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.