the nazi
As a teenager and then student, I was a prolific letter writer. With a penchant for foreign languages, I saw letter writing as a practical way to broaden my horizons and bring academic teachings to life while indulging my enquiring mind. It was a people-focussed pursuit - I wrote to friendly faces I had encountered on my travels, to students who sought to exchange languages skills, to strangers who occasionally went on to become lifelong friends. Once, after reading a feature in a German magazine, I even wrote to a tree!
Anyone passing by the Bräutigamseiche in Eutin, Schleswig Holstein, can help themselves to a letter. Mine was fairly standard for a young student looking to practice her German. I introduced myself and invited the reader to drop me a line. Then I forgot all about it.
One day, a letter from Northern Germany arrived. The handwriting was beautiful and the writer went on to say that he would be delighted to exchange random thoughts with me in Goethe's tongue. His writing was engaging so I replied. This was the start of a correspondence that was to span several years. It was regular, but not intense. We discussed life in our respective countries, cultural differences and... food.
Meanwhile, I had started reading German at University. My tutors welcomed ideas and initiative, so I endeavoured to focus on one theme, namely German Jews under the Third Reich because, as early as I can remember, I could never fathom how the Holocaust had been allowed to happen.
One day, my penpal invited me to stay with him and his family. I had not mentioned the exact nature of my studies to him, anxious as I have always been never to imply that Germans and Nazis were synonyms.
I went to see him, he played the perfect host and showed me the sights. We ate Abendbrot on little individual wooden cutting boards in the evening. We talked at length, an old man and a young student both acutely aware of the significance of the other's presence in their respective lives. He wanted to know why I had decided to study German. At that point that the conversation inevitably drifted towards my grandfather, Jan.
Jan was born in Krakow, Poland. Sometime during his early years and for reasons I ignore, his family fled to France where they settled and started anew. And thus Jan became Jean. When WWII broke out, Jean went on to fight alongside the French. Alas, he was soon captured by the Nazis and promply dispatched to an Arbeitslager - a forced labour camp in Germany - where he toiled for some time before being released when the war ended.
At the Arbeitslager, Jean learnt German. And forgiveness.
As a child, I remember Jean occasionally mentioning that he had exchanged a few words of German with a couple of tourists lost in the village, and that it was a pity so few people these days bothered to learn foreign languages.
"We must never forget what the Germans have done, but we cannot hold the young people responsible for the atrocities their forebears have perpetrated. We must build Europe, we must communicate, we must look towards an harmonious future together. This is the only way to safeguard peace."
Despite having suffered during the war, Jean saw little point in recrimination, preferring instead to foster understanding between people. This is all he was prepared to say about Germany and his time there. Jean was not an educated man, he worked as a farmhand all his life and could barely write, but he was wise. And good.
My penpal appeared visibly moved by my grandfather's story and so told me about his past. At once, my history books came to life. I found myself sat opposite a former Hitler Jugendführer - a former Hitler Youths leader - who told me how he had preached Hitler's doctrines to many a young German and organised various related activities.
I immediately defaulted to interview mode, censoring my inner dialogue and jotting down all I could jot down. The voice that was asking questions wasn't my own, I was in a state of shock but I needed to learn more.
In the middle of our intense exchange, the real person behind the penpal got up and retrieved two large books from a chest. They were Hitler Youths books, written in Gothic script. He explained to me they were albums into which Hitler Youths would stick pictures of their then idols (Hitler and his cronies) which they had collected and traded. I was horrified and taken aback in equal measures. Possessing such material is an offence under German law - all Nazi literature was allegedly destroyed after the war.
I asked him why he still had the books and he simply replied they were "a nice souvenir". It emerged that he was rather nostalgic and didn't view Nazism as reprehensible.
This is when I did something for which I shall never forgive myself - I asked him if I could borrow the books, he agreed. I took them back to the UK, brought them along to my University presentation about the Hitler Youths, and sent them back to Germany without any accompanying note.
I did think of donating them to a museum in England, but they were not mine. I thought of notifying the local police in Germany but couldn't bring myself to.
I had come face to face with history, and like many foreigners in the know between 1939 and 1945, I had done nothing about it.
I never wrote to him again.
While in Germany, I had befriended his daughter Julia, also a student, a few years older than me. She talked to me frankly about her father, whom she disliked immensely. Julia had seen an au pair ad placed by an American family in the local paper and she asked me to help her write an application letter in English.
I returned to England and carried on with my studies, delving deeper and deeper into the Holocaust until I lost sleep and became haunted by it. I did resolve to continue learning German come what may, for Jan.
One day, a postcard from California dropped onto my doormat. It was from Julia.
22 pies thrown:
What a fascinating story....don't stop now.
On a far more prosaic note, my first (and best) penpal was German. She lived in Hamburg and I lived in Mozambique and went to school in S Africa. She was tall, slim and beautiful. We corresponded for many years until I just stopped writing. I wonder how fat she is now and how many children she has? :-)
Please don't stop now.
You did nothing wrong: you couldn't change the past. this man trusted you when you borrowed the books. As horrible as his past life was, he still did so after you told him about your grandfather. Human beings are a strange alchemy.
Some will acknowledge their past mistakes and some others, maybe just like him, will just highligh their youth because it's all they have to live with when their present is dead.
The fact he contacted you first meant he needed to communicate with someone.
You did the right thing: you returned the books and stopped corresponding to him. Now he's back to his ghosts. Karma.
Fascinating stuff. Tell us more, Ariel!
P.S. I really do like it here and I'm going to link you to my page which I hope is ok with you.
Yes, more please! Interesting and thought-provoking reading, and you have nothing to be ashamed about, you did well in the circumstances.
I will also blogroll you if you don't mind, been enjoying the archive!
Reluctant Nomad, Franje, Froggy, Edvard, Mr X... thank you all so much for your kind words. I have had German on the brain of late, because I now use it on a daily basis again, albeit in a very limited and pedestrian way.
Tapping into my 'germanophone side' got me thinking about how I came to learn the language in the first place and where it has taken me. Before I knew it, I was stuck in a time warp and being my young, somewhat hesitant student self again. I wrote the post in that state of mind, somewhat awkwardly, anxiously.
I'd be honoured to be one of your 'raconteurs'!
Have just got back from my second Dutch lesson. There's a new pupil. So the class consists of an Australian, an Englishman, an American and me, the Sefefrican.
My dear, this is splendid! You absolutely must keep it up.
Oh my. This really is fascinating stuff. Hope there's more to tell...
Mehr, mehr, bitte...
What an amazing tale. With so many of his generation dying out, you were given a unique opportunity to interact with history. I'm surprised that he even let you borrow the book. I probably would have done the same thing as you, which should be a lesson to us on how easy it is to let things be.
I find myself sitting at work reading your very engrossing story with feelings all over the place...
My mother was born in what later became East Germany, and she even saw Hitler once as a young girl; all the children were lined up along the street as he rode through, standing to attention in his car on his way to inspect a mine.
I have heard so many stories from this time, how my grandfather, who was a book keeper employed by the state, was forced to join the party against his will. And then of course after the war, he was fired BECAUSE he had been a member.
Although the family on my mother's side have always maintained they were very anti-Hitler from very early on, I'm also aware of his powers of persuasion. He created a lot of new jobs which were a godsend before people realised WHY he wanted to improve the infrastructure. Of course part of me fear that my family too went through a period when they thought he meant well.
Too many things going around my head... maybe I need to do an entry on this myself.
Wonderful writing and an excellent cliff hanger, I really want to find out what happened next.
Blimey...
The bad news is... from now we expect great things the Fab Fuck-Up.
OE
Nick, Mike, TC - thank you so much!
Neil, you make a very good point. Should he have been held accountable, albeit belatedly? Yes, I do think so but I didn't feel it was my place to do it. Rightly or wrongly, I chose to focus on what my grandfather impressed upon me, so I helped Julia. This being said, more than a decade later, my encounter with the Nazi still haunts me.
Waspgoddess, thank you for sharing your story. Under the Nazi regime, things were definitely not clear-cut, as you point out. We were not there, we do not know and we cannot possibly put ourselves in the place of our ancestors. What would we have done? How would we have survived?
Overnight Editor, welcome and thank you for your kind words/feedback. All material is research material...
So he did what almost everyone else of his age did. Had to do, or face serious consequences.
Judge not, or you're judging an entire nation.(Almost.) I'm shocked you even considered stealing his books.
This is an enormous topic, and of necessity you can tell us only part. You tell us lots about your grandfather, and lots about your German penfriend. But of your own feelings, at the time of the Nazi revelation, you say very little. You went into "interview mode" with him, and you do the same to us.
Because of that brevity, I don't get the full understanding of what seem quite odd suggestions. Suggestions such as reporting an old man you've happily corresponded with to the authorities. And that you ceased writing with no explanation to him.
I cannot believe it was such a shock to you to learn that someone his age had been a Hitler supporter. There's stuff you've yet to tell us.
Nevertheless, a fascinating post. Tyk.
Peter I think you're a bit tough with her: she was a young student and with no expecations was confronted to this reality: the man who had been her penfriend for a long time was a past active nazi. He had apparently never given her a hint about it before they actually met. She was taken aback. As for her assuming he must have been so because of his age, that's taking all of the old German people for nazis. I think it's a bit short of a conclusion.
Ariel, brilliant!! I will now exhaust my German. Eine bier bitter!
Peter, what an interesting comment, thank you for stopping by! As I said in an earlier reply, what would we have done had we been there? I cannot know that, I am not German nor had I been born when Hitler was in power. I know full well that a lot of people toed the party line because they were forced to. The point I am trying to make is that, although the man may well have been compelled to become a Hitler Youths leader, he was still telling me after all these years that he didn't consider Nazism to be reprehensible. With this in mind, he also went through the trouble of hanging on to books which were outlawed after the end of WWII while what he should have done was surrender them to the authorities/occupying forces in 1945.
I must point out that I didn't consider 'stealing his books', no. I wouldn't have wanted to keep them for myself, but I figured that if they had a place in our society, any place, it was with a museum or possibly a restricted access library such as the Wiener Library in London. This being said, I was aware of the fact that donating them to such an organisation was not my place therefore I returned them to him.
As for my own feelings at the time, they went beyond words, hence my defaulting into interview mode. Again, it's not so much the fact that he had been a Nazi supporter that shocked me because many of his generation had been - by design or default - as you rightly point out, it's the fact that he didn't seem to view Nazism - and its consequences - as an atrocity.
Indeed, I stopped writing to him, but I should add that there were no unanswered letters either - he also stopped writing to me. He cannot have been in any doubt as to why our correspondence stopped, as my feelings - a mixture of horror and incomprehension - were written all over my face from the moment we had that conversation until my departure.
To clarify one final point once and for all - and I think my post is unequivocal about this - I have never equated German nationality with Nazis, much as I would never equate being British with being, say, a colonialist!
I tried not to judge, however I couldn't help react. I made the conscious decision to focus on the young generation - embodied here by Julia - rather than the old - him. I felt that was all I could do because, after all, I wasn't equipped with enough understanding of what it was to live under the Nazi regime. What would I have done had I been a young German under Hitler? How would I have survived? Again, I cannot know that.
"There's stuff you're yet to tell us". Is there? I believe I have said all I had to say on the matter. It's obvious I am no advocate of Nazism, much as it is obvious that I am not anit-German either.
Froggy, it's a good argument. However I am grateful for Peter's visit and comment, and the resulting opportunity to clarify things that, quite possibly, may have been ambiguous to certain readers.
John G., well, at least you won't go thirsty should you find yourself in Germany. You may want to learn another useful word though: Wasser [water] - just in case you don't fancy a hangover that lasts several days!
Well I'm an Austo-Hungarian Mancunian, born in Vienna and raised in the Netherlands and in the UK and I want to know more!
~Milady
xxx
Thank you for your considered reply to my possibly harsh comment. Nazism and the holocaust are such delicate topics, and many of "my people" met their horrifying end then.
Nevertheless, what an amazing experience for you. To use a cliche: thank you for sharing.
A fascinating story, Ariel - and one which has reawakened my own desire to one day write the history of my maternal grandparents: a pilot in the Luftwaffe, sent on many bombing raids over the UK during the Second World War, who just before hostilities broke out in 1939, happened to fall in love with a young Engiishwoman visiting Munich after finishing her degree in German. In 1941 they had a child, my mother, and were then granted permission to marry - in a strange meeting of which one solitary photo exists - by Hitler himself, because obviously a German officer marrying one of the enemy was not the done thing. They lived out the rest of the war in a half bombed-out flat, and escaped to leafy Surrey and my grandmother's family as soon as Germany fell.
More, please.htt
Peter, discussion is a very healthy thing and I welcome all points of view and contributions. Thanks again for yours.
Unreliable witness, hello and welcome! What an amazing family background you have. It's such a heart-rending story, the triumph of love over evil! Thank you for sharing it here.
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