this. So I grabbed my buddy Joe who dragged me to Jerusalem and we set the plan in order and we're gonna do it sort of a Jewish boy style. We're going to do sort of like a Passover slavery to freedom roots. So we fly into Warsaw and we do sort of like speaking of bus tours, we hit all the highlights, we do Auschwitz, Middown, Ekstra Blinka, we hit all our favorite concentration camps and we end up in Prague where we're going to take a night train to. And that's the end of this sort of heroic journey for us, which is we're going to get to Berlin in the morning.

We're going to chip at the wall across to the West and go home at the end of our year. It's all exciting. Well, we thought this is a grand plan. Nobody else seems to have thought this was the same kind of grand plan, because we are alone on this platform at night. It is pitch dark.

There's nobody else there. We're just waiting on this platform in Prague. It is pitch dark, there's nobody else there. We're just waiting on this platform in Prague, tourists are just, nobody else there. And basically, here comes our train. We think it's our train that starts rolling through the station, but it doesn't stop. It just keeps rolling, sort of clattering those tracks and what it is is an old freight train.

Now, can I tell you I am, long island raised, like for me I've been raised on a full on diet of the Holocaust. You know, like this sets instant Holocaust PTSD in my head. You know, I'm saying, you know, for those of you like I'm a Shiva boy, like we didn't do the Diary of Ant Frank, we went like clockwork, orange style, you know. From honestly, you know, I have a friend here she'll tell you like from a way too young age they would sit us there and flash images, no joke, like piles of bodies, piles of teeth, piles of hair,

you know, just, you know, combs, you know, just these really unbelievably dark images. And there's no greater symbol of it. They always did the jackboots, all those old tapes played big black jackboots, and then those trains. I mean, these are the trains that annihilated our people. They would stuff them full of Jews.

And when there was no more room, they would stuff babies in over the people's head. You know, there we are standing on the same platform. It's not like it changed. We're on the same platform. Those are the same tracks. This could be the same train that destroyed our people. You know, we're just standing there dead silent. Well, the next train is our train.

And, you know, we get up on it. And back to the island part, I know my trains. I made a little co-pig, Lindenhurst Babylon. I know my roots. I can tell you, you know, sort of like on the G, went to switch cars. I know when something doesn't feel right, when I step into a train car.

And this feels bad. It's sort of over hot and already over packed. And we're looking for our seats. We've got our numbers. And we go over to our compartment. And we open it. And we expect like two British people drinking tea. It's like the beds are open.

It's six guys laid out, like head to toe, like sardines. And honestly, it smells of piss. It smells of beer. And most of all, it just smells of sadness. These are refugees. You know, we're on some freedom adventure. People have been trapped behind the iron curtain. Like the wall has come down, people are on the move

and like a good American. At that time, I don't think I could point like Canada on a map. Like I can't tell you there. They roam on me or no idea, but just refugees on the move. Well, we don't want our seats anymore, and they ain't giving them up. And we sort of look around in this packed car, and this nice family, they make room for us.

You know, we take off our packs, we slide their kids over, and they let us in their compartment, and I could cry telling this to you right now, these people with nothing they offered to share their food with us, you know, and we settle in, and we're rolling, and we're, you know, on our way to Berlin, and then the train stops. And I don't speak anything. I don't know what's

happening. I don't know how they understood it. What's getting screamed, but suddenly bed them. You know, I'm saying they're grabbing their stuff. You can feel it in the car. Or everybody has to get off the train like we suddenly and there we are with those packed, we're like turtles getting jostled. We are out the train. We're not at a station. We're down the ladder. We're in the dirt in the night running in these groups. It's going this way and that's sort of like eddies and rivers. We're just flowing with these refugees. We don't know if there's a fire or what's going on. We are just terrified and it seems to me I am a coward at everything. It seems like a nightmare of a bad idea what we have done. Like I don't know what's

going on. Eventually there seems like a dominant stream. It seems what it does seems that they're sending the whole front of the train to the back of the train. Like the train is being split in the night. We climbed back up. Well if it was packed before there is no room. It's really panicking. I don't feel like a witness to anything now. I just feel part of it, Jill. And we are in it. Like I just want some space somewhere to be. I want to get safely to Berlin and I want wanna cross through that wall. Well, it's just where pushing and, you know, again, those compartments are overflowing. We like make our way to the end of the car.

And the last compartment in that car has the curtains drawn. So we give it a yank, and we give it a yank, and we hear someone scream, fuck. Now I have to tell you, you cannot learn to curse like an American. You know what I'm saying? Like, I have an Israeli friend, Motea, I remember he was be like, not done, I give a shit. I'd be like, no, no, Motea, you cannot learn to curse like an American. You know what I'm saying? Like, I have an Israeli friend, Motea, I remember he was like,

not done, I give a shit. I'd be like, no, no, Motea, you don't give a shit. You know, like, he still can't learn it. Point is, that is a pitch perfect fuck that I get. You know, so we're like, fuck, did you say fuck? We say fuck, it's like this chorus of joyous fuck. And then the door flies open.

We fly in, it's slam shut, and it backed me being a coward. I can tell you, I don't know if I'm overreacting. There's two sort of American frat boy types there. Do dev eyes like saucers? They are as scared and panicked as we are. Well, this is the embarrassing part of the story. It's just this is an EMI age, you backpack. Then we honestly all deeply believe

that Europe was filled with small bands of like ninja robbers who were trained solely to rob 19 year old Americans. Like they wanted the bounty of half a joint and a cowboy junkies mixtape. This was on the black market, you could live feed a family off of such bounty. The more embarrassing part of the story is we honestly believed it's so stupid.

We honestly believe we would tell each other that they would guess you, that they would have tanks of sleep, they would knock you out and then take that stuff. So we all traveled with ropes or bicycle chains. That's how you lock your door. Well, guess what? These guys had the bicycle chain. We were thankful for it.

That's the door was chained. And people are pulling. You know what? We're not the only ones who need a space. People are pulling and yanking and banging at the door and screaming while the train starts moving. The banging sort of subsides. Every once in a while, there's banging and screaming,

but the door's not coming open. And in the way you make home anywhere, the four of us are a team, where a group, where a safe, the adrenaline drains out, we pass out. So we wake up in the morning. It is beautiful. I've never so enjoyed seeing it in a morning like that, like sun streaming it.

It is lovely. It's bucolic. It's dead silent. There's just trees out the train. And we're waiting and we're not moving. So I go to check what's going on. And I go out into the corridor. And I very much understand why it's so silent.

There's nobody else in the car. Cars completely empty. So I look into the next car. And then I totally understand why it's so silent there's nobody else in the car cars completely empty. So I look into the next car and then I totally understand why it's empty because there is no next car there's no locomotive there's no train. You know I look behind us same difference we're a car loan we've been unhooked like at at some point in the night we've lost our train. So I also then understand maybe one of those people banging and pulling and screaming was a friendly conductor trying to tell us there was a second switch. I can hear you all laughing, which means you understand what's happened.

I understand what's happened. We're going back into that compartment. Honestly, we had a very bad night. It's a very bad night. They're not trying to, it's a very difficult information to sort of relate to them. There's no, what do you mean, there's no, like sort of this idea. Like, where are we, I don't know, you don't know what station,

I don't know what country, you know. So, again, it's not hard to do recon as a group. They come out and they see. We've lost the train. Well, the one thing we have with us, and again, we don't have our iPhones. There's no compass. We know which way our bodies were hurtling through space.

So we put on our packs. We open our door to the next compartment. But there is no train, next car. And we step down onto the tracks and we hike. We see a station in the distance which is good, you know, and we hike up towards the station and there's another fact that I have not forgotten in the 20-year since, which is when you show up at the station without the train, the platform is so much higher than you would think. But, you know, they hop up, Joe pulls me up because that's how it goes.

And it's like six in the morning or something. It's just morning light. And then there's just one drunken blonde dude with a bottle of vodka sort of stumbling around, not scary, happy, like about our age. Looking happy with a bottle of vodka on the platform. We go up to him to inquire. Do you speak English and what country are we in?

Anyway, he does speak English. He's been out partying. He's got one leg up on us. He's finished his degree. He's been celebrating drunkenly all night. We are in the German Democratic Republic of East Germany. We are in the city of Dresden. And guess where he's going home to?

He is headed home to Berlin. So our group of four, we are now five strong. Our train is coming. It's joyous. Really just want to get through the wall at this point. And we get on the train, we take our seats, incomes, sort of out of central casting. The sort of big, strong East German woman

in the very serious conductor uniforms. And she takes our tickets, and our tickets are no good. I mean, sort of try showing up at O'Hare with the ticket from La Guardia. Like, our tickets aren't even from the same country. We have checked tickets. We did not originate in East Germany.

So the tickets are no good. So we pull out our ural passes, which are good everywhere. And she looks at them, and she doesn't know them, and they're no good. And this is when I understand she makes it very clear we are being turned off at the next stop. Now you know what, I held it together through Israel and then to Fata, and I held it together through the trip,

and the night, like, you know what, I'm actually terrified, because I remember my mother talking about my grandparents saying, oh yes, these relatives used to write them, from across the, and then they stopped writing. You know what I'm saying? Then they were just gone. Like, this is a part of the world that swallows Jews. And you know what?

Like, those refugees, like, dead serious. There's a reason they're racing. Like, that wall comes down a day. It could go back up in a day. Half the world was already trapped behind it for all those years. Like, you know, I just think, like, what have we done? And I think back to that sort of, okay,

to bus tour as I tell you now, I think like, do you have to be on the first bus? Like, what have we done? Anyway, so in the middle of my panic attack, Joel's trying to like keep me under control. And I see our German friend, he's up. He's up, and he's talking to the conductor. And he's just stipulating.

He's sort of delivering the Gettysburg address there. I mean, honestly, literally, with the light streaming through in the morning and he's just stipulating. He's sort of delivering the Gettysburg address there. I mean, honestly, literally, with the light streaming through in the morning, he looks almost sober. It's beautiful. Whatever he's doing, it's beautiful. And when he's done, out of nowhere, she reaches out. This conductor with this hard face and it goes soft.

And she punches our ural passes. And she welcomes us on the train to Berlin. So we ask him, what did you tell her? And he says, I told her this, these people have come from America to our country. They've come to see our country. Are you going to tell them that a ticket that is good in Madrid, that is good in Rome, that is good in Paris, is no good here?

The great conflict is over. We are one world now. We are all of us brothers. Thank you. That was Nathan, Englander. Nathan is the author of the story collections, what we talk about when we talk about Anne Frank, and for the relief of unbearable urges. When we come back, we'll hear from a documentary filmmaker struggling with how to capture the experience

of domestic violence victims who are too afraid of their abusers to be filmed. The Moth Radio Hour is produced by Atlantic Public Media in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, and presented by PRX. This is the Moth Radio Hour from PRX. I'm Katherine Burns from the Moth. Our last story is from filmmaker Ellie Lee. Back in the 1990s, Ellie worked in the trenches of the independent film world, and she told me the story you're about to hear as we stood outside at 3 o'clock in the morning on a freezing cold night, leading for the crew to make a lighting change on set. I never forgot it, and years later, Asker to tell it at a Moths show in Grand Rapids,

produced with Michigan Public Radio. Here's Ellie Lee, live at the mall. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. When I was in college, I liked most people in college. I had no idea what I was doing. And I had no idea what I was supposed to study and what I was supposed to do with my life. So coming as a child of an immigrant, actually, as an immigrant myself, you know, my family was rather poor when we were growing up. So we wanted to be practical, you know, and I felt this overwhelming need to study math and physics and computer science,

which I did. But I never told my mom that my real passion was animation. I loved animating, and I just discovered it in college. And, you know, to try to keep me grounded, you know, as I was studying all these things, I also did a lot of volunteer work at the local homeless shelter in the greater Boston area. And I loved it. I loved also being there every night and just seeing these familiar faces. And year after year, I would see a lot of the same people, unfortunately, the same men and women. And over time, I got to become really close with a lot of the women there. And I'd also noticed a pattern emerge where they were all involved in very abusive relationships with other homeless men. And late at night, you know, as they started seeing me more often,

they started trusting me more over the years. They started confiding these stories about how they had all been abused as young girls, either physically or sexually, and usually by people that they trusted. It was a family member or friend of the family. And years later, I found studies that estimated that in the Boston area, 86% of all homeless women had these kinds of histories. And I remember thinking at the time, like, why isn't this being addressed in training?

When I go to other shelters, why isn't this something that's even raised? It was back in the late 80s, early 90s. And it's hard to imagine now, but back then, the idea of domestic violence was a fairly new term. It was a fairly new phenomenon to a lot of people. And it existed for a long time, but never in the public eye was always something that happened with great deal of shame

behind closed doors. And there was this movement to raise awareness about this issue that affected every person, regardless of socioeconomic status. So, and I remember thinking that if a film or something existed that could help in training at the shelters, or even for the police department, so when they saw a situation on the streets,

they would know how to approach a woman. And I decided as an undergraduate, well, that's what I'm going to do. I'm going to make a documentary film about it. And I was really excited that night. I went to the shelter, and I started talking to some of the women. And I told them that my idea, and they loved it. They're like, that's great.

That would be a great service to our community, and that would be amazing. And I said, oh, that's perfect. So you'll be in it, right? You'll participate in the film. And they said, absolutely not. No. And of course, in that moment I thought about, and I said,

well, of course they're going to say no. I remember a lot of the women who had confided that in these relationships, they wished that they could leave. They wished that they could break up with their boyfriends, but they were really scared. They were scared because if they ever got into a fight with their boyfriend, they would say, don't try to hide, don't try to go somewhere

because I'll find you. There's only so many shelters in town. There's only so many meal programs. There's only so many drop-in centers. And I will find you. And the women didn't want to suffer the consequences of that. And imagine participating in a film, then all of a sudden they're airing their dirty laundry and the boys would find them, and they

would have to suffer those consequences. So I understood the women's reluctance to be involved because they were still in crisis. After getting rejected, from the women, I just still felt like, well, somebody needs to make a film like this. And that's when it occurred to me, well, maybe I could make it as an animated documentary. I could use the animation in a way I could protect their identities and their anonymity.

And it would keep them from being exposed. You know, and I can still share their stories and their experiences and shed light on this issue. And all of a sudden, it felt like my life made sense. You know, like I loved animation and then my work at college and then my volunteer work at the shelter at all came together. And suddenly I felt like I had a purpose. So I set off and I started interviewing a lot of homeless

women and formerly homeless women. They would serve as the soundtrack for my film. And then I decided to use charcoal drawings as my animation medium. And the charcoal was perfect for me because I felt like, depending on the texture of the paper, the line could be really peaceful and delicate or really violent and somehow that could mirror the emotional journeys

that a lot of the women were going through. And then as the character featured in the film, I would use a character that looked like me because I felt like I was a conduit for so much of their experiences. It kind of made sense. And in a way, it made the film even more personal. I was really, really invested in this film.

And so by the time I was finished with it, and for those of you who are not familiar with animation, animation is incredibly laborious and tedious. In any given second, you have anywhere from four to 12 unique drawings per second. So it's incredibly time consuming. And after a year and a half of working on this film,

I had 1,000 drawings that I created, and I was so overjoyed, because I was that much closer to finishing this film. At the same time, I was not overjoyed by the fact that I was totally broke and I had to move back in with my parents. So I called my mom and I was like, you know, can you help me move out of my place? You know, this is my last day. And she said, sure, no problem, I'll come over right now.

So she comes in with a car. I didn't have that much stuff. It all fit in one car load. And the last thing is to go, were my artwork and I put it in the trunk and I closed the trunk and we drove off. And we're driving on store, driving Cambridge, Massachusetts, which is like a very speedy, kind of windy parkway. And cars are going about 40 or 50 miles an hour.

And most of the time it's a Tulane parkway, sometimes three with no shoulder. And then it started getting cloudy and out of nowhere, like there was just a downpour, it's just like pouring buckets of rain. And we're driving along and there's a really sharp turn, a very sharp left turn that you have to make on my way to home. And as my mom's making this turn, she hit a pothole, which normally would be totally fine,

except for the fact that there was a problem with the trunk. When I had put my artwork in and slammed a trunk shut, I didn't realize the trunk was just really stuck but not fully locked. So it's raining, we're going 45 miles an hour, we hooked this sharp left, she hits a pothole, and the trunk popped open, and only the artwork, a thousand drawings just slid out into two lanes of traffic in the pouring rain, and it's a rush rush hour so I'm seeing all these cars drive over my artwork and I was in a state of shock and I looked in the review mirror and I started freaking out.

I was like, Mom, turn around, please turn around, this is disaster. It took us 10 minutes to whip around and there's no shoulders so I'm like, stop the car, stop the car, and I get out in the middle of the parkway and this traffic all around me and I'm trying to salvage what I can and as I pick up a stack of my drawings they just melted in my hands like pulp. It was completely destroyed, everything I lost everything. And by the time I got home I just remember just sitting on my parents couch and staring at a piece of lint on the carpet for four hours. I was completely catatonic.

I had no idea what I was doing anymore. And that year that followed, I tried desperately to recreate the film because I felt like I could resurrect it. But I was completely out of steam and out of gas. I gave everything to this project. I mean, emotionally, I had been invested in it for like three years. And I just didn't have anything left.

And part of me also felt like it was torture. Like, why would I want to do this to myself again to kind of force myself through the motions of doing something that I already done? And it was so fragile. Like, what's to say that it's not going to get lost again when I'm done this next round? So at that point I decided to just give up on animation completely. I just never wanted to animate ever again. So I moved on and I tried other things. And I was OK, but I felt like five years later, I felt this nagging pull that was holding me back. And I felt like it was this film. I had made a promise to these women when

they shared their stories with me. And I felt like they deserved at least one more attempt by me to try to bring these stories to life. So I knew I needed help, so I applied for a bunch of grants, and I was very lucky to cobbled together some grants, so I could hire a team of animators to work with me. And 3,000 drawings later, we were done with the film, and it was amazing

right and and I was so excited and I was starting to work on the film and edit it. When I got a phone call I got an invitation to screen a work in progress at this new organization a nonprofit in Cambridge Massachusetts called On the Rise and they work specifically with chronically homeless women and I thought it was just a perfect match. So I screened at their opening event, and it was attended by a small group of people, about 30 people. And afterwards, a woman came up to me

and to protect her identity, I'll call her Annie. Annie came up to me, and I just remember vividly this woman who was sort of shaking and unable to make eye contact with me. It was almost as though she felt invisible. she didn't feel comfortable in her own shell. And she said, thank you so much for making this film. You know, you really captured what it's like to be homeless. And as we start talking, I learned a little bit more

about Annie that she'd been homeless for about a decade. She'd lost custody of her son once she'd started living on the streets. She was a heroin addict, and all of her friends were addicts, as well. And she had just gone to a doctor, to because she wasn't feeling well. And the doctor had given her some bad news

that she had a life-threatening condition, and that she didn't radically change her lifestyle and get some support and help, that she would probably be dead within a year. And that was her wake up call and that's what brought her on the rise and she was taking those first steps to get help. And I really appreciated her saying what she said about the film. I felt like I was just very touched and moved by her.

And 18 months later, I was attending, at this point, a board member for on the rise and I was attending a luncheon and it was a fundraiser, a small event. And I saw a woman who looked really familiar and as I approached her I realized it was Annie and she looked totally different, like she looked six inches taller and she was glowing and radiant and gorgeous and she looked me directly in the eye and you know, and everything had changed. She was no longer homeless, she was living in her own apartment. She had reconnected with her son. She, because of her advocacy, worked for homelessness organizations and homeless people, she had been invited to join the board of the National Coalition for

the Homeless, which is a really influential organization in Washington, DC. She had just gotten a scholarship to go back to college and she was going to school at night while working during the day and she had taken her health back, and she was training for the Boston Marathon. You know, I mean, she was amazing, and I was moved to tears, and I said, Annie, how did you do it? How did this happen? She said, you know, honorize helped me a lot.

I couldn't have done it without them, but I think the moment that really changed my life was when I saw your film. And up until that point, and I beat myself up every day for making bad decisions and finding myself in these hopeless situations and not feeling like I could do anything to get out of it. And when I saw your film, I realized I wasn't alone and not only that, I recognized voices in the film and these were women that I looked up to because they were formally homeless and now doing something to change people's lives.

Like I didn't know Macy had suffered from a history of abuse and I didn't know Peggy felt trapped and ashamed about her past and what had happened to her. And once I understood that it wasn't my fault, I didn't have to blame myself anymore. There was this bigger societal problem and it had a name and I could defeat it. I could beat it. At that point, I realized I didn't have to beat myself up anymore and I could beat this thing. And she did. And looking back, those seven years of anguish and kicking myself and feeling at this incredibly

low point and struggling with this film and with my career and all these questions, I made this film in an attempt to save my friends, the women at the shelter. And I realized that it was the women that saved me. Thank you. That was Ellie Lee. Ellie is a five-time National Emmy Award nominee and a 2009 DePont Columbia Award winner. That's it for the Moth Ridu Hour. We hope you'll join us next time. Your host this hour was Katherine Burns. Katherine directed the stories in the show along with Maggie Sino.

The rest of the most directorial staff includes Sarah Haberman, Sarah Austin Janess, Jennifer Hickson, and Mick Boles, production support from Laura Hadden and Whitney Jones. Most stories are true, as remembered and affirmed by the storytellers. Most events are recorded by Argo Studios in New York City, supervised by Paul Ruest. Our theme music is by The Drift. Other music in this hour from Bill Evans, Tom McDermott and Evan Christopher and Keith Jarrett.

The Malthus Produce for Radio by me, J. Allison, with Bikki Merrick at Atlantic Public Media, and Woods Hole, Massachusetts. This hour was produced with funds from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, committed to building a more just, verdant and peaceful world. The Moth Radio Hour is presented by the Public Radio Exchange, PRX.org. For more about our podcast, for information on pitching your own story, and everything else, go to our website, THEMoth.org.

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