Revenge, Reconciliation, and Responsibility Transcript

“Revenge, Reconciliation and Responsibility” – This 2009 talk summarizes the way I achieved a measure of reconciliation with the small German town where my father came from. His parents, prominent citizens of Grossrohrsdorf, were deported to the Trawniki labor camp in 1941, and murdered in Sobibor Concentration Camp in 1942. This recording discusses my address to the residents of the town in 2008, when it unveiled a monument to my grandparents. You can hear or read the talk below:

00:00:02 

Well, thank you, Jordan, both for the introduction and for the question. 

00:00:06 

And thank all of you for being here tonight to remember what we must remember. 

00:00:14 

This evening, I want to share with you a story, possibly two stories, and maybe even more. 

00:00:22 

For me, the story begins more than 20 years ago. 

00:00:26 

For the other people involved, it goes back much further in time. 

00:00:31 

None of those involved really knows when the story ends or if it ever does end. 

00:00:39 

On my father’s death in 1986, I received a strange inheritance. 

00:00:46 

Among his files, my brother and I discovered a large packet of old letters written in German. 

00:00:52 

Even with our poor knowledge of the language, 

00:00:55 

We quickly deduced that the letters were written between 1939 and 1942 and sent to my father in America from his parents, who were still in Germany. 

00:01:07 

Up to that moment of discovery, my father had disclosed almost nothing about his experiences during the Holocaust. 

00:01:16 

I knew only that my grandparents, Kurt and Rogina Schenwald, had been murdered by the Nazis, 

00:01:23 

and that my father, who had himself been imprisoned in Germany, never forgave himself for their deaths. 

00:01:31 

Long before the concept of survivor guilt entered the language, I could see it in my father’s eyes, and I wanted to know where it came from. 

00:01:44 

A few years later, and thousands of miles away, well below my radar, 

00:01:51 

A parallel quest had begun in a small German town near the Czech border. 

00:01:57 

Following the collapse of the Communist regime in East Germany, three men in the town of Gross-Rossdorf decided to research their town’s history during the Holocaust, a topic that had been forbidden during the years of Communist rule. 

00:02:13 

The men quickly discovered that the history of Gross-Rosdorf under Nazi rule was, in fact, the history of the Scheinwalds, its only Jewish family, and my family, too. 

00:02:26 

They vowed to tell the story to the townspeople, many of whom didn’t particularly want to hear it. 

00:02:34 

These parallel quests finally intersected in the year 2000, after I first visited Gross-Rosdorf. 

00:02:42 

Shortly after returning home, I received an e-mail from the three men. 

00:02:47 

Having heard of my visit after the fact, they found my name and tracked me down by the internet. 

00:02:55 

Up to that moment of discovery, I had known nothing about the three men who had already spent so much time and effort recovering the history of my family. 

00:03:06 

As I later learned, 

00:03:07 

They were worried that I would respond to their overtures with indifference or perhaps anger. 

00:03:14 

Instead, we joined forces in a common quest. 

00:03:19 

Over the course of several visits and the exchange of countless letters, they filled me in on the 25 years the Schenwald family had lived in Gross-Rostdorf, especially in the period after the Nazis came to power. 

00:03:34 

In turn, I was able to tell them the family saga after 1939, when Kurt and Regina moved to Berlin and the Schanwald children, my father and his sister, had managed to escape the country for the safety of the West. 

00:03:50 

Over the past decade, I’ve gotten to know these three men very well. 

00:03:55 

Norbert Littig is a Lutheran minister who was introduced to Judaism while a seminary student in East Berlin. 

00:04:03 

He learned Hebrew, helped rebuild Jewish cemeteries throughout Germany, and started exchange programs between students in the little town of Gross-Rosdorf and Jewish schools in Skokie, Illinois, and Haifa, Israel. 

00:04:18 

Eckhard Hennig, a retired history teacher, told me his childhood memory of Kristallna. 

00:04:26 

After a Nazi mob destroyed all the windows in the Scheinwald store, my grandfather hired Eckert’s father to replace the glass. 

00:04:37 

This transaction came to the attention of the town council, who sent Eckert’s father a letter. 

00:04:44 

He was informed that the town would give no more jobs to anybody who had worked for, quote, the Jew Scheinwald. 

00:04:53 

The last member of the trio, Matthias Mead, 

00:04:56 

was a restoration architect who became interested in my family when he was hired to restore the building that had housed Kurt and Regina’s textile store. 

00:05:08 

During these visits, Norbert, Eckert, and Matthias brought me face to face with several elderly women whose aunts, fathers, and other relatives had worked for my grandparents and remembered them well. 

00:05:22 

These efforts culminated in a week-long commemoration of Kurt and Regina Schenwald during the 70th anniversary of Kristallnacht in November of last year. 

00:05:33 

There was an exhibition at the museum based in large part on Norbert’s book about the history of the family, a public reading from the letters of Kurt and Regina that I had given to him, and finally, the unveiling of a monument to their memory. 

00:05:50 

As part of the activities, 

00:05:51 

I was asked to address the townspeople on behalf of the Schoenwald family. 

00:05:58 

As you may have gathered, I’m not somebody who is intimidated by the prospect of public speaking. 

00:06:04 

And I usually don’t have a lot of difficulty composing my remarks. 

00:06:08 

In fact, the problem is always to keep my remarks within the time limit that I’ve been allotted. 

00:06:14 

Yet the talk that I was to give in Gross-Rostorf that November night 

00:06:19 

was the hardest one I’ve ever tried to write. 

00:06:23 

I thought about it for a very long time. 

00:06:26 

I discussed it with friends, family, and colleagues. 

00:06:29 

I read other such lectures that had been given. 

00:06:33 

But the words simply would not come. 

00:06:39 

My uncharacteristic writer’s block developed, I realized, because I was being pulled in opposing directions. 

00:06:46 

by conflicting desires for both revenge and reconciliation. 

00:06:52 

The revenge motive came from my father, who developed a deep and abiding hatred of Germans, who volunteered for U.S. 

00:07:00 

military service in World War II precisely so he could go back and kill the people who had murdered his parents, and who, when visiting his wife’s hometown, my mother’s hometown in southern Germany, 

00:07:14 

drove several hours to the Swiss border every night so he would not have to sleep in Germany. 

00:07:21 

He also made sure that his own children shared an aversion to all things German, taking me to see the film Judgment at Nuremberg when I was an impressionable 11-year-old. 

00:07:32 

As I tried to write the Gross-Rosdorf talk, I could feel him sitting by my side, scowling, telling me not to let the SOBs off too easily. 

00:07:44 

That desire for revenge had to compete with an equally powerful longing for reconciliation that stemmed in large part from something happened that happened in this very room in the year 2000. 

00:07:58 

At our Yom Hashoah lecture that year, we heard from the remarkable Eva Corps. 

00:08:05 

Eva was a victim of the notorious twin experiments at the Auschwitz concentration camp. 

00:08:11 

She told us of the day many years after her release when she was asked to accept an apology by one of the doctors who had been on the camp staff, a man she remembered for his kindness to the victims of these gruesome experiments. 

00:08:27 

She talked movingly that night about how saying a grudging, I forgive you, unleashed a torrent of emotions in her. 

00:08:36 

Forgiving this man, she told us, 

00:08:38 

enabled her to forgive her own sister for failing to survive the Auschwitz experiments, to forgive her parents for failing to protect her as parents should, and finally, to forgive herself for becoming so deformed with hatred. 

00:08:59 

With Ava’s example, how could I not offer reconciliation? 

00:09:05 

So on November 7, 2008, 

00:09:08 

Still unsure if I had achieved a proper balance between the warring instincts for revenge and reconciliation, I stood on the podium in the festival hall in Gross-Rosdorf, facing an unusually attentive audience of several hundred people, staring into a television camera, broadcasting the event to Dresden, speaking into a microphone that would carry my words to a radio audience throughout all of Saxony. 

00:09:37 

I gave them the following message, which I have abbreviated in the interest of time. 

00:09:44 

Madam Mayor, members of the town council, honored members of my family, ladies and gentlemen. 

00:09:53 

On the last night of my visit to Gross-Rosdorf in 2004, Matthias Meath drove me to the guest house where I was staying. 

00:10:01 

As we said goodbye, he told me solemnly that he knew it was impossible that the Schoenwald family could ever return to Gross-Rostdorf. 

00:10:10 

But Matthias said, It was very important that I understand how much the town had lost when the family left Gross-Rostdorf in 1939. 

00:10:20 

I believe we hugged and he drove off. 

00:10:24 

As a result of this week and the efforts that led to it, 

00:10:28 

We all know what Gross Rosdorf lost 70 years ago. 

00:10:32 

My family and I are grateful for what you have done to keep alive the memory of the Schoenwalds, to honor their legacy, to assemble here tonight, to hear from us. 

00:10:42 

My grandfather never returned here, yet here are his children and some of his grandchildren, celebrating and mourning with you. 

00:10:52 

When I returned home after my first visit to Gross-Rosdorf almost 10 years ago, I called my brother, eager to tell him what I had learned. 

00:11:01 

Almost immediately, we ran into a communication problem. 

00:11:04 

I wanted to tell him all the wonderful stories I’d heard about Kurt and Regina Schenwald, but we had no language to identify the people we were talking about. 

00:11:16 

We couldn’t call them grandfather and grandmother because we’d never use these terms for anybody in our lives. 

00:11:23 

Referring to them as Mr. 

00:11:25 

and Mrs. 

00:11:25 

Shenwald seemed ridiculously formal, while Kurt and Regina were too intimate for people we had never known. 

00:11:34 

Eventually, after several pauses to search for the appropriate word, we settled on using the awkward phrases, dad’s dad and dad’s mom. 

00:11:45 

As a result of what I have learned on my visits to Gross-Rosdorf, Kurt and Regina have become my grandparents, not just my father’s parents. 

00:11:56 

I have imagined the 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. 

00:12:08 

I imagine they would have talked with pleasure about most of their years here in Gross-Rosdorf, about the friends they made and the acceptance they felt as 

00:12:17 

the town’s only Jewish family. 

00:12:20 

Perhaps, too, they would have told me about the dark years after 1935, which is part of their story as well. 

00:12:28 

During these times, they were subject to an economic boycott that forced customers to send their children into the store by a back entrance, invisible to the Gestapo cameras that were permanently set up in the tea shop just across the street. 

00:12:43 

The public baths, built with generous contributions from my grandparents, posted a sign at the entrance that read, No dogs or Jews allowed. 

00:12:55 

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, Kurt’s subsequent arrest and deportation to Buchenwald, 

00:13:09 

and then, after his release, being forced to give away the store to an Aryan businessman. 

00:13:15 

I suspect they would have told me that Gross-Rosdorf was like most small German towns during those years, no better, but no worse, filled with people who showed them kindness and people who turned their backs. 

00:13:30 

Getting to know my grandparents as people has been painful. 

00:13:35 

I understand only now what it meant 

00:13:38 

to lose them from my life. 

00:13:40 

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. 

00:13:53 

Now, because I know Kurt and Regina as kind and caring parents, as generous people who love children, their lives and their murders are real to me. 

00:14:04 

I grieve for them not as abstractions, 

00:14:07 

but as flesh and blood, people who had emotions, fears, passions, hopes, and dreams. 

00:14:15 

I am angry that I was denied the pleasure of their company. 

00:14:19 

In short, I now own the pain that comes from their loss. 

00:14:24 

Strangely, all this makes me very grateful. 

00:14:30 

My father spent years refusing to seek or accept compensation from the German government. 

00:14:36 

In furious arguments, he told my mother he would never accept what he called blood money. 

00:14:43 

He felt the debt that he was owed for the murder of his parents could never be paid with mere money. 

00:14:50 

In my mind, whatever debt Gross-Rosdorf owed the Shainwald family has now been paid in full. 

00:14:59 

You may be as shocked to hear those words as I am to say them. 

00:15:04 

But 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. 

00:15:14 

For that, I consider the books balanced. 

00:15:18 

And as the son of an accountant, I mean that as high praise indeed. 

00:15:24 

With the debt to my family retired, the Schenwalds now belong to Gross-Rosdorf, to you. 

00:15:32 

How will you deal with them? 

00:15:35 

When the Allies debated German accountability for the attempted genocide of the Jewish people, philosophers argued whether only Nazi Party members or the German people as a whole should be held guilty of the Holocaust. 

00:15:49 

Although criminal charges were filed only against those with a direct role in the atrocities, many felt that all Germans stood accused and should be treated as criminals. 

00:15:59 

In my household, where we didn’t spend a lot of time pondering justice, there was no doubt who was guilty. 

00:16:07 

As late as 1974, when I first visited Germany as a student, my eyes could see only Nazis. 

00:16:16 

As an adult, I no longer believe in collective guilt. 

00:16:20 

I don’t think that people born during or after the Holocaust should somehow be deemed guilty simply because they are German. 

00:16:29 

Although I no longer believe in collective guilt, I do believe in collective responsibility. 

00:16:34 

So let me explain the difference. 

00:16:37 

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 systematic mistreatment of Native Americans. 

00:16:50 

For these subject peoples, the guarantees of freedom and opportunity so important in my life were nothing but a cruel joke. 

00:16:59 

Even though my family was not a party to this oppression, arriving in America long after the original sins, I consider them part of my legacy as an American. 

00:17:09 

It means I inherit a moral obligation to atone for their mistreatment by ensuring that African Americans and Native Americans are treated with dignity and with justice. 

00:17:22 

In the same way I believe your inheritance as Germans is the Holocaust. 

00:17:28 

It is your birthright as slavery and the exploitation of Native Americans are mine. 

00:17:35 

You have responsibilities here in Gross-Rosdorf to that history. 

00:17:39 

So I ask you again, how will you deal with the legacy of the Shenwalds, a family that most of you never knew beyond legend or rumor? 

00:17:51 

I can’t tell you what to do because this is something you have to resolve for yourselves. 

00:17:57 

I can only give you choices. 

00:18:00 

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. 

00:18:11 

I hope you will think about the strangers who live among you now and deal with them as creatures fashioned in God’s image. 

00:18:21 

I hope when you think about Israel, which is also my homeland, 

00:18:26 

You will understand how behavior that may seem extreme or paranoid is, in fact, a logical reaction to events that happened here on German soil, and that you react with empathy and support. 

00:18:40 

When you pass the Schenwald store on Bishop’s Wardestrasse, I hope you pause to read the plaque and explain to your children and grandchildren what happened there and why it must not happen again. 

00:18:53 

When my father became an American citizen in 1943, he changed his name from Heinz Schoenwald to Henry Wald. 

00:19:03 

When I later asked him why, he said jokingly that World War II was just not a good time to have a German name in America. 

00:19:11 

It never occurred to me to ask him why he chose to drop the first part of the family name, Schoen, which means beautiful in German, and Keith the second. 

00:19:21 

After all, Shen could be rendered in English as the very Anglo-Saxon sounding shame. 

00:19:27 

Yet he kept only walled, the word Germans use for dark forests. 

00:19:34 

I think my father could not bear a name that associated beauty with Germany. 

00:19:39 

And so he left Shen behind in a place where his parents were slaughtered. 

00:19:45 

As you may know, the Nazis required that all Jewish women take the name of Sarah on their passports. 

00:19:51 

You might thus imagine that both names, Sarah and Schoen, were forever banished from our family history, but that is not the case. 

00:20:01 

In an act that reclaimed both names, my brother gave his daughter the first name of Sarah and for her middle name, the Schoen that had disappeared from our history in the 1940s. 

00:20:14 

By your actions this week in Gross-Rostdorf, you have done your part to reconnect our German name with beauty. 

00:20:22 

Please let that spirit guide your actions as we entrust you with the Shenwald legacy. 

00:20:29 

On finishing these remarks last November in Gross-Rosdorf, I felt both emotional release, but even more curiosity about the effect of my words. 

00:20:41 

From the number of people who approached me with tears in their eyes or wordlessly put their arms around me in fierce hugs, 

00:20:49 

I soon realized how much it meant to them to encounter a living Schoenwald. 

00:20:56 

But I did not fully learn if my call for responsibility had registered until the following Sunday morning, when we sat in Gross-Rostov’s parish church and heard Norbert’s sermon to his parishioners. 

00:21:09 

Just a few kilometers outside the town, there was an abandoned Soviet-era military base that housed Iraqi Christian refugees 

00:21:19 

who had fled the carnage in their country for the safety of Germany. 

00:21:24 

Until now, Norbert said, the Christians of Gross-Rosdorf had done little if anything to help their fellow Iraqi Christians, believing that the cultural gap between them was simply too big to bridge. 

00:21:38 

But if they were to take to heart the lessons of the Shenwold family, he told them, they had to show kindness to these strangers. 

00:21:46 

Effective immediately, he announced, 

00:21:49 

The parish would adopt the camp and set up regular rotations to help feed, clothe, and educate their Iraqi cousins. 

00:21:58 

They would take the new residents into their homes for meals, for festivals, for fellowship. 

00:22:04 

That, he told the Hush congregation, was what collective responsibility meant. 

00:22:10 

That, he said, was their Christian duty. 

00:22:13 

That was what they, the residents of Gross-Rostorf, owed 

00:22:18 

to Kurt and Regina Shenwald. 

00:22:22 

Later that day, the week-long commemoration ended with the unveiling of a monument to Kurt and Regina installed by the town government. 

00:22:31 

The monument, which you can see on the front page of your program, stands on a small pedestrian island that faces the old family store. 

00:22:41 

Edged elegantly in Jerusalem’s stone, 

00:22:43 

It displays a photograph of my grandparents and a description of their life in the town, their exile to Berlin, and most importantly, the circumstances of their death. 

00:22:56 

And what of reconciliation? 

00:23:00 

As one town’s person told me, referring to more than just the five of us who were present for that week, it was good to have the Shenwalds back in Gross-Rostorf. 

00:23:11 

There was more. 

00:23:13 

My brother, who had once asked me more or less why I was hanging around with a bunch of murderers, had come on the trip only at the urging of his daughter. 

00:23:22 

Certain that he would hate every minute of the experience and need an antidote, he had scheduled a trip to Israel as a follow-up. 

00:23:32 

As we drove to Berlin after the unveiling, he confided to me that he wasn’t sure that Israel could measure up to the week in Gross-Rostorf. 

00:23:43 

I think that even my father, implacable and unreconstructed though he was, might have grudgingly considered the whole affair worthwhile had he lived to see it. 

00:23:54 

It might even have made him whole again. 

00:23:58 

I realize in some that a lot more was reconciled that week in Gross-Rosdorf than just me. 

00:24:07 

Thank you.