Dearest grandchildren,
My father, your great grandfather, Thomas Heumann was the first man I loved and my first teacher. His honesty, dignity, and integrity still shine today in my life, and in the lives of many who knew him. He was a guiding beacon of light and an anchor of stability and morality to just about everyone who knew him.
I’m not just saying that. At Dad’s memorial in March, 2017, everyone, it seemed, spoke of Thomas’ steadfast trustworthiness and his absolute determination to always do the right thing – and of his expectation that others would, as well.
My father could do no wrong in my eyes and I knew that I could pretty much do no wrong in his.
Thomas’ grandchildren, your parents, called him “Opa.” They loved him as much as I did, and dare I say that, although he loved me to pieces, he loved his grandchildren to smithereens!
I never knew my own Opa, Thomas’ father, Carl Heumann. Or rather, I should say that I never met him.
Until the last years of his life, Thomas didn’t talk much about the grandfather I never met. As a child, I knew that my parents emigrated to America a few years after the end of WWII. I knew that Carl died during the last days of that war in the basement of his home in Chemnitz, Germany, clutching a few pieces from his beloved art collection. I knew that an Allied bomb had made a direct hit on the house to which he had been relegated for years because he was a Jew.
But I knew little else – and learning even those few facts about my grandfather was the result of a few family road trips from the Bay Area to Lake Tahoe, when my father couldn’t escape the incessant questioning from my three brothers and me.
As my father got older and he had time to reflect on his past, he began to write. He wrote and wrote, hiding for days and weeks at a time with his memories until he had finished two full books, multiple essays, and hundreds of pages of journals and diaries. Thomas dedicated his first book, The Longest Year in the Young Life of Peter Bauer, to his children and wrote in its forward:
“These memories were originally written down for you: Michael, Stephan, Carol, and Christopher, who were both spared and denied a 1945.
The time when you grew up in America is now called "the tumultuous '60s and'70s.” Compared to the Europe of 1945, they were peaceful and tranquil years. Only a few years in all of history were as turbulent as 1945 in Europe. In Germany especially, it was a year of death and birth, a year of purgatory. All over the world it was a watershed year between old and new. It was the first year of the atomic age.
Whether you know it or not, you, too, have much of 1945 in your veins because all of its terror and all of its beauty left such deep marks on my own life at that most impressionable age of sixteen. Think back to the year when you were sixteen; the difference between that and me in 1945 may help explain some of our idiosyncrasies, and maybe even excuse your parents for sometimes being a bit embarrassing when you were children by being “so ... so ... so different.”
Everything in these pages is essentially true — "essentially" and not "completely" because some events had to be left out, changed in time sequence, or simplified to make the story less confusing (yes, it was in reality even more chaotic than it appears here!). But all of the events are based on personal experiences, with the single exception of the American tank patrol, which is based on hearsay from someone else, but it probably happened about as described.
Beyond that, living for more that half a century in a different world can play funny tricks on a man's memory, but that may not be altogether bad. In the process of evaporating details, the mind distills out the essence of a period. And that's really the main thing I am trying to convey.
I wrote about Peter and not about myself because it’s so much easier to step outside and look in from a distance. And when you talk about someone else you have more freedom to make the truth truer by adding some “retrospective imagination” to details without having to feel guilty of lying. Last but not least: Peter is strictly a fictional character — I’m sure I wasn’t half as likable!”
I’ll be quoting my father’s words often on this blog, partly because these are, after all, his experiences, partly because he was an excellent writer, and partly because he asked me to tell his story after he’s gone. He wanted to tell his story to his children, but as he made clear to me in the last months of his life, in both subtle and not-so-subtle ways, he wanted me to tell his story to the world.
That‘s too big a task and too much pressure for me, which is why I have yet to get started on that book I told him I’d write, but this I can do. Blogging is familiar territory for me, so this is the format I’ve chosen to use to tell my father’s story – and just as his children were his audience when he wrote, you – my dear grandchildren – are mine.
Maybe someday one of YOU will finally write “the book.” No pressure.
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