No Words

How do I begin to describe the last two days? Yesterday, there were simply no words. In the morning, we toured the the monument at the old train station from which Jews were deported to the concentration camps. Lists of names, and railway tracks, were so powerful that most people broke into tears. There were simply no words to describe what I had seen or what I had experienced.  In the afternoon we toured one of the concentration camps. Although this was not considered to be an extermination camp but rather a work camp, it was clear that the expectation was death by work. One does not dig in the clay and water with bare feet and minimal clothing and food in the winter for very long without dying.As I walked through the grounds I thought about those who walked the same steps and those who died there.

Today we  attended a luncheon at City Hall hosted by the deputy mayor of the city of Hamburg. The place cards read  "Senate lunch for  persecuted former citizens of Hamburg  in Hamburg City Hall. "   The deputy mayor made a beautiful speech, a very sincere speech, talking about the atrocities that had occurred and welcoming us back to the city that had so betrayed our families.

 Afterward, a Rabbi, a lovely gentleman, asked me for my father's name and said that he would say Kaddish for him during Shabbat on Friday. The tears fell again. None of us have cried so much in front of strangers in our lives.

All of us met for dinner tonight for the last time. Tears flowed again as we hugged and exchanged email addresses and added each other to Facebook. We have truly journeyed together. We do not want it to end. We are bonded. I learned another new vocabulary word: Jekke. It means "German Jew".

I am a second generation Jekke. And I am proud and grateful to finally understand what that means.

Hamburg day 2....The discovery

It is impossible to encapsulate all that I have seen, done, and discovered today in one blog post. There are two "first gen " in our group. One does not speak of his time in the camps. One  stood before us and sobbed as he told of coming back to Hamburg at 14 years of age, looking for his mother and finding no one. He described how he asked someone if there were any Jews left, and how he was directed to an apartment in which he found a relative who cared for him.

I listened to the Rabbi describe the return of the Torah to Hamburg and the mixture of joy and sorrow on that day.   I walked the halls of the Jewish schools and saw the pictures of the children who were deported and murdered. I have developed new vocabulary: My father's immediate family "fled".  They "survived." Those who disappeared were "murdered." My mother/father/uncle was "not right afterwards."

I spoke to gentile high school students, one of whom confessed in a whisper that his grandfather had been taken from his home at 16, and forced to guard one of the camps, and how he had never recovered from what he had seen. I tried to offer some sort of forgiveness nearly 90 years later.

In the early twentieth century there were over 20,000 Jews in Hamburg. There are today about 2000. And....none are "German Jews." They're all immigrants from other countries. The Rabbi commented that Hitler was successful in that way. One of the first gens remarked "Well I wish old Adolf could see us now!" And there was laughter in the midst of sorrow.

I have befriended a woman whose father and grandparents lived in the same apartment building as my father and my grandparents. They surely knew each other, as they were the same age. I believe we are now connected forever.

In the streets I believe I see the shadows of all who came before, and I am grateful for the opportunity to honour them.

Hamburg day 1....

As I flew in over Hamburg yesterday, I was overwhelmed to be entering the city of my father's birth. I thought about him as a young child, walking the streets of the old city centre. I became teary-eyed, but I couldn't decide if it was due to exhaustion or emotion. As we were taken from the airport in to the hotel, we rode with another couple who had arrived for the same program. I realized then how different it was to be able to  share this experience. This had never been a shared experience for me. Arriving at the hotel and meeting 30 other people who also were here to share this, was an unbelievable opportunity. Isn't that what life is  about? Shared experiences. After five decades of keeping this a secret, it seems strange and almost dangerous to speak so openly.

This morning, we came together for a meal and  introduced ourselves. As people told their  stories, I watched grown men and women just like me cry from the pain which had permeated their lives. Our stories were so similar, and yet most of us had endured in solitude. Stories of lost lives, lost homes, of exile and relocated families. Of living with damaged parents, of silence and secrets.  As I write this we've spent approximately 9 hours together and have bonded in unimaginable ways. We've come to realize that our parents and grandparents may have lived on the same street, or that they may have done business together. Puzzle pieces being put together, connections made. In 24 hours I have spoken more about my father and his life than I ever have in my life. What our parents could not do, we have begun. Like a Phoenix from the ashes.

The Journey Continues

 

Late in 2016, I was approached by a representative of the government of Hamburg Germany, the city from which my father’s family fled. I was invited to attend something which roughly translated as “The Welcoming”. In the past years, the city of Hamburg has invited small groups of Holocaust survivors and/or their descendants to come to Hamburg for a week, and to attend several events. The visit culminates with a dinner with the city council and mayor, and includes a reconciliation of sorts. I of course immediately accepted, even knowing my father would have hated the entire thing.

We leave in 3 days for this exciting journey. At the end of the week in Hamburg, more than a dozen of my family members will descend en masse to the same hotel in which we’re staying for an impromptu reunion. I am deeply touched and blessed by their enthusiasm and generosity in welcoming me to Europe. I haven’t seen many of these folks for more than 30 years.

This month has been a very tumultuous and trying time in my life. Everything I have held near and dear (with the exception of my husband) has changed dramatically and quickly. My only child graduated from college, and accepted a job 2400 miles away. In a great whirlwind we helped him pack up and move. Amazing, exciting times for him. I remember that time of life when the entire world was filled with possibilities and I rejoice for him. How hard it is though to be so far away.  Then this past week I was forcibly early retired from a career which has spanned my entire adult life. As I sit here, I am still reeling from the shock and hurt that accompanies such a thing. In one week, my entire reality has changed dramatically through no action of mine and without my consent.

I am reminded of my father, as I struggle to make sense of my world on the eve of a very important journey to the place where he began. I am reminded of his resilience in the face of losing everything familiar to him. I am reminded of his pain, and his rage, and his perseverance and his survival. How very poignant his journey appears as my own journey begins.

The Journey Begins

In March of 2012, I received an email from a wonderful woman working on behalf of the government of Hamburg Germany who had come across some genealogical information which I had uploaded on the net. In part, the initial email began:

I hope I have now found a member of the family (name redacted), for whom I have been searching for some time. I found your name in the family tree maker side of family (name redacted) on the Internet. For several years I have been working on the project „Stolpersteine - Biografien der Opfer in den Stadtteilen“ that has been initiated by the "Landeszentrale für Politische Bildung Hamburg" and the "Institut für die Geschichte der deutschen Juden". The aim of this project are publications, that are issued by the "Landeszentrale für Politische Bildung Hamburg". There you will find short biographies of the victims of Shoah. You will find it also on the Internet www.stolpersteine-hamburg.de

Thus began a journey which would, over the next four years, result in the sharing of information, the creation of a family page on Facebook and the gathering of several branches of the family that had been long scattered. My father was thankfully still living at the beginning. He died less than 18 months later, but he was able to participate as much as he liked at the start. Pictures were shared, people identified, stories told.

In 2016, a reunion was held in the south of Sweden which I unfortunately was unable to attend. Cousins arrived from all over the world. I watched online as one of my cousins spoke at the opening of the reunion marking the first time that all of the branches of our family were together in over 60 years. It was emotional, it was exhilarating, it was gut-wrenching. The children and grandchildren of those who fled were together again, remembering those who survived and those who did not, those who came before us and who were now gone, those who never lived to see this come to fruition. And that is when the journey became, for me, very personal.

 

I am the daughter of a refugee of war.

 

My Father the Feminist

My father spent 20 years volunteering at the local battered women’s shelter, faithfully spending 20 hours per week there. He was the only man who had ever been allowed in the shelter. He made soup, read to children, changed beds. I have been told that for some women and children, he was the first non-violent man with whom they had ever spent time.  When he died, they invited me to a plaque dedication for him. The plaque hangs in the shelter today.

My mother and I used to joke that he was like a slave owner working for the abolition of slavery. He adopted feminism to an extreme. He had good friends from all walks of life at the shelter. He went to a lesbian wedding when he was 81 years old and rejoiced with them. He lectured me constantly about not referring to myself as a “girl”.  And he truly and honestly believed everything he espoused.

At his front door, it all stopped. It was as if he put on his feminist hat when he walked out the door and took it off when he returned. And he seemed completely oblivious to the dichotomy. He sabotaged every attempt my mother made to work outside the home, whether consciously or unconsciously. He was aggressively verbally abusive. When I divorced my first husband, I tried to explain that his best and my father’s worst were the same single point on a continuum. It was a text book case. He was deeply offended. He seemed to literally have no awareness of his behaviour and turned to my mother in complete confusion wondering how I could be so incredibly hurtful to him. Even as I write this I am entirely sure it was unconscious. He lacked emotional awareness because emotions were dangerous and to be repressed at all costs.

At my father’s funeral many women approached me in tears, expressing their grief. Again I heard how lucky I was to have such a man as a father. And I was without words. Because I loved him and I loathed him, and I grieved him and I resented him, and I was blessed to have him as my father and cursed to have him as my father. And I hated him for it even as my grief overwhelmed me.

 

A Secret Betrayed

I carried the secret of my father’s Judaism throughout my childhood. As I said before, it was always present, always in the background. It coloured our lives. Even my mother’s family did not know. We were involved in a conspiracy of silence so great and so terrible that it almost had a life of its own. Until the day when I betrayed my father and in one terrible moment spewed my anger and pain in a volcanic revelation.

My mother and I were at a family reunion when I was about 20 years old and there were many people there. My mother had 5 living brothers so reunions were not small. My father as usual had declined to attend. My mother’s family found him difficult at best. Part of the conflict was cultural, part was the absolute determination on the part of a few of my uncles to hate anyone whom my mother married, and part (the largest part) was my father’s ever present need to be as combative and provocative as possible.

We were sitting at a picnic table and someone made a joke about Jews and Easy-Bake ovens.  Even as I write this, my stomach clenches and the rage bubbles. Yet I am also aware that the joke was made in ignorance and without malice by a person who would never ever have intentionally hurt me.

I erupted. I said loudly and without thought “I will have you know that my great-grandmother died in a concentration camp!”  Three heartbeats of absolute silence ensued. Three heartbeats in which I realized that I had betrayed my father. Three heartbeats in which I realized that I had betrayed my entire family. It was cataclysmic. The earth shook beneath my feet.  I was up and running, heaving sobs coming from deep inside. The damage was done. Something terrible was going to happen.

My mother later told me that everyone was stunned, in particular the person to whom I had reacted. Even in their bewilderment, there were heartfelt apologies all around as well as words of acceptance and love. I was unable to hear those words both because I was too far away physically but also because of the turmoil inside.  The uncle with whom I was and today remain the closest followed me and encouraged me to come back to the house and to lie down for a while. As he quietly left the room, he said “You should be proud of who you are Karen.”

Not one person ever said another word to me about my revelation that day, but I am completely sure there was a great deal of discussion in its wake. My parents had been married for at least a quarter of a century by then, and this was, at the very least, unexpected.

When we arrived home, I tearfully confessed to my father that I had betrayed the secret.  I had broken the trust. I was devastated. He simply shrugged his shoulders and said “Bet that made a hell of a splash” and kept on reading his book. But I knew, I KNEW, that I had done something terrible. I had clearly set in motion some unknown chain of events, and placed us all at risk. I had exposed us and nothing would ever be the same.

The Demon Raged

My father was one of the most moral, compassionate people I have ever known. He was also an avid volunteer, a champion of those who needed. One of my earliest memories is of being in McDonald's with him. He brought our food to the table, and then happened to look over at an apparently homeless man who was squeezing ketchup into hot water to drink. My father asked me to wait and he went and bought the biggest meal he could. He set it in front of the man, and then came and sat down and said, "Now I can eat."  My father spent 20 years volunteering at a battered women’s shelter, faithfully spending 20 hours per week there. He was the only man who had ever been allowed in the shelter. He made soup, read to children, changed beds. I have been told that for some women and children, he was the first non-violent man with whom they had ever spent time.

My father was charming and witty, and could entertain people with stories and banter. He was incredibly honest. People used to comment “You’re so lucky to have him as your father!” And I never knew what to say. Because he was all those things and more. Unless you were close to him.

My father had no real friends beyond the women who worked at the shelter and his beloved friend Christer. He trusted no one.  He presented in many ways as a snob. No one was ever good enough to be his friend. It is my personal belief that it was he whom he never thought was good enough, but that was certainly not what he said.  Literally the only people close to him were my mother and I, and some of his relatives whom we saw only rarely.

I will confess that every year I struggled to find a Father’s Day card that would fit. I was simply unable to relate to the warm fuzzy Hallmark dads described. My father was to my mother and I a very nasty, cruel person. I hesitate to write that because he was also loyal, loving, generous, and I knew he would have stood in front of a moving train to save me. I knew he had my back and I knew he would protect me from anyone or anything that might threaten me. Except him. My father showed many classic behaviours of survivors of the Holocaust.

My father never lifted a violent hand against either my mother or myself ever. But he was incredibly cruel verbally. I spent much of my adolescence being told that I was ugly, fat, a disappointment in every way. This was occasionally said in public as well. He was vicious to my mother. Never once would he ever admit to ever being wrong or hurtful. He never apologized.  Once after he had publicly humiliated me, I asked him how he could do that. His response: “If you are humiliated, good. Life is humiliating. Get used to it.” Even into adulthood he continued to assure me that I never quite measured up to whatever invisible yardstick he was using.

I have come to realize that damage breeds damage. He was, I believe, terrified to allow anyone to be close to him. His behaviour allowed a distance to be maintained, because if a person gets too close, they might disappear forever. My years of training and work in child development can and do explain the early trauma that caused this behaviour. I am able to explain it clinically in terms of brain development in the early years. I can talk to you about synaptic pruning and attachment. I can also bring in a very clinical discussion about inter-generational trauma.

But in the end, none of it matters. Because he was damaged and he hurt us. And that hurt lives on inside me,  a small child who still hears those harsh words and believes them.  In the last year of his life, as he sank into dementia, my father was able to acknowledge his behaviour and apologize. I was able to forgive him. I know he loved me, probably more than anyone else in the world. Perhaps if he had been able to face the things that shattered his soul, his life and our lives would have been different. But he could not. And inside our home, the demon raged.

A Friend Found....

My grandfather, having seen the proverbial writing on the wall, put his small family on a train to Sweden for a holiday, and they simply never went back. In those days, Sweden was relatively safe, but the anti-Semitism was overt and prevalent. My 8 year old father was sent to school in Stockholm, a foreigner, a refugee, a Jew, unable to speak the language…an outcast.  And then he made a friend.

The legend in our family is that Christer’s grandfather worked for the King of Sweden. His people, my grandmother said, ‘were somebody’. Christer’s family had been nobility for centuries. His grandfather lived on the palace grounds and they were well respected. Not royalty, but certainly ‘somebody’ in society. And Christer befriended my father, drew him into his circle, and remained his friend for over 70 years until his death.

As you may imagine, this provided some protection for my father and some acceptance during his childhood. But more importantly, Christer was someone with whom my father could be his complete authentic self, because there was nothing to hide. Christer knew the best and the worst of everything my father had endured.

I remember Christer and his family visiting us when I was a child. My father was Gunther to Christer, but this Gunther was safe, happy, even jovial. My father never had many friends, even superficial ones, because he didn’t like or trust most people. But he loved Christer.  Those visits resonated with joy. They would remind each other of the time they shot a hole in the King’s tuxedo (accidentally of course!) or the time they poached pheasants from royal grounds (a serious crime!) and laugh until the tears were rolling down their faces. When my father received word of Christer’s death, it was the first time I had ever seen him cry.

I am privileged through the magic of social media to be able to communicate with, and even perhaps to befriend in some ways, Christer’s son. My attempts to communicate to him what his father meant to my father have been, I believe, inadequate. I hope when he reads this, he realizes that his father’s gift to my father will live on in the story of our family.

A Friend Lost

My father had a first cousin named Werner. Werner and he were the best of friends. Werner’s father was married to my grandfather’s sister and they were in business together. When the families fled to Sweden, Werner’s family came also.  My father said they were inseparable. Then, one day, Werner…disappeared. From Stockholm. His whole family was just…gone. My father later said that the adults must surely have known what happened but that the children were not told. My father was left with yet another loss, which was unexplained. Of course sometime during his adulthood my father did discover what happened. My father never saw him again.

Many many years later, in 2007, I was fortunate to be contacted by Werner’s sons, who contacted me through a family tree website. Before he died, my father was able to contact Werner’s sons by email, and the circle was finally closed. It was only then that my father shared his memories with me. Here are my father’s words sent to me in an email:

(Werner’s son’s) grandfather, the husband of (my father’s sister) owned together with my father a Leather import and export business in Hamburg.  My father had earlier, before he was married, worked for his Onkel in Stockholm for a couple of years in the early 20s. Thus, when my parents and the (name redacted) decided to leave Germany in 1933, after Hitler's rise to power there, (his uncle) offered my father and Werner’s father a job in his company.  We and (name redacted) left for Sweden in early 1933. My mother with my sister and me in April and my aunt together with Werner and his siblings, a bit later, in the spring of 1933. My father and Werner’s father left for Stockholm a month or so later. They both worked for his uncle in 1933, but decided, not much later, to form their own Import Export business, AB. Nordhandel.

Werner’s family left Sweden for Rio de Janeiro, one day, unannounced, in 1938/39 and that is where his son gets the Kristallnacht from......  Because on November 9th 1938, after a Jewish Student had assassinated the German attaché in Paris, the first far reaching programme, which resulted in many burned synagogues and looted Jewish-owned stores, throughout Germany, which was then called the Kristallnacht after all the broken glass.  That is when Werner’s parents plus children wisely left Sweden for Rio de Janeiro.

Our deepest regret is that our fathers were not able to reunite in life. When my father passed in 2013, one of the family wrote to me:  Now the three friends Werner, Carl-Albert and Gunther are all gone. Hope they are now celebrating together like they did in their teens. They had such heavy backpacks to carry through life.

We hope so.

My father and Werner are in this picture together at the far left, with their arms around each other.

Inter-generational Trauma

Individual trauma reverberates across communities but also across the generations. The concept of historic trauma was initially developed in the 1980s by First Nations and Aboriginal peoples in Canada to explain the seeming unending cycle of trauma and despair in their communities. Essentially, the devastating trauma of genocide, loss of culture, and forcible removal from family and communities are all unresolved and become a sort of ‘psychological baggage... continuously being acted out and recreated in contemporary Aboriginal culture’.

 C Wesley-Esquimaux and M Smolewski, Historic Trauma and Aboriginal Health, Aboriginal Health Foundation (2004) p 3.

The concept of inter-generational trauma is a topic of much research and discussion and even some contention. Native Canadians believe that trauma reverberates through 7 generations and many researchers are looking at similarities in descendants of Holocaust survivors. I don’t know if this is true, but this much is clear: My father manifested many of the traits of survivors of the Holocaust, although he was not in the camps and that has impacted my life significantly. He loathed violence of any sort, even in movies and TV shows, yet was capable of great emotional violence.  Survivor-parents have shown a tendency to be over involved in their children’s lives, even to the point of suffocation and to push their children to be high achievers and my father was no exception.  When it came to education he was an unstoppable force.   I used to joke that I was half way through university before I realized some people didn’t even go.

Of course, not all traits passed from survivor-parents are bad. Resilient traits - such as adaptability, initiative, and tenacity were passed on to me. We as children of survivors have a tendency to be task-oriented and hard workers. We tend to  know how to actively cope with and adapt to challenges.

Sometimes, those challenges were within the home. Some survivors, such as my father, did not talk to their children about their life experiences. It was the dark elephant in the room, and contributed to an environment of confusion and insecurity. Some research indicates that children and grandchildren of survivors may have different stress hormone profiles than the general population, and may be at greater risk for anxiety disorders. 

In our family, my relationship with my father was a push-me-pull-you all through my life. 

My father was suffocatingly overprotective and over-involved while also maintaining an emotional distance from me and from my mother at any cost. This contradictory behavior is apparently quite common in survivors. In times of emergency or great emotional stress which came from outside the family, my father was a rock. He would have defended me to his death and I knew that. But he also worked actively to push the people he loved as far away emotionally as possible, and he often did so with great cruelty. There is a theory that suggests that this results from having already gone through great loss and knowing it is possible to lose everything on a visceral level. Resisting emotional closeness was a result of self protection, but it also caused him to be extremely emotionally isolated, and as a result, he was very lonely for most of his life.

My father, the year they left Germany. You can see the pain in his eyes.

Is your father a Nazi?

My father spent 80 years hiding from who he was. And that takes a toll on a person. He once said to me that there was nothing left inside him but ashes. He spent hours and hours reading about Hitler and the Third Reich and our bookshelves were filled with books on the subject. Once, a friend gazed at the crammed shelves and asked me “Is your father a Nazi?” How could I answer? “No.” I replied “No, definitely not.”

And yet my father was in many ways  many different people.  He was a husband, a father, a grandfather, an uncle. He was "Hans" to all of us in North America, but he was "Gunther" to all who knew him in Europe. While my father tried to leave behind all the trappings of his former life,  his name did not leave him. Even as a small child, I knew that he was “Hans” here, but to his family he remained “Gunther”. When some of his ashes were sent to Sweden after his death to be reunited with his parents, the marker was inscribed “Gunther”, not Hans.

In my mind they were two different people.  Hans was completely North American. He lived here, worked here, took vacations, mowed the lawn and ate pizza.  People said he had an accent, but I didn’t hear it. To anyone who knew him he was Swedish. Gunther was more complicated. He emerged when family came from Europe or during the rare times he went to visit them. He spoke Swedish and when pressed to do so, German. No one knew Hans’ secrets, but everyone who knew him knew Gunther’s secrets.  Hans was not a particularly happy person, but Gunther was miserable.  I knew that this hadn’t always been true because my father had 4 nieces to whom he was “Onkel Gunther”, and they adored him. They were considerably older than I and they liked to tell stories of how as a young man in North America, he would often gather as much candy as he could in a big box and send it to them in Europe.  Yet growing up, I watched my father sincerely and lovingly welcome his family when they visited from Europe, and then watched him slowly and inevitably close in on himself and withdraw behind an unhappy, self protective shell. Being Gunther was dangerous. 

I am the child of a refugee of war.

My father was a complicated man. His early life was framed by loss and this followed him forever.  When he was 8 years old, his family fled Nazi Germany to Sweden. And his life was forever changed.  The stories I share are from my father’s viewpoint, coloured by his perspective as a child. Of course, there was likely discussion among the adults, but my father was not privy to it.

My grandfather, having seen the proverbial writing on the wall, put his small family on a train to Sweden for a holiday, and they simply never went back. They lost everything. My father’s first years were marked by the presence of servants: a nanny, a cook, a maid. My grandmother was suddenly in a strange land with nothing, unprepared for the life that was now theirs. My father told me that he often heard his mother crying when she thought she was alone. My grandfather had lost his business and was struggling to support his family. Tensions were high.  Although much of my grandfather’s family followed to Sweden, much of my grandmother’s family remained in Germany, including her mother, who subsequently died in Theresienstadt concentration camp. 

In the early part of the 20th century, children were not seen as being sensitive to trauma or in need of support. They were simply expected to soldier on, to be seen and not heard, to never ask questions. When my father arrived in Sweden, antisemitism was rampant. School was not easy. Life was not easy. My father was a refugee of war. An immigrant. An outsider. And that feeling would be ingrained in him for the rest of his life. 

No matter where he lived, what he did or how successful he was, inside himself my father remained an 8 year old Jewish refugee for the rest of his life.

Hazy Memories

My father left Europe when he was in his early 30’s and first emigrated to Canada and then to the US. It was a whole new beginning. In North America, he was anonymous. No history, a fresh start. But baggage follows a person.

When I was 2 years old, my father was transferred to Germany by his company for a 2-year stint. So off we went, complete with our American refrigerator that my mother refused to be without. We could, at that time, have lived on the American army base in Wiesbaden as they were both American citizens by then.  My mother desperately wanted to. My father traveled all over Europe and was gone from Monday to Friday on business. She spoke no German and had only a 2 year old for company.

My father insisted that they settle in the very small town of Steinbach. And there we landed. No English speakers, no English books, no English television, no English radio, nothing. My mother was alone from Monday to Friday, completely isolated. Incomprehensible today, with the internet. My mother became so desperate that she reached out to my paternal grandmother, who came and stayed for over 6 months. In the second year, through sheer determination my mother managed to pass the incredibly lengthy and complex German driver’s license exam and got her license. When finances permitted, the two of us would travel to Wiesbaden to the base and eat American hamburgers and fries, while my mother revelled in being able to speak to another adult.

I have only a few hazy memories of that time, of a tall winding wooden staircase in our home, of a friend named Sigrid and a pencil box I was given by a trusted babysitter Sabina. My mother later told me that my father was unhappy and frightened and swung wildly between frenetic behaviour and depression from the moment we set foot on German soil until the moment we left.  No one knew who he was, but he knew who he was.  It was a two year reign of terror now real and manifested only in my father’s mind and ending only with our departure. 

You can never tell anyone....

“You can never tell anyone. Ever.” My grandmother was whispering, and I didn’t understand what she was saying or why she was whispering, but I knew it was bad. I nodded solemnly.

After my parents became engaged, my father told my mother he had something to tell her. He confessed that he was Jewish. (My mother later told me she already knew.) He said it was a secret and he never wanted to speak of it again. He swore my mother to secrecy and made her promise that she would never tell any of her family or any children they ever might have. I have often wondered how he thought that would work, considering my entire extended paternal family is/was Jewish.

There was a method in the madness. According to Jewish law, Judaism is passed through the mother. My father very deliberately married a Christian woman, believing that any offspring would be safer than if they were Jews, safer if they never knew, safer if he hid it all away. An imperfect plan, made even more imperfect when his mother decided I should know and took matters into her own hands when I was about 5 years old. I was later told that the ensuing explosion was of epic proportions but the cat was out of the bag and there was no going back.

I carried the secret throughout my childhood. It was always present, always in the background. It coloured our lives. When I was very small, I was terrified that “they” were coming to get us, but I had no idea who “they” were. Discussing it was not an option.  And so the ashes of all  the pain and secrecy covered the corners of our lives and was like a grit between our teeth. 

The Journey Begins...

"The time has come," the Walrus said,

"To talk of many things:

Of shoes--and ships--and sealing-wax--

Of cabbages--and kings--

And why the sea is boiling hot--

And whether pigs have wings."

(from Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There, 1872)

I have always loved to write, from the time I could pick up a pen. No typing in those days, just cursed cursive, but oh I loved to write. The years slipped by and never did I really explore writing with purpose. I've been encouraged by those I love best to begin the journey. And so it begins.