Woo-hoo! Found out what the spoiler font problem was! So now...
Re: Stranger Things 4. Y'guys. Sometimes things are getting weird. Mostly in my brain.
So I watched Stranger Things 4 and oh boy, am I immersed with all of the feelings. Around ep. 5 I decided to carefully visit Tumblr, avoiding spoilers to the best of my ability, to see if some folks are thinking and feeling what I'm thinking and feeling, or to open my eyes to things I've missed in the first 4 episodes.
It is where I learned about this: [link] Which threw me off personally (and I'm not gonna write more about this here because it's not what I want to talk about now), but also professionally. Now, as some of you may remember, I'm an archivist who processes holocaust-related archives and collections. And during my years as an archivist I came to learn a few things about the Jewish resistance in Vilnius. One of the most amazing operations that took place in Vilnius was the one done by the paper brigade: [link]
Here's where it gets weird/interesting (spoiler font from now on for something that took place in 1944 but is also spoiler to ST4, ep. 4).
Avraham Sutzkever, a member of the paper brigade, was a very famous Yiddish poet with some true miraculous stories. One of them is about the time he was with partisans and had to walk through a minefield. I'll let him tell the rest (Yiddish with English subtitles, approx. 1:20 minutes): >[link]
So the minute I read about the prison and after watching the last scene of ep. 4, I thought of Sutzkever's story about being saved by a melody. While the traumas are very different, I can fully see how surviving a trauma - any trauma, fictional or real, personal or genocidal/societal - can look like a miracle. A fantasy story/fairy tale. It's just quite a thing, having a very similar narrative of survival in two very different stories - one real, one fictional/SFF.
Anyway, that's what I wanted to say.