My dear grandchildren,
This is the post where the stars in my eyes fade upon the realization that, whereas my father was a prolific writer, he was not really a very good writer. I’m spending hours upon hours a day editing his writing for grammar, punctuation, sentence structure, and clarity. English was his second language, so it’s understandable, but this is the same father who (along with my teacher mother) was adamant that my ability to write well in English was as important as… well, as important as reading and writing French apparently was to his parents. (Read on…)
I apologize in advance if I am the omi who insists that my grandchildren be good writers. But seriously, guys, be good writers. It’s important!
And that’s how generational trauma happens. Go ahead – blame me! :-)
Here is my dad’s (edited) writing for today. This entry has nothing to do with war and everything to do with the experience of being 14 years old.
In 1942, I was fourteen. It is an age when any young person, anywhere in the world, at any time in history, seeks answers to what life is all about – particularly regarding “those things that must not be discussed.” In our home, two subjects were taboo: sex and any information about my father’s relatives and ancestors. No one ever spoke to me about either of them, especially about sex. Grown-ups giggled and whispered, but we were never let in on the secret.
My research on the “sex secret” was limited to the noon hour, when both my parents had their mid-day nap. In their beds, in darkness, clad in their night clothes. That was when I had the library to myself and I could explore Vandervelde, a sex education book for grownups whose own parents probably never mentioned anything like sex, either. Like us, they were probably left to find out from friends who might know more than we did. What was all that secrecy about? Must be something great!
I looked everywhere for information about “Vandervelde, a sex education book” in Germany. I couldn’t find anything anywhere about such a book! Maybe Dad meant Van der Velde?!
These are from Amazon. Maybe I should order them and sneak a peek?!
I knew all about the birds and the bees because of the book Das Liebesleben in der Natur[1]. Maybe my parents left that book out on purpose. I learned all about the birds and the bees, and did my own extrapolating about humans - wrong, of course.
(From The Booklooker)
I found this one, too!
My life was protected, again and still, from all that went on outside of my direct involvement with the world. My world revolved around my own life and my own concerns. One of them was Rainer’s chemistry lab that was set up on the third floor near Rainer’s tool closet. 1942 was Rainer’s last year at home. He had gotten his Abitur (basically, high school diploma) and was ready to move to München, which meant that I would inherit his tools and his chemistry lab. I was thrilled.
Our house had three stories plus a basement below. The central hall of the top floor had been turned into what amounted to big brother's territory: his tool chest and a table for his chemistry experiments. I was still relegated to the playroom for the "two little ones" (and with a girl,!), so Rainer's attic hall required his permission for entry and was to me a paradise yet to be attained, a prime reason in my mind to grow up fast.
One day, while our little sister Ulli and our parents were out of the house, Rainer gave me an orientation on the details of his chemistry lab, showing me some of the important items in his lab, including a water hose that ran from the attic bathroom to the lab table (because you can’t run a lab without water, right?). Rainer was deep into his chemistry experiment that day, one that used stinky sulfur dioxide, something that was best done with parents and little sister out of the house. He allowed me to watch and even gave me the job of washing out the vials, which wasn't easy because the garden hose he had rigged between the bathroom faucet and the chemistry table ended in a tiny little valve from his chemistry set. But I was proud to have gotten everything clean and not breaking anything in the process. Too bad we had to stop for our Saturday bath, a directive from our parents to have completed by the time they returned.
We took a bath in the nearby bathroom. (One bath, of course, to save water.) To young boys, the purpose of a bath is not to get clean; it is for underwater car races, for submerging the toy submarine, only to have to pop up high out of the water, clearly lacking the properties of a real submarine... and it is a time for boy talk.
Our bath was interrupted by a loud voice coming from downstairs."Where are the boys... and is someone frying eggs?!" Clearly our parents and Ulli had arrived home.
Ulli, with great anticipation, thought she heard dinner frying in the kitchen. But that blip-plop-pott-pud wasn't the sound of bacon frying. Wrong. It was a steady stream of water pouring from the hose on the chemistry table, now minus its tiny valve. When we turned off the faucet after our bath, it turned out, the sudden increase in water pressure separated the maybe-not-so-ingenious hose from the attic bathroom to the lab table. Now water was dripping from the ceilings into the bedrooms, the hall, the playroom, even running down the attic steps,rivulets forming on and under the wallpaper and finally pooling into puddles in the wood parquet! Yikes!
"Buckets! Quick! And mops! Towels, more of them!" Herr Pennsdorf, the caretaker who lived above our garage, was summoned and requested to bring with him his wife and children.It would take everyone to deal with this flood! Being an expert at all things structural, Pennsdorf looked panicked, but never lost his Saxon lethargy. "Herr Gonsuhl, he droned in his broad Saxon dialect, "That ceiling's coming down."
The fancy coffered ceiling never actually did come down, but it sported a big brown blotch throughout the war until, a few years after our domestic flood, it suffered the same grim fate as the rest of the ceilings in our house which, unlike this one, had preserved their snow-white luster.
When the excitement that naturally followed this catastrophe was over, Rainer showed me his diary entry for the day, a page filled to near-blackness with circles, spirals, confused jagged shapes and a whole cacophony of round and jagged scribbles. Rainer’s journal entry was all about our parents’ different temperaments. We spoke of our parents not by using affectionate terms like "Dad" and "Mom," but rather as "he" and "she," characterizing them as "round" and "jagged" - and their response to the chemistry debacle illustrated their round and jagged temperaments perfectly. Father, the “round” one (even by appearance), planned, directed and punished and worried, with all the deliberate rationality he could muster under the dire circumstances, while “jagged” Mother, in contrast, was nervous, panicked, and fastidiously practical, mopping up water and finding more buckets and towels than I knew we had.
At that time, we were still rather sheltered children, not at all conscious of how cruel life was becoming for people like my parents, while life on the surface shone with Nazi glory. How bizarre the new realities must have been to anyone accustomed to the normalcy of the life they had known. It wasn't until much later that we realized the extreme pressures weighing on our parents at that time, making it completely understandable (in retrospect) that they were acting "round, " "jagged," or any other way they could manage without losing their sanity.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Chemistry was exciting, but most of the time I was busy with schoolwork, especially private French lessons from Herr Epping, a staunch Social Democrat who had been stripped of his job as principal of the local girls’ high school. Herr Epping would come to have a major influence on my life in years to come.
My parents believed that, while learning languages like Latin, Greek and English is important, one must know how to speak and write the “only truly cultured language,” French, in order to call oneself a well-educated person. My own interest in French got so strong that I began to read the French newspaper (by then of course totally controlled by the German Occupation of France!) and had French conversation with Father at dinner. That year, my Christmas present to my parents was reciting a memorized French fable by La Fontaine, including, for extra credit, a German translation.
Ulli, meanwhile, was finishing elementary school. Her teachers were impressed with her intelligence and diligence, assuring our parents that she was well qualified to enter the best high school for girls, but the Nazis would not allow it. Like us, she was a Mischling Ersten Grades and therefor would not be admitted to high school, just as Rainer was not admitted to the Technical University in München. Mutti knew that, if some Nazi, somewhere, would be willing to stick his neck out, Ulli could continue to go to school, but no official anywhere would stick his neck out. So Ulli was told that she was “still too tender” to go to high school with her friends, which was the one and only thing she really wanted. For years into her future, Ulli thought that the reason she was not admitted to high school was that she was not smart enough. Just imagine!
Everyone was constantly hungry and cold. By this time, life was interrupted numerous times during the day, and often at night, by air raid sirens. Nothing was normal anymore.
My mother Irmgard was well aware that her sheer existence as a non-Jew was the only thing that stood between her Jewish husband and an evil and hostile regime that wanted him dead. During this time, she wrote to her mother, Adele, that she was completely disheartened by a world full of madness and irrationality and that she was often “drenched in tears” over the lack of smiles and any humor in her family’s life.
[1] “Love Life in Nature”
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