Searching for a metaphoric home

Pulitzer-prize winning novelist Carol Shields once said that “a great novel should follow the character’s search for a metaphoric home.”

I’ve thought a lot about that comment recently; it resonates with Is It Night or Day? in two ways.

First, that is the trajectory of Edith’s story. She is a child immigrant searching for a home, physically and metaphorically. Young Edith’s bewildered efforts to assimilate in America are as poignant as her struggle against constant feelings of abandonment and isolation. Through the prism of Edith’s story, readers experience urgent themes that resonate with today’s headlines: families torn and children threatened by immigration issues, war, natural disasters, and the daunting work necessary to rebuild a life in the face of unspeakable loss.

Second, with the book’s launch only weeks away, the book and the story are searching for a home and an audience. The book explores the little-known One Thousand Children project which rescued some 1,200 youngsters from the Holocaust.

My hope is that this book will give Edith a home and the One Thousand Children a place in history.

It’s a book!!!

In bookstores March 16th.

Is It Night or Day? Fern Schumer Chapman. Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, $16.99 (192p) ISBN 978-0-374-17744-7

Chapman, who wrote about her family’s Holocaust ordeal in the adult book Motherland: Beyond the Holocaust, assumes the voice of her mother, Edith, who at age 12 is sent by her Jewish parents from increasingly anti-Semitic Germany to live in America with relatives. Edith’s plaintive narration describes her father’s mounting fear of the Nazis (“suddenly, we were filth, Jews polluting the village,”) and her mother’s increasing detachment. The story of Edith’s ocean voyage to America provides some light moments; without her parents around, Edith’s fears and anxiety are always evident, but her interactions with other young Jewish emigrants are touchingly childlike, such as when they play hide-and-seek onboard. In Chicago, Edith is met by a disdainful aunt who treats her like a servant and classmates who keep their distance. Though her story reads more like a memoir than a novel, Chapman captures a plucky determination in Edith that readers will find endearing. There is no Cinderella ending for Edith, but the hope she finds in Jewish ballplayer Hank Greenberg and the honesty in her story make this historical fiction well worth reading. Ages 10–up. (Mar.)

A memorial statue in Hanko, Finland, commemorating the thousands of emigrants who left the country to start a new life in the United States

The definition of immigration is “a person who comes to a country to take up permanent residence or a plant or animal that becomes established in an area where it was previously unknown.” But the concept can encompass much more and much less than that.

Immigrating connotes coming to a new place while emigrating connotes leaving. My mother actually emigrated from Germany, but is it fair to say she immigrated to America?

That implies that there was some pull to this country. She did not share the spirit of those who left shtetls in Russia or Poland for America in the 19th century. They believed the streets were paved with gold, but nothing pulled my mother to a new country. She was only 12 years old when she emigrated; she wanted to remain in Germany with her parents.

In the process of emigrating, my mother also became an immigrant in another aspect of her life. As she entered adolescence, she sought meaning and coherence, mirroring every young person’s journey from childhood to adulthood.

A broad interpretation of immigration would include children entering adolescence since they are introduced to “an area … previously unknown.” It also would include adults who, say, leave an unhappy marriage, as they are coming to a new “country to take up permanent residence.”

Through major life changes, we are both emigrants and immigrants.

My mother's childhood home

Most Germany homes are handed down from one generation to the next. My mother’s childhood home in Stockstadt had been in her family for 200 years. But after the Holocaust, Nazis stole some Jewish homes; others became available for rent.

In the Kreis-Gross Gerau area, one family who rents a former Jewish home has lived uneasily in it since 1978. “We wondered what happened to the original owners,” the tenant told me.

The man who grew up in the home fled Nazi Germany for Palestine in 1936. When he returned for a visit when he was 79 years old, he told the residents that his brother and sister escaped, but his parents were killed in the Holocaust.

“It was strange when he was here because this was his house, his birthplace, the place of his youth,” the tenant said. “He stood for a moment on the last step of the stairs. It was emotional for him.

“I felt terribly guilty. I know that there is no reason to think it, but I felt like a thief.”

In 2000, my mother’s cousin returned to his home in Worfelden and told this story: “Early one morning, I went to the house where I was born so I could take a picture. As I held up my camera, a man stepped in front of me and asked, ‘Why are you photographing my home?’ ‘Well,’ I said, ‘it used to be my home.’ Then he invited me in. Only the attic and the basement were the same. Everything else was different. Then I noticed my cat wasn’t there either.

At that time, my mother and I spoke to the residents who now live in her childhood home in Stockstadt. The couple inherited the home from the man’s father. “We didn’t know this home belonged to your family,” he insisted. “My father never told us anything. We were shocked when we read the German edition of Motherland and learned about the house and your history.”

In another blog entry, I wrote that the second generation has the scars without the wounds of Nazi Germany. But, in his book Child Survivors of the Holocaust, Dr. Paul Valent claims that the second generation has the scars and the wounds.

“Second generation children are dominated by the shadow of the Holocaust without ever understanding the original context,” he writes.”They were in some ways more vulnerable than child survivors because they carried scars and emotions with no possibility of remembering their origin. While they had the advantage of being born in an objectively better world, they were subject to the memories, anguish and struggles of their parents, who often kept them in the dark about them…

“The lack of memories is indeed a lack, a deprivation, because without memories the scars one carries in the form of emotions and behavior are believed to be senseless and irrational. This is because the scars cannot be connected with the original wounds. Further, because there are no words or concepts for the original traumas, they cannot be integrated into higher level views such as of parents, blame and identity…

“The younger the person (who experiences trauma), the greater is their vulnerability, the less their ability to know and to speak, or even to know what they would like to say.”

The lives of all the Germans I know have been defined by the Holocaust and its legacy. Some more than others.

I have another friend in her 60s whose family has lived in my mother’s town, Stockstadt, for generations. This friend feels terribly alienated because her mother made a choice after she had her only child: She decided she wouldn’t have any more children because she wouldn’t want to send a son to war.

“Now I have no family,” my friend explains. “No one is left.”

Her grandmother worked in a nearby hospital which housed disabled children during the 1930s. “My grandmother was forced (under threat to her life) to prepare the children for the trains. I am like a microchip. I retain all the pain of my grandmother.” (Interestingly, my friend works with learning disabled teenagers.)

Her grandfather hated Hitler and made a remark about it. “After that, he was put in a hospital for the mentally ill. He died there. Her grandmother, who also had been outspoken about Hitler, was very quiet after that and simply did her job.”

My friend’s mother once saw my grandmother Frieda in Darmstadt. At that time, (around 1940) she was living in the Jew house. “Whenever my mother told this story she would cry. She greeted Frieda and she wanted to hug her. But Frieda refused.

“‘You are safe,’ Frieda said. ‘Go away!’”

The first time I met the head of the German Society to Preserve Jewish Culture in 2000, I told him that my grandparents had ‘died’ in the Holocaust.

“They didn’t die,” he said. “They were killed. It is a very big difference.”

Then he told me his history:

“My father and grandfather were strong Nazis. I have tried to understand what made them partners in murder. The more I search the less I understand. I think my father thought that if you go along, you will find a better place in the community and you have a better chance to become rich. He died before I could ask him about why he did what he did. He never told me anything.

“My father’s biography is my own. It is me. I’m haunted by the question, ‘Would I do the same thing?’ I’ll never know. But I try to do all in my power to make sure no one has to be haunted by this question again.

“I’ve gone to Russia more than twenty times to do humanitarian work. I try to find the places where my father was a soldier and undo what my father has done.”

“The war and the Nazi period are like a relative to me,” a German friend born in 1960 tells me. “For me, it’s very alive. We were the first generation to read Anne Frank. We cannot think of German history without thinking about the Jews.

“But our parents couldn’t talk about the past. When we bring up the subject, many said, ‘Stop talking about it. It’s over. We have a new life.’ They have aggressive, brutal memories. They feel they were victims, robbed of their youth.”

Many records were destroyed during the war, but now in some parts of Germany, there is a trend towards remembering.

“What our parents destroyed, we cannot undo,” my German friend who works as a researcher at a Jewish database tells me. “But perhaps we can make it so Jews are not totally forgotten. So I collect every newspaper clip with every name, every sign of Jewish people — shops, weddings, death notices. We want to know the social and political life during this time. We want to know what the press said about Jewish people and Jewish life. We want to create a biography of all the Jewish people who lived in Gross-Gerau in a databank.

“It’s good for us to create this database. It helps us live with our parents and our history.”

The German Office for the notification of next of kin of casualties of the German Wehrmacht in Berlin

When visiting Germany, I have discovered that Germans speak openly about their country’s dark past — but most don’t talk about their personal involvement.

Children have little information about their parents’ contributions to Nazi Germany. When I asked my German friends why they don’t know about their parents’ role in the past, they said they didn’t want to ask family members to relive painful memories in a discussion.

Now those children can find out about their parents’ or grandparents’ role in the war by requesting information from a German data archive called the Wehrmachtsauskunftsstelle. The archive has received hundreds of thousands of requests, mostly from young people who want to learn about their relatives’ involvement in the war.

"Everything is done by hand," says an employee who has worked for the agency for 44 years.

Here’s what the Wehrmachtsauskunfststelle, also known as the German Office for the notification of next of kin of casualties of the German Wehrmacht, states about its operations: The office employs 900 people and contains the records of 18 million — 15 million Wehrmacht soldiers, three million members of the SS, the RAD and the various police agencies. Of these 18 million, three million are listed as dead and one million missing.

Endless rows of shelves hold millions of index cards from the Second World War. Based upon various local records, the archive gives information on an individual’s military career, promotions and penalties, and hospital stays. In addition, the archive has medals, personnel files, court records and Army documents about foreign prisoners of war in German custody.

Anyone can make a request for personal or academic reasons. My German friend Gert Krell writes in an upcoming blog at Shadows of the Holocaust (www.shadowsoftheholocaust.com) that he inquired about his father recently.