by admin » Fri May 18, 2018 12:11 am
6. Susanne, The Hopeful One
JUST LOOK AT ME sitting here in front of you. My face, my eyes, my mouth, my nose. What do I look like to you? Tell me, what do you see? Suppose we were to run into each other at the supermarket on the check-out line. I turn around and you look at me. There's nothing special about me, right? And now here we are, talking about whether I'm the child of murderers -incredible! What does the child of murderers look like? Tell me truthfully, what did you think I'd look like? Did you have any mental image, any preconceived notion, what somebody like me would look like?
I was conceived in 1944, maybe at the very moment your grandmother was killed in a concentration camp. Or perhaps later that same day, after office hours. Father comes home from work and gets on top of Mother, probably after dinner. I really don't know why I should talk about this with you of all people. But I have to begin with someone.
Actually, you're the first person willing to talk about it all. Probably this is going to turn into one gigantic agony.
We had some teachers at school who were willing to talk about it. One of them was an emigre who'd come back. He went to London with his parents in 1938, and he returned in 1945, hoping, so he used to tell us, to help in the rebuilding of a new Germany. He tried so hard to describe the horrors of the Nazi era for us. But all he accomplished was to make himself miserable, not us. When he talked about it he would tremble from head to toe and turn away to wipe away his tears. We sat there stoically, like Sunday at mass. All the pictures and films he showed us, the stories he told-they meant no more than anything else we learned in school. The bell rang, he came into the room, opened his briefcase, set up the projector, inserted the film, and the pictures appeared on the screen. He read from a book and showed us photographs. I was fourteen at the time. When the bell rang at the end of the hour we rushed out, ate our sandwiches, and got ready for our next class. And a few minutes later we were listening to our math teacher talk about straight lines and curves.
We were busy trying to solve math problems, not problems of history. It was all very meaningless.
In 1948 my father was sentenced to ten years, and he was released after two years, in 1950. I was three years old at the time he disappeared for those two years, and I never noticed it. I was five when he returned. I remember it like today. Suddenly he was there again. None of this was ever discussed at home. My father is still alive. He's almost ninety, a tall, proud man with a shock of white hair. His left hand is missing up to his wrist. He has an artificial hand covered by a black glove. It's inflexible and the fingers are slightly bent. He tends to extend his left arm slightly, as though about to shake hands. Strange, I always see this hand when I think about him. I don't see him as being evil. On the contrary. He never hit me, never yelled at me. He was calm and understanding, almost too calm.
"I'll tell you everything you want to know. Just ask me," he used to say to me, and invariably added this admonition: "And also tell your children. It must never happen again." He was making me responsible for the future, and it was up to me to shield my children against repeating his mistakes. The only problem was: What mistakes? All those historical revelations, those stories, were always so vague.
Mr. Stern-that was the name of the teacher who'd come back from London-once invited my father to school, and my father accepted. That morning he was very nervous. The upshot was that from then on the two met regularly at my father's suggestion. He was eager to see and talk to Mr. Stern. He was looking for understanding. And to this day I find it puzzling how he could talk so often and for so long with Stern, who after all had been one of his victims. When I was older he used to tell me: "We wanted to win at least this one war. We already knew in 1943 that we would lose the war against the Allies. But the Jews, they'd have to die."
He tried to explain it to me over and over again. Very calmly, no undue excitement, trying to win me over. He told me the story hundreds of times and made it all sound so simple and logical, even the most horrendous cruelties. Like stories about a vacation trip. Most of the time I just sat there listening, not saying a word. My thoughts tended to wander, or I would look past him out the window and think of something else. He talked in a soothing monotone, all the while looking at me, and I often felt that I was going to have to listen to him forever, for all eternity.
When I was sixteen he took me to Auschwitz. He knew the camp; he'd been stationed there at one time. We latched onto a German-speaking group. The guide was a former German prisoner. I'll never forget that day. There were many young people my age in our group, the only difference between them and me being that they were the children of victims.
My father didn't say a word during our guided tour. Later, in the car going back home, he began to tell me where he thought the guide had been wrong, which of his explanations were in error. He spoke about the selection at the unloading ramp and said that between 60 and 70 percent of the prisoners were sent to the gas chamber. The rest were put to work. It seems that the guide had said that all but a handful were exterminated immediately. And throughout it all my father was completely calm. And at the end he asked: "Can you imagine how horrible it all was?"
In retrospect, the terrifying thing about him was his objectivity. His reports and descriptions, his careful recapitulation of events. I never saw him shed a tear, never heard him break off in the middle, halt, unable to continue talking. Only these monotonous litanies, almost as though he were reading from a script.
I was raised by my father. I never knew my mother. She was killed in a bombing raid when I was a baby. Later we had a maid who took care of me and the household. He treated her very well. He was, as I already told you, a serene, friendly man. He believed that everything could be explained, and he followed his own logic. Once people were made to see the reasons why things happened, then all barriers to understanding and outlandish ideas would vanish. According to my father, everything that had happened back then was just a matter of cause and effect.
His father was an officer, and so he too became an officer. His parents were enthusiastic Nazis, and so he too became a Nazi. His entire family was involved in it from the very beginning. I never knew his father, he was killed in the war; he even knew Hitler. My father told me that in the early days, between 1930 and 1933, he often saw Hitler personally. "One couldn't resist the force of his personality," he used to say.
In his opinion the horror that unfolded during the war years grew out of the existing conditions and situations. However, in all honesty, my father never glossed over anything. He used words like "murderers" and "criminals." He never offered excuses and never claimed that the things we read about in the papers or books weren't true. But as to guilt, he never considered himself guilty. He never, not once, said that he had made a mistake or that he had been partner to a crime. He was simply a victim of circumstances. And I, I always believed everything he told me. I believed his assurances, believed him when he said that what happened had been a catastrophe, and I never suspected that he might be one of the guilty. But everything changed when my son demolished my view of the world. But more of that later.
After my graduation from high school, in 1962, I decided to study psychology, but later changed my mind and went into education. My husband and I met at the university. We married in 1965, and in 1966 I gave birth to my son, Dieter. Horst, my husband, teaches German and history.
One day about three or four years ago Dieter came home and told us that he had joined a study group to trace the history and ultimate fate of the Jews of our city. Wonderful, I said, and I was proud of him. And Horst also said he would help him in any way he could, with advice or books or whatever. Both Horst and I were quite ingenuous and really proud that our son would undertake something so important.
Dieter and his friends met regularly in the homes of one or another's parents, including ours. They dug through the municipal records, wrote letters to Jewish communities, and tried to find former residents of our city who had survived.
And then, after a few weeks, everything suddenly changed. I began to feel uneasy. Dieter was hardly ever at home anymore; every free minute was spent with his friends. And I was beginning to feel somehow that the more time he was devoting to his project the more estranged he was becoming from us. He hardly ever discussed his work with us; he stopped confiding in us and became more and more secretive.
One evening at dinner-Horst and I tried to talk to him and asked how his group was coming along-he suddenly looked up from his plate, stared at me, and in a rather aggressive tone of voice asked me: "Tell me, what did Grandfather actually do during the war?"
I thought to myself, I'm glad that he's showing interest, he's got a right to know what his grandfather did back then. And he asked me to tell him what I knew. By then my father was in an old age home, about fifty miles from here, and we visited him once or twice a month, usually without Dieter. So I told Dieter what I knew about those days, a past I knew only from my father's accounts. I tried to explain, describe, interpret, and report about a world which, as I now know, had nothing to do with reality. My son listened to me for a while without looking up. Suddenly he jumped up, threw down his knife and fork, which he had been banging on the table while I was talking, looked at me angrily, and shouted: "You're lying, he's a murderer! You're lying, you're lying! My grandfather was a murderer and is a murderer." He didn't stop until Horst got up and slapped his face. At that I began to scream at both of them. It was dreadful. Dieter ran to his room, slammed the door, and didn't reappear.
Something broke in that boy. Over and over again I tried to talk to him, to explain what had happened "back then," that damned "back then." I might just as well have been talking to the wall. He'd sit across from me, stare at my knees, wring his hands, and never answer. It was no use. He wouldn't listen to either of us.
Some weeks after that he came home, took some papers out of his bag, and threw them down on the table. They looked like old documents.
"Do you know a family by the name of Kolleg?" he asked. "No, never heard of them," I answered. "Here," he pointed to the papers in front of me, "they once lived in this house." "You mean, in our house?" I asked, trying to read one of the documents. "Yes, here, where we're living now," he said. I didn't know what he was after. "Yes, and what are you trying to tell me?" I asked. "Nothing important," he answered, and then went on very calmly: "The Kollegs were taken from this house in 1941, and in 1944 they died in Auschwitz. Your dear father moved into this house with your dear mother the day after they were taken away."
He then tore the paper out of my hand and shouted at me: "Do you want me to read it to you? Should I? Here, here it says, 'Here lived Martha Kolleg, age 2, Anna Kolleg, age 6, Fredi Kolleg, age 12, Harry Kolleg, age 42, and Susanne Kolleg, age 38. Arrested on November 10, 1941, deported on November 12, 1941. Official date of death of the children and mother, January 14, 1944. Father officially missing. Place of death: Auschwitz. Cause of death:-' Do you want any more details, Mother? And you want to tell me that you knew nothing of all this? Your father never told you any of this?"
I said nothing. I fidgeted, not knowing what to say to him. My father had never told me that we were living in a sequestered house. I assumed that it had been in the family all along. And damn it all, what should I have said to my son? Form an alliance with him against my own father?
I tried to talk to Horst about it, and he promised to have a talk with Dieter. But that didn't help matters. On the contrary, our son now also turned against his father. And Horst also didn't handle things very skillfully. He is a dedicated adherent of the Greens and considers himself a leftist. In his opinion our problems today, namely the ecology and atomic energy, are unique to our time. And he tried to persuade Dieter of this. The problem facing young Germans today, he insisted, wasn't fascism. The past was past and should be laid to rest. The critique of fascism was the province of philosophers, not teen-agers. Today young people ought to demonstrate against atomic ·plants, against the pollution of the environment. Everything else was socially conditioned and would have to await social changes, and then there would be no more fascism, and on and on with this theoretical twaddle. Dieter sat there, shaking his head, trying to get a word in edgewise, but Horst wouldn't budge.
Dieter finally gave up, but Horst kept talking. I tried to interrupt and asked Dieter how he now felt about it all. He looked at me, looked at Horst, and all he said was: "What on earth has all this to do with the fact that my grandfather was a murderer?" He then got up and went to his room.
The next few weeks were horrible, nothing but arguments, fights, tears, and accusations. Dieter and I were on a collision course, like people of different religions and different truths. Horst took refuge in TV and refused to mix in, except that every now and then he surfaced with senseless advice-telling us to stop and not take things so seriously. But that wasn't of much help. On the contrary: Dieter took everything very seriously.
I feared that I was about to lose my son. I hadn't broken with my father despite all the stories he'd told me. But now a breach between me and my son became a real possibility. I found myself in the dreadful position of having to choose between my son and my father.
Before being forced into that choice I of course tried to reason with Dieter. We had not spoken to each other for about two weeks when one evening I asked him to listen to me one more time. I tried to make clear to him what my father had told me of his work, mentioned our trip to Auschwitz and other incidents of my youth. I wanted to make him understand what I'd been told of my father's past and of National Socialism, how I'd reacted to these accounts, and to what extent it affected my life, if at all. I also tried to make clear to him the difference between our two generations. When I was his age it would never have occurred to me to join a study group investigating the history of our town under National Socialism. Compared to today's youth we were stupid and na'ive and uninterested, or possibly the subject was still too loaded then.
That conversation was very important. Dieter, no longer so resentful, listened to me very calmly and asked many questions. But I think the most important thing, as far as he was concerned, was my telling him that I was not going to defend my father at all costs, that his grandfather must not be permitted to come between the two of us, and that he must not think of me as an ex-Nazi clinging to faded ideals. I also made him understand that it is not all that easy to condemn one's own father as a murderer if one has never seen or experienced him in that role and if he had never shown me that side of himself.
Well, yes, basically what I did was to ask my son for forgiveness and, beyond that, for an appreciation of my situation. I left no doubt about my own rejection of the past and my father's deeds. That probably played a crucial part in our reconciliation.
In the days after our talk something wonderful happened to me. I forged a bond with my son-against my own father. Increasingly I began to take an interest in the work of his group, and he showed me everything he and his friends were collecting and digging up. His study group frequently met at our house, and I would sit quietly in the corner and listen to them. I was fascinated by the way young people today approach history. This generation is far less self-conscious and less fearful and inhibited than mine.
But this doesn't mean that everything was okay. I continued to visit my father every week, and every time before I went I planned to talk to him, but I never did. He had trouble walking, his hearing was bad, and I usually spent my time with him wheeling him around the garden of the nursing home. I simply couldn't get myself to ask him about the circumstances surrounding his acquisition of the house in which I now live.
I tried to persuade Dieter to come with me on one of my visits and to talk to his grandfather. He refused. "He's your father," he told me. I also thought that he would find a talk with his grandfather unpleasant.
Eventually I was able to persuade Dieter to come along. My father was happy to see his grandson. He hadn't seen him for almost a year. He asked him about school, and the two talked like old friends. I thought that perhaps Dieter had dropped his original plan. But I was wrong. After chatting about this and that Dieter came to the point.
He asked my father the same question he had asked me, namely, whether he knew the Kollegs. No, my father told him, he'd never heard of them. Dieter persisted and asked him how he'd gotten the house in which we lived. He bought it, my father told him. From whom? Dieter continued. From a real estate agent, my father answered. Did he know who had lived in that house before? Dieter asked. No, he didn't, my father replied.
.And so the talk went back and forth without Dieter actually attacking my father. He asked him simple questions, and my father answered in his customary straightforward manner. I began to think that perhaps my father really didn't know anything. But Dieter, in his penetrating prosecutorial fashion, didn't let go, until my father lost his patience. "What is it you're trying to find out?" he asked Dieter. And so Dieter told him about his study group and the documents about the house they had dug up, about the proof of the deportation of the Kollegs, the people who had lived in our house.
But my father denied everything. He hadn't known it, he'd bought the house in the usual way; this was the first time he'd heard that Jews had lived in the house before him. Dieter didn't believe him, but he refrained from starting a fight with his grandfather. He whispered to me that it was pointless to talk to him about it. And we left it at that.
On that day my father died as far as I am concerned. I no longer know the man I continue to visit, and he's no longer of interest to me. We talk about meaningless things as I push his wheelchair around. Since that crucial visit we never again have had a personal talk. I had found out that my father was a liar. And I didn't want to think about all the lies he'd been telling me all my life. Nothing was certain anymore, everything I'd been told may have been either half-truths or distortions.
Now I visit my father only once a month. Dieter has never again gone back with me, and I've never asked him to. I am now on his side and all my hopes rest in him. He is not influenced by my father's generation, and that's good. He is growing up far freer than I, and also far less in awe of authority. But the crucial experience in regard to my son is my alienation, with and through him, from my father. The old man living in that nursing home is a complete stranger to me. Someone else could be sitting in the wheelchair I keep on pushing around in the garden, and I wouldn't even notice it.