Group-Analytic Contexts, Issue 80, June 2018

Newsletter – Summer 2018 71
asked her. And yes, she confirmed that Belfast had been bombed by
200 or so planes in 1941. She had been there also, age 17 at the time.
Above all she described the massive terrifying world vibrating sound
of 200 bombers passing overhead (the scene in the film) and of course
the subsequent devastation: 50,000 houses damaged or destroyed.
Nearly 1000 people were killed, many thousands more injured. Her
home escaped relatively untouched. I was astonished that she'd never
mentioned this before...not once!! I suppose the trauma and on-going
consequences of such unimaginable events find all sorts of ways of
expressing themselves, in many of the ways you describe Elizabeta,
even more terrifying when the bombs carry the slow-killing poison of
uranium!! In the case of my mum it was silence. In the case of the
history I learned at school...about Belfast, also silence!!
Peter Zelaskowski