you realize your people tried to kill us, right?

My mother's family is Jewish. Eastern European origins, settled into the greater homeland area of metropolitan New York City, and so I am also Jewish.

My father's family is German. Not Nazis per se, just regular citizens who were technically on the wrong side of history during the international crisis that took place during the 1940s. My father was born in 1935 so was around for the whole affair. His father was drafted to Hitler's army corps of engineers. My father says he was mostly involved in blowing up bridges and stuff but that's as much as I really know. Dad describes his mother as "patriotic" to the point that she was happy to receive the Mutterkreutz after achieving her 6th proper German child. This is a fact I probably would not have known if she hadn't presented it as a gift to my sister towards the end of her life. Why she didn't have the thing smelted down I really can't say, so we write it off to elderly crazies and move on. I can't find it in me to hate my grandmother simply for holding onto this bizarre relic, as she is my past, and otherwise a sane and spirited woman. She is also my present: when I find myself filling my garden with blackberries and grapes instead of just the normal suburban stock of flowers and ornamental grasses, I know this is her genetic imprint bearing itself here and now.

Dad in front of his childhood home, with my son, Zach

Apparently, the war was a pretty big deal for anyone who lived through it. For folks who had their entire genetic future removed from the chain of future evolution by German mechanized murders, there is just no way to get one's brain around this such that it makes sense. And for a 10-year-old boy forced to flee his idyllic home near the beach due to punitive Russian occupation -- witnessing the nearby city of Stralsund burning to the ground on his way out, and then being deprived of the option to go back and visit freely for the next 45 years, skipping years of school and being moved to the rubble of a new city, in a country where the average adult was so demoralized by the terrible decisions they had either participated in or had not been able to stall, with national pride instantly turned into embarrassment and humiliation -- it was a big deal, too. And even for Germans today, children who have yet to be born, the scars of the past remain so very present and unshakable, even if they are not often discussed. 

For some Jews in America, the Germans were and thus shall always be our enemies. They won't travel to Germany and most certainly wouldn't purchase a Volkswagen. But for me, it would be impossible to avoid myself. So, like all other Germans of my own and future generations, I must also take responsibility for Hitler's Germany as part of my own personal past. Definitely not a source of pride or acceptance, but one for which I am forced to mentally post-mortem. What would I have done? (I would probably have been killed, but that's not the point of this exercise.) Would I have been susceptible to the propaganda? The skewed and dehumanizing logic? I certainly hope not. I can't write off an entire generation of a country's population without dissecting the complexity in this worst-case illustration of the negative power we humans collectively possess.

I sometimes wonder what in my current life falls into the category of blissful but not benign ignorance. And if any human out there really has a clean bill of genealogical past. Probably not. Thus I look forward, and try not to judge people for histories they can not control or change, unless they carry them into the present.