Exodus: A memoir

by Feldman, Deborah

  We checked out the next morning and drove to Frankfurt, stopping only for lunch in a tiny town in Hesse. I had to move on to Berlin very soon, but I had decided to stay in Frankfurt for a day or two because Markus had arranged for me to meet his mother. I was curious to meet her because she had been raised by real Nazis. Although Markus had told me that she had always had a very troubled relationship with her family and their beliefs, I still wondered if I might detect any trace of her background imprinted on her character, the way mine was no doubt imprinted on me.

  Ada had recently been widowed and was now living in the small apartment she had used as her private sanctuary throughout her marriage. It had a lovely garden out front and another in back with a little terrace, and that’s where we sat. Young pink climbing roses were carefully tied to the railing of the terrace; the plants were immaculately tended in attractive ceramic pots. Ada had pure white hair, large pale blue eyes, and very fair skin. Her home was perfectly tidy, and pretty objects and collectibles were displayed throughout. This reminded me instantly of my grandmother, and as we made small talk on the porch, I realized for the first time just how much I missed having an older person in my life, the way I used to.

  “I wanted to ask you about your parents,” I said eventually, after we had licked clean a bowl of strawberries and cream. “I’m really curious what it was like being raised by them, and how you were able to turn out so differently and raise a son like Markus.”

  “My parents hated everyone who wasn’t German, not just Jews. Even on his deathbed my father expressed no remorse. My mother could never stop talking about the time she kissed Hitler’s hand. Come, I’ll show you a picture of them.”

  We walked into her little office, and there was an old sepia photograph taped to the side of a curio, showing a surprisingly diminutive couple walking their German shepherd in the rain, smiling from underneath their shared umbrella. His face seemed to disappear under his squashy hat and large, thick-rimmed glasses, but I could detect a decidedly prominent nose. He looked like the average middle-aged Jewish man buying a bagel on the Upper West Side. She was no different, with a narrow forehead and thick, dark eyebrows.

  “They look more Jewish than most Jews I know!” I said.

  “Right?” Ada laughed. “And with their German shepherd, so proud of themselves. They looked nothing like the ideal Germans they had in their fantasies.”

  “But you do,” I said before I could help myself. “You’re so blond and blue-eyed. It’s interesting—Markus looks nothing like that.”

  “Markus looks like his father.” Indeed, he had a tall, broad forehead but a large nose and dark hair. His eyes were hazel, but his smile was distinctly Bavarian, the upper lip coming out slightly over the lower, which lent him a look of perpetual bemusement.

  “My generation was different. Back then, everyone was rebelling against their parents, against what they had done. We didn’t want to be anything like them. It didn’t help that my parents were brutal to me as well. My mother used to give me electric shocks as a way of disciplining me. I tried to accuse her of it when I was an adult, and she wouldn’t even discuss it with me. It was clear she knew it was sick, that she was sick and compulsive and couldn’t stop herself from committing brutality.”

  I remembered seeing all those photos of Hitler cavorting with children, reading how Nazis would go home and hug their wives. It never occurred to me that some of them might have been as cruel to their own offspring as they were on the job.

  Markus drove me around the city for a short tour. I asked him if any of his siblings had turned out anti-Semitic, wondering if these patterns were in any way genetic, skipping generations and then popping up again out of context.

  “My younger brother went through a phase when he was a teenager, but I think he’s mostly grown out of it.”

  “What do you mean by ‘mostly’?”

  “It’s how young people do their rebellion here. You know it’s against the law, and it’s considered politically incorrect, so of course that’s the issue that young people will pick as a way of showing they are going against the grain. It makes them cool. But it’s abstract for them; it’s not like they actually know any Jews. My brother is not an anti-Semite; he just makes an offensive joke once in a while.”

  “I would say that’s an anti-Semite, Markus.”

  “Every teenager in Germany is an anti-Semite then, because that’s what they do now, to be cool. They make politically incorrect statements, to show they don’t give a fuck, and since Jews are a sore topic here, they like to pick at the wound.”

  “Would your brother disapprove of you being with me?”

  “I don’t think so,” Markus said. “But it wouldn’t matter anyway.”

  “It would matter to me.”

  We slept together on our last night in his narrow bed, neither of us moving from the position we fell asleep in, with his arms wrapped around me, and the humid summer air cooking us like chickens on a rotisserie. My head swam when I awoke. I had a train to catch to Berlin. He kissed me on the forehead. “Call me when you arrive,” he said. I nodded.

  When I arrived in Berlin, I immediately felt as if I had lost that magical sense of orientation that had guided me through most of Europe. Berlin’s sights lay sprawled in every direction, and I felt dwarfed by the scope of the city, beleaguered by its complicated maps, its chaotic layout. The streets were filled with scaffolds and trenches; there was construction happening everywhere. What about those orderly arrondissements and neatly delineated quarters? Here the river was not something to skirt around via a pedestrian bridge; it was not even a body of water you could easily view in its entirety, the way you could see down the Seine in Paris. Elevated tracks crisscrossed on top of it, and buildings squatted over its narrower parts. What was missing was the sense of knowing what to expect.

  In my first few days there, I was afraid to go out. Markus was gone, and it was strange to navigate my life without him, even though I had done so for years. I was staying on the edge of the old Jewish quarter, but it was only when I finally ventured out that I realized that. The old synagogue was a two-minute walk away. It had been perfectly preserved in its mostly disheveled state, with bits of still-intact marble and mosaic cordoned off. I had to go through an extensive security check and a metal detector just to get inside. On the exterior of the building was a plaque that described how the synagogue had been violated and ultimately destroyed. Underneath the description was a line in bold, enlarged letters: “Never forget it.” I snapped a photo, and the security guard standing alongside it smiled as if to pose. I wanted to tell him that a smile was inappropriate, that this wasn’t some tourist trap he was showing off, that this was a reminder of this country’s shame, and his face should reflect that. But I stared straight ahead instead, pretending I didn’t notice.

  After that I descended into the subway and headed in the direction of the Holocaust memorial. It was a gray weekday morning, the stations were empty and quiet, and aboveground the wide city blocks with their cold contemporary buildings seemed forbidding. Normally I stayed away from Holocaust exhibits, as my visit to the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., when I was a teenager had scared me off future attempts. I remember my class went there on a field trip, and although all of us were from survivor families, I was the only one who didn’t make it halfway through before I dissolved into hysterical tears, hyperventilating in a bathroom stall for nearly an hour.

  But the German museum’s exhibits couldn’t compare to the thoroughness of those in D.C. In Germany, memorials were brief and succinct. For someone so well versed in this particular history, I had yet to learn something new at any of the Holocaust sites. I descended into the underground chamber below the memorial, where the Holocaust was summed up for tourists and schoolchildren. I joined the procession of visitors that passed slowly along its corridors.

  “It happened, therefore it can happen again; this is
the core of what we have to say,” read a quote by Primo Levi emblazoned on the wall behind the entrance.

  I was okay, as expected, holding my coffee cup and a napkin, shuffling along behind the line of people. Even in front of that high-definition photograph of the Einsatzgruppen moving among a writhing pile of naked moon-white women, rifles cocked as they shot each one individually. The quality of the photograph was unparalleled. Although I’d seen it before, I hadn’t previously noticed the visible relish on the Germans’ faces, or how each woman was twisted into a grimace of anticipation or a tremor of death. It was so fantastically horrible as to be pornographic. The women were piled in the forest like slain Venuses, like raped fairies. They were stunning in their innocence. It must have been horrible to die in such a way, made to run naked into one’s own grave. But from the lens of history it was those men who were immortalized in their ugliness, their sneers frozen for an eternity of analysis. The smooth white backs of those women were impeccable in their grace and dignity.

  I followed the crowd into a darkened room, the floor of which had a small collection of backlit testimonials from various victims of the Holocaust, collected from postcards or journals. Afterward, it struck me, the irony, that it was writing that felled me and not a photo.

  Here was a poem by Miklós Radnóti, the Hungarian Jewish poet that Zoltán had spoken of to me so fondly. It was translated into German and English. I whispered it out loud to myself.

  I fell beside him and his corpse turned over,

  tight already as a snapping string.

  Shot in the neck—And that’s how you’ll end too—

  I whispered to myself; lie still, no moving.

  Now patience flowers in death. Then I could hear

  Der Springt noch auf—above, and very near.

  Blood mixed with mud was drying on my ear.

  —Szentkirályszabadja, October 31, 1944

  I choked on a terrible sound coming from my throat. Suddenly I had to sit down, and the napkin wasn’t enough to mop up the mess of mascara and snot on my face. How vivid and powerful those words were, that I felt as if I was lying right there beside him as he died, and it was unbearable.

  The other visitors stepped cautiously around me, but I was blind and did not care. I sat in front of the poem until my chest stopped hurting so much. I recalled the intense rage and sorrow I had experienced the first time I had seen those images in the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. It felt just as fresh. Would this feeling ever dissipate or dilute itself?

  In the other room, the names of the victims were being read, with descriptions of how they had lived and died. In the next room was an explanation of the death camps. A little boy around the age of seven sat in one of the audio booths with earphones pressed to his head, listening to information about how Auschwitz was operated. I looked at him in shock: he could have been my own son, and he looked somberly into my red, swollen eyes. You shouldn’t be here, I wanted to say; you’re too young. But who was I to say that? Was this how it was done here, the Holocaust education? You started when they were young, as if to root out that Nazi tendency before it had a chance to grow? Was there really such a thing as a seven-year-old boy who needed to be educated about death camps in order to grow up to be a decent human being?

  My son did not yet know about the Holocaust, and this made me realize that I could not recall a consciousness that did not include it. Did my awareness of my grandparents immediately coincide with my awareness of them as survivors of genocide? Was there ever a moment in which I did not align my identity so neatly and perfectly with theirs, knowing with certainty that I, too, would have been a target, and still could be if the world lost its mind again before I died?

  In a room off to the side, a group of German schoolchildren clapped loudly but perfunctorily as a Holocaust survivor finished her lecture. As the students filed out of the room, their faces seemed to say, Yeah, another one.

  I remembered seeing my son’s head when he was born, his wet curls still gleaming blond, and thinking, Thank God, he’ll pass for non-Jewish, before I collapsed back onto the pillow.

  I wondered what these young students would think if they knew there was at least one person of their generation in this world who was still deeply and indelibly marked by an event they considered a relic of the ancient past. I wrote something in the guestbook then, underneath a message from a young Ukrainian student that read, “We must always remember.”

  “How can I describe this feeling of being at once alive and wiped out? To be descended from the living and the dead? A part of my soul has been erased. How will I ever heal this wound in my family? How will I tell my son about this?”

  I signed my name underneath. I hoped someone would read it and realize it was still real.

  I came at last to a photograph of Bergen-Belsen at liberation. This was the scene that first greeted the dumbfounded British troops when they arrived. They had proceeded to document everything. Here was an image of skeletal women sitting up among piles of corpses as if rising from the dead. It was some unimaginable horror: as far as one could see, a vision of a postapocalyptic wasteland. I stood transfixed before it.

  My grandmother had witnessed this. She had been there that day, lying in that filth and ugliness and inhuman horror. It would never be erased from her memory. I felt that rage from earlier return like bile in my throat. I left the exhibit and raced up the stairs to disappear into those concrete pillars. Walking down the aisles in between them was spooky; here and there I’d catch the ghostly shadow of some other visitor passing fleetingly between the aisles. They were there, and then they weren’t.

  I stopped in between two pillars and leaned against one of them and let myself cry with the intention of drying up my tears for this trip. Just this once, get it out, and then you’ll be through. There’s nothing left to cry about. None of this is new for you. Someday you’re going to have to stop crying about all of this.

  That night I woke up at 3 a.m. after a bad dream.

  I lay awake remembering the photograph of the Einsatzgruppen. I couldn’t get over the lifelike expressions I had seen on their faces, up close. What was it about these men that made them capable of this?

  I called Markus. He was awake.

  “I can’t sleep. Bad dreams.” I told him about the photograph.

  “Can you find it on Google and send it to me?”

  I did.

  “That’s a pretty bad picture.”

  “I feel, for the first time in my life, that I really could murder someone. I didn’t think it would make me feel that way. But now I am filled with anger, which scares me, because maybe somehow that explains what they did, and I don’t want it to. It can’t. But I have this conviction that we should have eliminated all of them, that it’s a gene, you know, and we didn’t eradicate it, and it will spring up again.”

  “You are racist,” he said.

  “I’m racist against murderers.”

  He was silent.

  “When I’m angry, you’re a Nazi. When everything is fine, you’re just a person.”

  “Genau. But I gladly pay my reparations, if it makes you happy.”

  “I just remembered something a good friend of mine once told me. She’s Jewish, too, with a grandmother who survived the camps. She’s from California, very liberal, a lesbian who married a non-Jewish woman. She said she could confront her family with anything; they were so open-minded. But that the one thing she could never do was bring home a German. It’s like this line we know not to cross.”

  I wondered if, in the act of crossing every line that had ever been drawn in front of me, I had somehow failed to draw any of my own.

  The next day I signed up for a tour of Sachsenhausen, the model concentration camp just outside Berlin. On the trip there I met a Jewish couple from Park Slope in Brooklyn. The woman was a daughter of Ukrainian survivors. She told me about how she and
her mother had gone back to their little Ukrainian village and had been chased out by an angry, drunken mob.

  “How could you let them do that to you, in this day and age? How could you bear to let them get away with it?” I asked.

  “What was there to do? It’s Ukraine.”

  “I would have done something. I wouldn’t have let them treat me that way. The world isn’t like that anymore. They can’t do that to us.”

  She fell silent, her head bowed toward her lap.

  “Do you think there is any place in the world where we can go and not experience anti-Semitism?” I wondered out loud. I told her about the conductor slamming the door on me in Rosenheim.

  “You’ve got to be careful of what you speak about in front of the Germans,” she whispered, nodding toward the other passengers. “They’re very sensitive about these things.”

  “They goddamn well should be. I’m not going to censor myself!”

  “You’re a guest in their country,” she said. “You can’t just go around talking like that.”

  “Like my grandmother was a guest in their concentration camps?”

  “Why are you here?” she asked.

  “I’m trying to deal with this part of my identity, to put it behind me.”

  “That’s impossible,” she said. “You’ll never put it behind you. I’ve tried my whole life.”

  “I think I’m doing okay,” I said. “I believe I can achieve some measure of closure. Most of why I feel so bound up in it is all the secrecy I grew up with. I knew about the Holocaust, but no one ever discussed the details of their experiences. It was as if life before America had been a collective experience, summed up by one word. I need to feel like I know the individual stories; I think that will bring me peace. I don’t want my grandmother’s story to be diminished by a broad category.”

  There was a beautiful blond man in our tour group. He was Swiss-German, very tall, with a chiseled jawline and hollows under his cheeks. His eyes were cool blue marbles under a golden brow. He didn’t talk much. I invited him out for a drink later; we were staying in the same neighborhood.