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solitary_summer ([personal profile] solitary_summer) wrote2005-05-08 11:56 am
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Family silences. It's strange, how you manage to maintain and ignore blind spots... It's not as if I'd been historically disinterested, and especially over the last five years or so I've been reading a lot about the holocaust, the war, the history of national socialism, but it took Eva Menasse's book, specifically the story of her Czech-German grandmother and her Jewish grandfather to remind me of something my mother mentioned once, it must have been years ago. The husband of my great-aunt (who was also my godmother) was Jewish; from what documents my mother had from my great-aunt, both his parents were from Hungary, but lived in Vienna at the time of their marriage. He was born in 1890, married my great-aunt in 1930. There were no children.

He left Vienna in 1940 and moved to Sastin, where he'd been born (and still had family?). She filed for divorce a year later, in 1941. My mother says, which may be the truth, or may be the version that became canonical and accepted in family history, that he insisted on divorce to protect her. I'll never find out, unless there are any letters, everyone from that generation is dead. Was there pressure from her family? Her brother-in-law (my grandfather) was a policeman at that time, he was briefly imprisoned after the war, my mother told me, but apparently there were no serious charges (another thing I need to look into). There is a story about how he warned someone, once, but again that may or may not be family legend. Is it possible to be in the police during this time and keep your hands and conscience clean?

He tried to emigrate to the USA, there's a letter from the embassy informing him that all the European contingents were full; a number on the waiting list.

After the war she tried to find out what happened to him, but only got the information from some Slovakian official source that he'd been deported to Poland.

I found nothing in the DÖW database about Jews in Austria, but he is listed at the Yad Vashem site: according to them he was in the camps in Nitra and Zilina, from where he was deported to Auschwitz on April 24th 1942, where he [died] was killed May 11th 1942.

The source for this information given is a project from the University of Bratislava about Slovakian holocaust victims.

She kept the name, and my mother says she still blamed herself at the time of her death.



So I'm left wondering, why did I not ask further when my mother first mentioned this? Worse, why did I (at least temporarily) forget again? I can only assume I must have been very much younger and had no interest in history at the time, no comprehension of what this really meant.

Perhaps with millions murdered it shouldn't make a difference that it's someone I might have known, someone who would have been family. Somehow it still does; makes it more personal somehow.

No one in my family talked about him, or at least not to me. (Although I keep thinking maybe there was some unspoken tension I picked up, some remarks they thought a child wouldn't understand? Something my great-aunt did tell me, but I forgot? Maybe there's a subconscious reason for my interest in the history of that period - something my younger sister never had -, combined with an undefined sense of guilt... ) No one, apparently, tried to find out more about his fate.


There is little enough I can do; my mother might have a little more information, but she was a child then, apparently this wasn't talked about much. Find out if I can get any documents; get his name included in the database at the DÖW; find out if he had family, and what happened to them.

[identity profile] un-crayon-rouge.livejournal.com 2005-05-08 06:13 pm (UTC)(link)
Hm. Schwierig. Just the other day we were having this conversation at work, about "keeping hands and conscience clean". I was of the opinion (still am), that it would have been all but impossible by our standards. People were members of the nazi party, the HJ, the BDM, as a matter of course. That doesn't mean they ever personally killed a jew, or harmed another human being, but they were in the system. Maybe they typed letters for a general. Maybe they were another general's pedicure, or baked Semmeln for an especially vicious Unterkommandant, whatever. And then their grandsons and granddaughters find out and are all "agh, my grandfather was a NAZI, he baked bread for this or that general, why has this been kept from me, this affects who I am!!", usw. usf.

Some of my workmates were indignant. The discussion went on about how *they* would have acted. Of course, they would all have bravely stood their grounds, helped jews, refused to collaborate. Well, I don¨t want to doubt them, I only know that I would have tried to survive. I don't know, I sincerely don't know if I would have put myself or my loved ones at serious risk, and that's the truth.

What I mean is, in almost every non-jewish german or austrian family there is bound to be someone who was in some way or other involved with the nazi party, who did this or that that the following generations are now ashamed of. My grandfather was a pretty adamant nazi, so was my grandmother. They lived peacefully through the war in their little town in Chechoslovaquia, the war ended, the Red Army came, shot my grandfather and put grandmother and samll kids in camps. So, how does that affect me? Should I be a nazi? Should I hate russians? Or should I feel they paid the fair price?

Sincerely, I don't really care that much. Maybe it's a reaction, because my mother has been using "family history" and "what happened back then" as an excuse for everything that has gone wrong in her life. It is important to know where you come from, but I really don't believe actions or ideas of my ancestors should recieve any kind of response from me, that it is my task to - irgendwas "wiedergutzumachen". We should learn from history, but then leave it behind, because that's what it is - the past. We can
live better and more wisely than they did, hopefully, but we can't undo what was done. We can mourn and go on.

With all of which I don't want to belittle or criticize your efforts to find out more about your family's history. I just tend to spill what I think.

[identity profile] solitary-summer.livejournal.com 2005-05-08 08:19 pm (UTC)(link)
Sincerely, I don't really care that much. Maybe it's a reaction, because my mother has been using "family history" and "what happened back then" as an excuse for everything that has gone wrong in her life.

Believe me, I understand that kind of reaction, because my father did the same; not war history especially, but his upbringing, family, that kind of history. And I used to think I could draw a clear line, i'd never do that, and now... well, you're reading my journal. And I don't know if it's because I'm too weak or if you just can't escape your past. Or if at one point I'll have worked through all these issues. I don't know.

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I don't intend to angst over this for the next ten years or so; maybe even now it's some kind of weird, masochistic self-indulgence, I don't know. The thought actually did cross my mind. OTOH, I do think this has been... how to best describe it, a kind of quietly festering wound in my family. I'm not going to *resolve* anything, too late for that, but... I don't want to say 'I owe it to (her? him?)' or 'it's my duty', that sounds so fakely grand and self-righteous, but while my mother's busy researching the K u.K military part of the family where a possible suicide I don't know how many generations back is the worst thing to be dug up... just to find out a death date, find out what happened. Acknowledge that this person existed. It seems (again with the pseudo-grand and self-righteous) 'the right thing to do'.

[identity profile] un-crayon-rouge.livejournal.com 2005-05-09 11:55 am (UTC)(link)
I understand how you would feel the need to create a connection to that person. Maybe I'll reach that point too, maybe I'll be able to read a book about Banater Schwaben and not hear my mother rant in the background about how everything was better there - how could she know, she was only three years old? But she reads the books, looks at pictures, listens to old people, and believes this way of life was actually something she "left behind"

Anyway, this has nothing to do with having someone like your grandmother in the family. Who knows, maybe I'd feel different about my german roots if I did.

Now it sounds as if I thought listening to old people was useless... not so, I usually enjoy it a great deal - my father is 83, so I guess talking to him qualifies as "talking to old people" as well. It's just that I believe a certain critical distance is needed when they say "ah, then, everything was better then"... :-)

[identity profile] solitary-summer.livejournal.com 2005-05-08 08:41 pm (UTC)(link)
Oh and... this isn't about pointing fingers or assigning blame, and I very much doubt I'd be heroic in a similar situation. And it's doubtless even more difficult when you've got family. It's mostly about understanding... I barely remember my great-aunt at all, she occasionally took care of my sister and me when we were children, I liked her, in the way a child likes someone, I remember her cooking. Remember occasionally visiting her. I never knew about this part of her life, the struggle, the pain, the guilt. It seems only fair to acknowledge this, too....