I had the importance of being able to laugh at life impressed on me by a chance meeting. It was around 1987 while I was in the Air Force. I was attending a maintenance overview class on the 747 being given by Boeing Company. The instructor had an unusual accent that I couldn’t recognize, and he also had the habit of constantly making jokes and taking almost nothing seriously. During a break, I mentioned this to him, and he then told me this story, which I have no way of corroborating, but I have no reason to doubt. He said that his family was Polish and when World War II broke out, he was four years old. His family lived in the part of Poland that the Soviet Union took. His family was placed in a camp, and he said his first memory was when he was five years old beating up a four-year-old for his bread because he was hungry. As the war progressed the Germans came and took over the area and his family ended up in the ghettos. Then the Soviets came back and “liberated” them. However, there was one catch, since his father hadn’t retreated with the Nazis, the Soviets said he was a spy and sent him to the Siberian gulags. His father finally escaped the gulags and got the family out of Poland and to Britian. There he was educated in engineering and then migrated to the States to work for Boeing. He went on to add that whenever he asked his father how he got out of the gulags all his father would say was, “You don’t want to know.” His father also told him that to survive he had to find humor in the absurdity of every situation and laugh every day, because in the camps once a prisoner stopped laughing, he would soon die. I felt this man knew what he was talking about and I strife to follow his advice.

#Humor, #Laugh