Revenge, Reconciliation, and Responsibility
Just days after the 2008 American presidential election, I stood at a podium in a small German town called Grosröhrsdorf, speaking to a large and attentive audience. Seventy years before, my family had been driven out of that town by the Kristallnacht pogrom. Summoned by the ringing of church bells on November 9, 1938, a Nazi mob headed for the only recognizably Jewish target in the town, the textile store owned and run by my grandparents, Curt and Regina Schönwald. The thugs rampaged through the store, destroying what they could. Then they marched my grandparents through the streets to the local police station. My grandfather was arrested, sent to the Buchenwald concentration camp, and released after six weeks of brutality that left him physically devastated. Curt and Regina sent their two children to safety outside the country, but they were unable to get out themselves and eventually they were murdered.
I did not learn these facts from my father, who had disclosed almost nothing about his experiences during the Holocaust. But I somehow knew that my father, who had himself been imprisoned in Germany, never forgave himself for his parents’ deaths. Long before the concept of “survivor guilt” entered the language, I could see it in my father’s eyes.
My first opportunity to learn about his experiences – which eventually led to the podium in Grosröhrsdorf– came about after the collapse of East Germany in 1989. Free to discuss what had been forbidden during the communist era, three men in a small town near the Czech border decided to research its history during the Holocaust. The men discovered that the history of Grosröhrsdorf under Nazi rule was the history of the Schönwalds, its only Jewish family. They vowed to tell the story to their fellow townspeople, many of whom didn’t particularly want to hear it.
The leader of the trio, Norbert Littig, a Lutheran minister, was introduced to Judaism while a seminary student in East Berlin. Deeply ashamed of Germany’s behavior during the Holocaust, he learned Hebrew, helped rebuild Jewish cemeteries in Germany, and started exchange programs between middle school students in Grosröhrsdorf and Jewish schools in the United States and Israel. Eckhardt Hennig, a retired history teacher, worked with Norbert because of his childhood memories of Kristallnacht. My grandfather hired Eckhardt’s father to replace the windows destroyed by the mob. This transaction came to the attention of the Town Council, who informed Eckhardt’s father that working for “the Jew Schönwald” made him ineligible for any city work. The last member of the trio, Mattias Mieth, was an architect who became interested in the family when he was hired to restore the building that had housed Curt and Regina’s textile store.
Their efforts culminated in a weeklong commemoration of Curt and Regina Schönwald during the 70th anniversary of Kristallnacht in November, 2008. There was an exhibition at the museum based on Norbert’s book about the family, a public reading from the letters of Curt and Regina, and the unveiling of a monument to their memory. As part of the activities, I was invited to speak on behalf of the Schönwald family.
I had trouble composing that talk because of conflicting impulses. I had inherited a desire for revenge from my father, who so hated the Germans that he volunteered for U.S. military service in World War II to kill the people who had murdered his parents. When he accompanied my mother on a postwar visit to her hometown in southern Germany, he drove several hours to cross the Swiss border every night so he would not have to sleep in Germany. As I tried to write the Grosröhrsdorf talk, I could feel him at my side, ordering me not to let the SOBs off lightly.
The deeply instilled desire for revenge had to compete with a more recent, powerful longing for reconciliation. At a Holocaust memorial ceremony in 2000, I had heard a lecture by Eva Kor, a survivor of the notorious twin experiments at Auschwitz. Many years after her release, she was asked to accept an apology from one of the doctors who had been on the camp staff, a man she remembered for his kindness. Eva Kor talked movingly about how saying a grudging “I forgive you” unleashed a torrent of long-buried feelings. Forgiving this man enabled her to forgive her sister for failing to survive the experiments, to forgive her parents for failing to protect her, and, finally, to forgive herself for becoming so deformed by hatred. With Eva’s example, how could I refuse reconciliation?
So on November 7, 2008, still unsure I had achieved a proper balance between my warring instincts, I spoke these words to the assembled population of Grosröhrsdorf: “Madame Mayor, members of the Town Council, honored members of my family, ladies and gentlemen:
“On the last night of my visit to Grosröhrsdorf in 2004, Mattias Mieth drove me to the guest house where I was staying. As we said goodbye, he told me solemnly that he knew it was impossible that the Schönwald family could ever return to Grosröhrsdorf. But, Mattias said, it was very important that I understand how much the town had lost when the family left in 1939. I believe we hugged and he drove off.
“I think we all know what Grosröhrsdorf lost 70 years ago. My family and I are grateful for what you have done to keep alive the memory of the Schönwalds, to honor their legacy, to assemble here tonight to hear from us. My father never returned to Grosröhrsdorf yet here are his children and some of his grandchildren, celebrating and mourning with you.
“When I returned home after my first visit to Grosröhrsdorf almost ten years ago, I called my brother, eager to tell him the wonderful stories I’d heard about Curt and Regina Schönwald. Almost immediately, we ran into a communication problem. We had no language to identify the objects of conversation. Grandfather and Grandmother were titles we had never used for anybody in our lives. Using Mr. and Mrs. Schönwald was ridiculously formal while Curt and Regina seemed too intimate for people we had never met. After several pauses, we settled on the awkward phrases Dad’s dad and Dad’s mom.
“As a result of my visits to Grosröhrsdorf, Curt and Regina have become my grandparents, not just my father’s parents. I have imagined conversations with them, thinking about the wisdom they would have shared, the love they would have expressed, the sense of history and roots they would have imparted. I imagine they would have talked with pleasure about most of their years in Grosröhrsdorf, about the friends they made and the acceptance they felt.
“Perhaps, too, they would have told me about the dark years after 1935, which is part of their story too. During these times, they were subject to an economic boycott that forced customers to send their children into the store by a back entrance that was invisible to the Gestapo cameras set up in the teashop across the street. The public baths, built with generous contributions from the Schönwalds, posted a sign at the entrance that read ‘No dogs or Jews allowed.’ They could have told me as well about the other indignities they experienced, up to and including the mob assault on their shop on Kristallnacht and how they were forced to sell their store at a bargain-basement price. I suspect they would have told me that Grosröhrsdorf was like most small German cities during those years, no better but no worse, filled with people who showed them kindness and some who turned their backs.
“Getting to know my grandparents as people has been painful. I understand only now what it meant to lose them from my life. In the past, I always knew with my intellect that my father’s parents had been murdered but there was a distance between them and me that made it possible to speak of them almost clinically. Now, because I know Curt and Regina as kind and caring parents, as generous people who loved children, their lives and murders are real to me. I grieve for them not as abstractions but as my flesh and blood, family members who had emotions, fears, passions, hopes, and dreams. I am angry that I was denied the pleasure of their company. In short, I now own the pain that comes from their loss. Strangely, all this makes me very grateful.
“My father spent years refusing to seek compensation from the German government. In furious arguments, he told my mother he would never accept what he called ‘blood money.’ He felt the debt that he was owed for the murder of his parents could never be paid off, least of all with mere money.
“In my mind, whatever debt Grosröhrsdorf owed the Schönwald family has now been paid. You may be as shocked to hear these words as I am to say them. By all you’ve done this week and the many weeks before you knew of our existence, you’ve given us back memories of things we couldn’t remember on our own. For that, I consider the books balanced.
“With the debt to my family retired, the Schönwalds now belong to Grosröhrsdorf, to you. How will you deal with them? “After World War II, the victorious Allies debated whether only Nazi party members or the German people as a whole should be held responsible for the war and the attempted genocide of the Jewish people. In my household, there was no doubt who was guilty. When I first visited Germany as a student in 1974, my eyes could see only Nazis.
“I no longer believe in collective guilt, that people born during or after the Holocaust should somehow be deemed guilty simply because they are Germans. But I do believe in collective responsibility. Let me explain the difference.
“As an American, I consider myself personally obliged to atone for two great sins in my country’s history, the enslavement of black people and the mistreatment of Native Americans. For these people, the guarantees of freedom and opportunity so important in my life were nothing more than a cruel joke. Even though my family was not a party to this oppression, arriving long after the original sins, I consider them part of my legacy as an American. It means I inherit a moral obligation to atone for their mistreatment by insuring that African Americans and Native Americans are treated with justice and dignity.
“In the same way, I believe, your inheritance as Germans is the Holocaust. It is your birthright. You have responsibilities to this history. So again I ask: How will you deal with the legacy of the Schönwalds, a family that most of you never knew beyond legend or rumor?
“I can’t tell you what to do because this is something you have to resolve for yourselves. I can only give you choices. I hope at least you’ll never forget the damage that results when a person is treated, in Martin Buber’s words, as an ‘It’ rather than a ‘Thou.’ I hope you will think about the strangers who live among you now and deal with them as creatures fashioned in God’s image. When you pass the Schönwald store, I hope you pause to read the plaque and explain to your children and grandchildren what happened there and why they must not let it happen again.
“When my father became an American citizen in 1943, he changed his name from Heinz Schönwald to Henry Wald. When I later asked him why, he said jokingly that World War II was not a good time to have a German name in America. It never occurred to me to ask him why he chose to drop the first part of the family name – schön, or beautiful in German – and keep the second. After all, Schön could be rendered in English as the very Anglo-Saxon sounding Shane. Yet he kept only wald, the German word for dark forests.
“I think my father could not bear a name that associated beauty with Germany. The Nazis required that all Jewish women take the name Sarah on their passports. You might assume that both Sarah and Schön were forever banished from our family but that is not so. In an act that reclaimed both names, my brother gave his daughter the first name of Sarah and the middle name of Schön. By your actions this week, you have done your part to reconnect our German name with beauty. Please let that spirit guide your actions as we entrust you with the Schönwald legacy.”
After I finished speaking I was curious about the effect of my words. By the number of people who approached me with tears in their eyes or hugged me fiercely, I realized how much it meant for them to encounter a living Schönwald.
The following Sunday morning, we sat in Grosröhrsdorf ’s parish church and heard Norbert Littig’s sermon. Just a few kilometers outside town, an abandoned Sovietera military base housed Iraqi refugees who had fled the carnage in their country. In Iraq, these Christians had been targeted for ethnic cleansing by both Sunni and Shia Muslims. Until now, Norbert said, the Christians of Grosröhrsdorf had done little to help them, believing that the cultural gap between them was unbridgeable. But if they were to take the lessons of the Schönwald family to heart, he told his parishioners, they had to show kindness to the strangers. Effective immediately, he announced, the parish would adopt the camp and set up regular rotations to help feed, clothe, and educate their Iraqi cousins. They would take the new residents into their homes for meals, festivals, and fellowship. That, he told the hushed congregation, was what collective responsibility meant. That, he said, was their Christian duty. That, he said, was what Grosröhrsdorf owed the memory of Curt and Regina Schönwald.
The week-long commemoration ended with the unveiling of the monument to Curt and Regina that stands on a small pedestrian island facing the old family store. Edged elegantly in Jerusalem stone, it displays a photograph of my grandparents and a description of their life in the town, their departure after Kristallnacht, and their deaths.
And what of reconciliation? As one townsperson told me, gesturing to the monument, it was good to have the Schönwalds back in Grosröhrsdorf. There was more. My brother, who had once asked me more or less why I was hanging around a bunch of murderers, had come on the trip only at the urging of his daughter. Anticipating that he would hate the experience, he had scheduled a trip to Israel as an antidote. As we drove to Berlin after the unveiling, he admitted that he wasn’t sure that Israel could measure up to the week in Grosröhrsdorf. I think that even my father, implacable though he was, might have grudgingly considered the whole affair worthwhile. It might even have made him whole again. I realize, in sum, that a lot more was reconciled that week in Grosröhrsdorf than just me.
Kenneth D. Wald is distinguished professor of political science and former director of the Center for Jewish Studies at the University of Florida. He serves on the task force on Holocaust education for Florida's department of education.
