What Will I Tell My Son? : His Father Was in the SS. His Grandfather Was a Nazi. Now He Has a Child. These Photographs Are the Start of a Painful History Lesson.

The walls echoed each footstep and whisper as we walked through the crematorium at Theresienstadt, once a Nazi concentration camp in what was then Czechoslovakia. Tristan, my 16-month-old son, loved the sounds. As he climbed on the pipes leading to the ovens he started shouting, conducting a conversation with his echo. I felt I should tell him to be quiet and not disturb anybody. But the place was already so disturbing that silence would have been oppressive.

Last summer was my son’s first visit to Germany, and he, my wife, who is American, and I had spent three weeks visiting my ailing father and mother in Hoisbuttel, a small town north of Hamburg.

I thought back to my last trip in 1991, before Tristan’s birth, when I was helping a Jewish friend put together a conference for Germans and Jews in Berlin for the first anniversary of the German reunification. I was to take part in a dialogue between children of Holocaust perpetrators and victims, some of them camp survivors making their first journey back to Germany. The son and grandson of former Nazis, I wanted to share the feeling of liberation I’d experienced when I met Jews in Los Angeles who talked to me and didn’t hate me, even though they had every reason to. My parents listened with interest, even pride, as I described what I was doing.

But later, after we’d been drinking, my father started arguing with me. How dare I judge him? he asked. What did I think I would have done? Jews had been persecuted wherever they went in the world. It didn’t have anything to do with Germans, yet everybody was still picking on Germany. Maybe the Jews themselves were to blame for their own destruction in the war. It had been necessary to deal with the Jews’ financial power; they were controlling Germany.

I had never heard my father say anything as revolting and ignorant. I’d always been sure that my parents didn’t feel and wouldn’t say this sort of thing. Still, I couldn’t reject my father. I am Vati’s son.

But I am also Tristan’s father. Tristan, as I do, will need to heal and be able to bear the burden of our people’s history. Someday, I will have to explain how you can love a person who has participated in or supported terrible things.

*

I had known all my life that another man I loved was a Nazi and an anti-Semite: my grandfather, Opa.

Opa managed huge estates in formerly German parts of Poland before and during the war. He prided himself on his honesty, saying he always gave the Polish tenant farmers their due, unlike landlords who cheated them.

When I was growing up, I spent every weekend and vacation at Opa’s. Like any grandfather, he passed on his beliefs and convictions. Any topic--school, family, agriculture--ultimately brought history lessons. Opa warned against teachers, politicians and the press, as they slanted everything to paint Germany in a negative light. Auschwitz was a hoax, he said.

The older grandfather got, the more he started repeating himself. The older I got, the less patience I had. One day I tried to argue. “How can you say that?” I asked him when he said the Russians had set up pictures from the death camps. The heaps of bodies, supposedly gas chamber victims, really were civilian war dead carted to the camps from cities destroyed by Allied bombings, he said.

What if “only” 3 million could conceivably have been exterminated that way? What kind of sick calculations were those? I preached. Grandmother silenced me. What kind of language was I using? she asked. Oma and Opa always listened to what I had to say, but I wasn’t to contradict them.

I thought of Opa as a misguided man who hated, yes, but did so in private. I wanted to think that his was an ordinary story in a country where many had professed to have known nothing of its evils. But recently I learned that my grandfather was the village Nazi leader, responsible for ensuring the party’s reach into every household. At the end of the war, he left his farm under cover of night because the Russians would have executed him. His wife and children, my mother among them, finally joined him on a farm in the west.

But despite everything, I have great love for the man, even eight years after his death. I feel pain when I acknowledge to strangers who he was, pain over what could have been between us if not for Nazism.

*

My father was 8 years old when the Nazis came to power in 1933. He was a Hitler Youth, an SS soldier for two years and then a POW. He turned 20 in a cattle car on the way to the Siberian rock quarry where he would labor for 2 1/2 years. When he returned he found that his own father, assuming that he was dead, had given away his farm. What part of my father died then I don’t know, but I do know that he has been trapped in history for the past 50 years. He has tired of listening to stories of war crimes and German evil and prefers to talk about how his generation built “a great democracy.” Still, I wait and wait for chances to ask my father questions, though his answers are generally short and unsatisfying.

History has come alive for me in the faces of real victims. A Polish Jew I met in L.A. continues, after close to 50 years, to look for people who might know his parents’ fate. He is my father’s age, born in 1925. What if their paths had crossed? I wanted to tell him that I believe--I pray--that my father would do as I do if only he could. That he, too, would seek out this man, if only to say he was sorry for all the pain.

*

Whenever I am home now I can’t help but think about the war and what role my family, friends and neighbors might have played.

The day before my brother’s wedding, my mother asked me not to “get into it” with Heinz, my aunt’s boyfriend. “Be quiet and don’t ruin our day,” she said. I only suspected what was to come.

After the ceremony, the family met for a reception at my parents’ house, and as soon as we were seated for coffee and cake, Heinz struck up a conversation. An American lawyer, he said, saved his life after he was convicted of crimes against humanity in the Nuremberg Trials. The court-appointed attorney had gotten the charges against him dropped. The two men had something in common, Heinz said: They both hated Jews.

I honored my mother’s wish and kept quiet. But I felt sick. Would I also have kept silent during the war? Am I the same as my grandfather and father? Will this evil silence be passed on to Tristan?

*

In the guest book at Theresienstadt a German student has written, “How and why was all this possible? I am German and I am ashamed about it.” I myself have lived in Los Angeles for 10 years, trying sometimes to emulate blacks, sometimes Indians, sometimes Latinos and sometimes Jews. I have wanted to be everything except German.

But in the crematorium where Tristan climbed and shouted, a bit of the monster went away. My son is the embodiment of everything that is good and pure in my life. On this trip and through my photos, I have wanted to say, “Here am I. Please hear my prayer. I dedicate myself, before the victims and before my ancestors, to never forget.” I wanted to be here out of love for Opa and Vati, the only grandfather and father I’ll ever have. I don’t know if I will ever return with my father. I hope I will. But for now it is our little family who comes to honor the memory of the dead.