Why I’ve Never Been to Germany

Image courtesy of the author

I recently attended my synagogue’s Yom HaShoah program, the highlight of which was hearing a fellow congregant speak about his childhood in war-torn Europe. We all knew that Jerry was born in Hungary just before the Second World War, eventually landing in the United States, but this was the first time he’d told his story publicly. Long story short: another miracle, that he (and most of his family) survived, and, in America, thrived. At one point, Jerry confessed that for decades he had nightmares about running from the Nazis. Sitting near the front of the sanctuary next to my friend Rachel, she and I turned to each other and exchanged glances. Later she confirmed my hunch: didn’t all Jews—even those of us born in America well after the war–have nightmares about running from the Nazis?

God forbid I compare my own Nazi-terror to that of those who actually lived through the Shoah. But terrified I was anyway, and this was despite growing up in the 1960s in suburban Virginia, where among other pursuits, I rode horses, turned endless cartwheels in the wide green expanse of our backyard, played hooky from Sunday school, and fought with my siblings.

We were, of course, Jewish, but as I eventually learned, we were a tribe within a tribe: German Jews, Jews who, in the case of both my mother and my father’s ancestors, arrived in the New World in the 1860s, making us the Jewish equivalent of Mayflower families. Fancy shmancy, with Ivy League educations, killer tennis skills, and the non-accent of the East Coast elite.

Check: tennis. Check: horses. Check: private school where we wore uniforms and played field hockey and celebrated, I kid you not, May Day, with dancing around the Maypole, Morris dancing, and song:

To heir the singin and the soundis;
The solace, suth to say,
Be firth and forrest furth they found
Thay graythis tham full gay.  Etc.

There were few other Jews where we lived, perhaps because there were few other people, period. It was a lush, wooded, magical place where in the summer I picked dandelions and wild honey-suckle, arranged pebbles in the stream that ran at the perimeter of our property, and made cities in the sandbox that my father had built under the huge oak tree in the far back corner of the lawn.

The point is: no one I knew had family who spoke with European accents, refused to speak about their experiences during the war, or had numbers branded into their arms. None of my friends had parents who were hyper vigilant or made sure their kids had seconds at dinner because God forbid. No one so much as mentioned the War or what happened to the Jews in Europe. Except, that is, my mother. My mother grew up in cushy, safe, quiet Scarsdale, New York, in a family so Reform that they celebrated Christmas with a Christmas tree and, courtesy of my Southern grandmother, Southern baked ham.

Even so, my mother told stories of listening to Hitler’s high-pitched voice followed by the roars of “heil Hitler” on the radio. She told stories about her sister’s dog, Laddy, who was sent to war to be a companion dog and returned to Scarsdale terrified by the sound of thunder. She told stories of waiting for her father to return home on nights when he was on civilian defense watch. (He was too old to be drafted.) Eventually, like pretty much all Jews, I learned about the Holocaust itself. The gas chambers. The carnage. The complicity on the part of tens of millions of European Christians.

But none of that is the reason why I’ve never been to Germany, where, in a place called Gross Rapenhausen (or perhaps, in German, Großpösna) my father’s ancestors lived for generations. That reason has to do with the summer between my last year of high school and my first year of college, when my mother’s mother, Jennie, took me to Scandinavia. One day we were in Oslo’s Frogner Park admiring the magnificent Gustav Vigeland sculptures when a family of tourists came up behind us and started speaking in German. My beautiful, elegant, Southern, and German-Jewish-to-the-max grandmother froze, a look of horror on her face. And that’s why I’ve never been to Germany.

My husband, a professor, has been to Germany on multiple occasions, often for academic conferences. He relishes spending time with his intellectual German colleagues in a culture-rich country that has, in modern psychological parlance, “owned” its past, and remains a staunch ally of Israel. Even so, I can’t do it. May my grandmother’s memory be a blessing. May my mother, gone too soon, be playing tennis with the angels in the next world. May the Six Million never be forgotten. May we all—one day—rest in paradise.