Denial (5 page)

“What was your first experience of fear?” I ask.

“I had heard about my uncle Solomon being carted off to a concentration camp and then dying within three months. Nineteen thirty-three. He was a person who sort of made jokes. He saw some men pulling up metal fencing, and he joked that they were doing it to use the metal for weapons. He made a joke about it. He was standing next to a workman. My mother's brother-in-law. And they carted him away.

“Shortly thereafter I was playing doctor with a neighbor's girl,” my father continues. “The idea was to discover what her crotch looked like. We were just playing. Afterward the town gendarme said he'd had a complaint about me; that I was defiling an Aryan girl. He told me that if that ever happened again, my whole family and I would be sent to a concentration camp.” All this my father says plainly, in a kind of monotone, as if dutifully reporting the details of an experiment that didn't go as planned.

I don't know what my father saw in my face. Perhaps I sucked in my breath.

“That scared me,” he explains.

“Was your mother there when the gendarme approached
you?” I ask, shocked by this story, which I am hearing for the first time.

“I was alone,” he says.

As I read these notes now, months later, this seems like a good summary of my sense of my father's life experience: “I was alone.” It has nothing to do with my father's actual life. My father has always been surrounded by people. Seven siblings. Countless cousins, despite the reduction in their numbers by the Nazis. Three wives. Seven children. Eight grandchildren. Nonetheless, I am compelled, once more, by a recursive thought: I don't want my father to die alone. I want us to be able to sit together, talking or not talking, whatever he wants. I want for him what I want for myself, to know that he is loved for who he truly is, including the pain he has felt and the pain he imposed on others, without denial. Isn't that what we all long for?

“Did you tell your mother?” I ask.

“I don't think so…. I doubt it. I'm not certain. I suppose I assumed that you're not supposed to do things like that, play doctor with girls, especially when the girl's father is a Nazi.”

My father is still speaking in the detached tone he reserves for distastefully emotional subjects. I try not to distract him with my own emotion. But I have never heard any of this before, and I am nearly paralyzed with terror.

“You thought you had done something really wrong?” I ask, quietly, as if trying not to frighten the little boy in this story.

“Well, maybe not terribly wrong, but something that endangered my family and me.”

I don't know how, in my paralysis, I summoned up the courage to push the question further.

“So your first sexual experience was connected with danger—with the threat of death,” I say.

Reading these notes now, I can no longer grasp that my father
and I managed to allow these words actually to exist between us, to be uttered aloud, these terrible truths that were not to be captured by words.

“I'm not sure I phrased it that way to myself,” he says. “We were little. I was curious.”

“So you discovered that your curiosity could be dangerous,” I say, bravely.

How alike my father and I are, I realize now. My curiosity compels me. My curiosity is dangerous, too. My curiosity propels me on, even in this interview, the most dangerous and difficult one of my life thus far.

“I thought I was being persecuted because I was Jewish,” he says, sticking with the facts.

I have come to believe that my father's trick, his whole life, has been to convert the sensation of fear, which makes him feel ashamed, into dominance. When my father is afraid of something or some powerful emotion he fears he cannot control, he finds a way to dominate himself and others. This is why some men go to war, I think to myself, and then brush the thought out of my mind. Too pat.

There is an aphorism that comes unbidden to my mind like a mantra whenever something truly bad happens: When the going gets tough, the tough get going. This is my father's recipe for resilience. This philosophy has often served me well. It makes me tough. But sometimes, I am ashamed to say, it makes me cruel—to myself and to others. Sitting here now, reading this interview, I recall with a nauseating shame my cruelty to an aunt who was going through a terrible divorce. She had recently discovered that her husband had gambled away much of their life savings, and she felt utterly lost. Although she was trained as a lawyer, she had never really worked, and now she was on her own. “Get a job!” I told her, sensibly, as if channeling my
father's eminently sensible approach to life. I apologized when I realized what I had done, but I'm not sure that she will ever be able to forgive me.

“Did you think that being Jewish was bad?” I ask.

“I was going to public school then, and the first year all the little boys were put into the Hitlerjugend shirts. I wanted to do the same thing—it looked very desirable. But I knew I couldn't join because I was Jewish.”

My father has a stronger accent now, his syntax slightly awkward.

“The second year a Nazi functionary was put in place as the principal. And this new principal came into our classroom and made all the Jewish boys and girls stand up—”

“How many of you were there?” I ask, trying, like my father, to stick to the facts of the story. Trying not to feel, or anyway, not feeling.

“About two or three of us. And then he said that Jews were the source of all the problems in Germany—he said they were enemies of the people. He reiterated the caricatures of Jews,” my father says.

“What were these caricatures?” I ask.

“Money grabbing. They will steal your belongings, they've been stealing from the country and individuals…. I didn't listen that closely…. I didn't believe it…because I knew my own family.”

I think to myself,
moneygrubbing
, but don't correct my father.

“What did being Jewish mean to you when you were a kid?” I ask.

For the second time he doesn't answer my question, but continues with his story.

“And he then told all the boys in the class that it was patriotic to beat up all the Jewish boys and make them go away…. They
chased me and caught me and whipped me with these flexible sticks.”

“What do you mean by flexible sticks? Branches?” I ask. My heart is beating hard.

“They were used in Germany to whip—”

“You mean switches?” I ask.

“Yes, that is the term,” he says.

I am not aware of feeling emotion, except that something as simple as finding the right word has brought us both relief.

“Every time school got out from that day forward, I had to make myself disappear so as not to get beaten up. I thought I was succeeding pretty well. But one day I met one boy who was one of my tormentors, and I attacked him and beat him up. Again the gendarme came around and said that if I laid a hand on another Aryan youth, my family and I would be sent to a concentration camp.

“The Nazis would have beaten me up and sent me off without discussion. But he was the town gendarme. He knew me, he knew my family. Nevertheless it scared me very much.

“When school was out, a person from the Joint Organization, a Jewish organization, traveled through Wetter [the town where my father lived] and was talking to the Jewish families, and when she came to our house, my mother described what had been happening to me at school. The lady asked to see my back. My back was so full of welts. She suggested a Jewish school in Marburg, and I should be sent away from home and sent to a Jewish camp in Frankfurt for the summer. And I did that.”

“What was the camp like?” I ask.

“I don't remember the camp. I just existed there,” he says.

I have never heard about this camp before. My father has not talked about his childhood in Germany very much. When I've
asked, he has told me about having to leave his kitten behind. And also his cousin, who was eventually killed by Mengele.

 

There are unstated conditions for this conversation. I will evacuate myself of feeling so as not to distract my father. This is an unspoken pact we've had ever since I can remember, since my mother died. Usually I can follow the rules.

Four years ago, when I was forty-six years old and my sister forty-five, we finally worked up the courage to ask my father to describe his recollections of our mother—a topic that my sister and I understood, from the time we were children, was off-limits. There had been no photographs of our dead mother anywhere visible in the house. We didn't know, until the time of this conversation, well over forty years after our mother's death, that my father possessed a photo album of their wedding, which he had hidden in a bottom drawer. Nearly all of our mother's possessions—the wedding gifts she received from family members, even her jewelry and silver—had somehow disappeared, given to other family members who apparently did not understand what these things would mean to my sister and me. I do not possess a single object that belonged to my mother. There was so much feeling in the room that day—something we were so unaccustomed to—that my sister requested that we break and continue the following day. But my father warned us, “I will not discuss this topic again.” It was too painful, he told us.

My father continues with his story. “The next fall I started going to school in Marburg. I was afraid we would be a target because now all the Jewish children were congregating, at the railroad station, on the train.

“Then the SS started appearing,” he says, continuing carefully.

“They were considered particularly deadly. I remember walking from the railroad station. Every time I'd see an SS man, I'd try to walk around him. Whenever it was inescapable that I had to pass him, I'd just steel myself for the process, try not to call attention to myself in any way.”

There is a dry hollowness between us now. The absence of feeling leaves me light-headed. I am slightly nauseated, a familiar sensation. It comes to me when there is some strong feeling unfelt.

But with all this discussion of my father's attempts to avoid drawing attention to himself, feeling periodically leaks into the room.

I'm better at interviewing terrorists than interviewing my father. It's too close to home.

“Is this the sort of thing you want to know?” he asks. I see that my father is embarrassed by having to go over this distasteful story. He is determined to do his duty, but we are perilously close to an indulgent sort of introspection, which my father deems “examining one's navel.” He hates to call attention to himself by divulging more than is required.

But there is something more: I sense my father's unacknowledged shame, and I feel ashamed of myself. Like a naughty child searching through her parents' drawers, I have now seen something I was not supposed to see—my father's shame. It's not only that I have discovered something illicit, but my dangerous, prurient curiosity about my father's inner life is now on display, exposed to my father's disapproval. My father does not approve of my “examining my navel,” but I, ever the difficult child, want to examine not only my own, but his, too.

“Tell me more about what it was like to feel afraid,” I request. I need to know. I need to know what it
feels
like to be afraid.

“I felt afraid,” he concedes, dutifully confessing the truth as he knows it, even when it is embarrassing or painful to himself
or others. But he has not yet provided me the details about the sensation of fear that I want so much to hear.

“No,” he says, pausing, and then more firmly, “I felt terror morning, noon, and night. The brownshirts would decide they needed to teach us a lesson. And then they would practice putting out fires by shooting streams of water at our house—their fire hoses shooting right at us. They never did break in and attack us, but that could happen at any time.”

There is a shift in the room now. More feeling, and with more feeling, relief.

“They marched into the house one time with guns drawn,” he adds.

“Who was there?” I ask. My skin feels prickly.

“My mother, Irmgard [my father's next older sister], and Anna Marie's mother [a neighbor]. They marched in. Irmgard was fourteen, and I was seven. They took my mother into the front room and shut the door.

“I was looking at Irmgard to try to figure out what I should do. What she did was collapse on the flagstones in the front hall and start screaming and kicking her heels. So I tried for a little while to do that, too, but it didn't seem sensible. So I stood there, aghast. They were in there about fifteen minutes. My mother told us that what they had demanded was that she sign receipts indicating they had paid her whatever debts were owed to my family.

“I didn't know what to do,” he says. “So I tried yelling for a while. Not long. And then I just stood there. I thought, Should I go and help my mother? I wasn't certain I should. I was afraid to go help her. I didn't hear any screams or anything. The door was closed.”

“How many of them were there?”

“Three or four,” he says.

“Were you afraid they were going to kill her?” I ask.

“I would have heard a gunshot,” my father says, sensibly.

He considers my question a bit further. “I was afraid they would kill us all,” he adds.

“So you just stood in the front hallway, your ear to the door, listening? Hoping not to hear a gunshot?”

“I stood there. When they were done, they opened the door.”

I repeat to myself, “When they were done.”

Done with what?

“The same door, where you were standing?” I ask, trying to tether us both to the physical world with concrete details.

“Yes. I was in the front hallway. They had marched into the sitting room, where my father's desk was.”

“What were their guns like? I ask.