Survival gives strength

SARA NEWHAM

Yoga's healing properties are well known. The peaceful art of stretching not only exercises one's body, but it can relax one's mind and spirit as well.

For Emmy Cleaves, an 85-year-old yoga instructor and the judge at the upcoming Western Canadian Hatha Yoga Championship, it helped do both.

As a young woman, Cleaves experienced the darkest of tragedies.

"I've been through war. I've had bombs drop on my head," said Cleaves, who now lives in Los Angeles.

She and her family had been living in Latvia during the Second World War and got caught in the crossfire during the Nazi occupation. In an effort to escape her wartorn country, she and her mother piled into a shipping boat to sail to Sweden. But they were caught.

A German patrol stopped the vessel, unloaded its passengers onto another ship and sent them to Stutthof (Danzig) concentration camp in Poland. At Danzig, Cleaves lost track of her mother and came within inches of losing her life as well.

"My mother and I were in a slave labor camp," said Cleaves. "I almost died within two days because the food was sawdust. The bread was made of sawdust. I was plugged up and basically on the verge of death for quite awhile."

Conditions were among the worst in Stutthof, the first concentration camp built by the Nazis outside Germany and the last to be liberated. Typhus and malnutrition caused thousands to die and gassing started in 1944. Mostly non-Jews were kept at Stutthof, a forced labor camp.

Cleaves is not Jewish but, as a Latvian, was among Nazi Germany's millions of victims. Her native country was an independent state until the eve of the war, when it was "given" to the Soviets by Germany in a secret pact. The Soviet Union took de facto control over the Baltic country shortly after but in June and July 1941 the Nazis invaded and quickly instituted anti-Semitic pogroms, ghettos and began the annihilation of the 94,000 Latvian Jews.

Cleaves managed to survive the war and her experience in Danzig and came to the United States as a refugee. She said that the war changed her outlook on life and her subsequent practise of yoga. She was first introduced to yoga during warm-ups before a dance class she took to tune up her body following her son's birth.

"I kept asking for more so the teacher finally said, if you like it so much, this is yoga, go find a yoga place," said Cleaves. "I did and I've never looked back."

She explained that she had done a variety of different forms of exercise in the past but she had never found something as good for her body as yoga.

Cleaves suffered another personal tragedy in her 30s, when she was struck by a brain hemorrhage but she kept moving on. In 1973, she tried Bikram Yoga and found her calling. But Bikram Yoga was different than what she had practised for 20 years and she was not convinced of its healing properties until she travelled to India that year.

"I ... went to different studios and saw different people and I also went to clinics where they use yoga as a healing modality for people with asthma, people with diabetes, and they were doing the postures the way that Bikram does them," said Cleaves, who became a yoga instructor in California in 1974.

Even at 85, she teaches five yoga classes a week, including three advanced classes. She will teach a public class during the yoga competition in Vancouver, on Jan. 18, and act as judge for yoga practitioners who wish to participate in the international contest in Los Angeles in February.

"This is absolutely the best maintenance system because no matter which decade you live in, whether it's your twenties, thirties or eighties, it doesn't matter. It is still accessible to you. It's something you can do to the end of your days. That's what you need to practise," she said.

"If you survive, you see that there was a lesson to learn from whatever happened to you, so keep a positive mental attitude. Keep moving, you're going to be healthy."

Sara Newham is a Vancouver freelance journalist.

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