Making Peace With the Past

“I am an Aryan,” the man told me, coldly. My chest tightened in fear.

Why was I afraid? Falk Rittig cornered me not in Nazi Germany, but in the summer of 1992, at a reception in Grunstadt, Germany, to honor my father. Rittig was president of the local Lions Club. My dad was one of four Jewish men invited to visit the town they had fled before the war.

Rittig had his own grievances. “You think you’re the only ones who have suffered,” he said. “You don’t appreciate how much the Germans suffered during the war. We lost plenty too.”

I stood mute and frozen, like a prisoner with a gun at my head. For the rest of the visit, I wondered why I didn’t argue, walk away. Why did the terror and shame feel so familiar?

I always knew that my father would never have left Grunstadt if the Nazis had not come along, that he felt thoroughly German. My mother supplied the darker memories: a childhood in the bleak port city of Hamburg, a terrifying escape on the eve of the war, grandparents and aunts and uncles and cousins killed in concentration camps, along with the 6 million Jews and 3 million more ethnic civilians and prisoners murdered during the Holocaust.

My mother tried to teach me I was a Jew, and the world hates Jews. I stubbornly resisted. “You’re in America now!” I screamed. But my fury proved no match against the sadness of my father’s longings for his homeland, or my mother’s fears.

How would I survive the Nazis? That was my private game as a child. Early on, I played partisan. I imagined living in the forest, foraging for berries, shooting Germans.

But one day when I was 6, I got lost with my brother in the woods near our summer bungalow. No heroine that day, I cried five hours straight. At last we found the road. As we trudged home, a police car drove up. “Get in,” the officer ordered. “I’m taking you back to camp.”

He meant a nearby summer camp. I knew of only one kind of camp back then--concentration camps. I sobbed inconsolably.

Many years later, I was assigned to review a book about Nazi medical experiments. I learned that the Nazis killed people with different colored eyes in order to pluck and dissect the eyeballs. I have a dark brown eye and a hazel one. I felt sick: Here was the answer to my childhood question, how would I survive.

*

For years now, German towns have been inviting Jewish survivors--or “former citizens,” as Germans prefer to call them--to visit. The communities typically pay for the trips and treat their guests royally, part of what Germans call “coming to terms with the past.” My father was thrilled when he received his invitation, but I had to wonder: Was this penance, German-style? Or public relations?

It was a week of parties, speeches, cream-filled cakes and conciliatory gestures. The “girl” next door, whose family purchased my father’s house for a song in the 1930s, gave me a silver-framed photo of my dad, age 10. Townsfolk gathered for a service in the Jewish cemetery, where my ancestors go back to the 1600s. I saw that there were no signs of recent visitors: no flowers, no small rocks or handwritten notes that Jews traditionally leave on gravestones.

On the final day, our group attended high school graduation. After diplomas were delivered, the principal announced that he wanted to give Grunstadt’s former citizens the handshakes they had not received when they ventured into the world. The principal called each Jewish man to the podium and handed him his complete school file. I thought: the Germans tried to exterminate these men, but preserved their records.

That night, we were guests of honor at the graduation ball. When I stepped outside for fresh air, a woman began telling me about her daughter, one of the day’s graduates. Imagine, the woman marveled. The child ready to go into the world.

Suddenly, I wanted to hit her. How dare she gloat with the sort of confidence my parents never enjoyed? I envisioned her daughter gliding toward her future under a halo of protection. Neither my parents, nor I, ever had one.

And then, in a flash, I realized: My parents had moved on without it. They had lived, thrived, in New York more than 50 years. My father now spoke of Manhattan with the same sweet nostalgia he used to talk of Grunstadt. My mother happily accompanied him to his birthplace, a trip she would not have considered 30 years earlier.

I thought of my encounter with the Aryan Falk Rittig. My mother had asked me what he said. When I told her, she’d waved her hand dismissively. “Ach. He gave me the same story. I just walked away.”

Outside the dance hall, I congratulated the graduate’s mother, and went inside to ask my father to dance.

Fran Smith is a San Jose-based freelancer.