Exodus: A memoir (33 page)

“I would have done something. I wouldn’t have let them treat me that way. The world isn’t like that anymore. They can’t do that to us.”

She fell silent, her head bowed toward her lap.

“Do you think there is any place in the world where we can go and not experience anti-Semitism?” I wondered out loud. I told her about the conductor slamming the door on me in Rosenheim.

“You’ve got to be careful of what you speak about in front of the Germans,” she whispered, nodding toward the other passengers. “They’re very sensitive about these things.”

“They goddamn well should be. I’m not going to censor myself!”

“You’re a guest in their country,” she said. “You can’t just go around talking like that.”

“Like my grandmother was a guest in their concentration camps?”

“Why are you here?” she asked.

“I’m trying to deal with this part of my identity, to put it behind me.”

“That’s impossible,” she said. “You’ll never put it behind you. I’ve tried my whole life.”

“I think I’m doing okay,” I said. “I believe I can achieve some measure of closure. Most of why I feel so bound up in it is all the secrecy I grew up with. I knew about the Holocaust, but no one ever discussed the details of their experiences. It was as if life before America had been a collective experience, summed up by one word. I need to feel like I know the individual stories; I think that will bring me peace. I don’t want my grandmother’s story to be diminished by a broad category.”

There was a beautiful blond man in our tour group. He was Swiss-German, very tall, with a chiseled jawline and hollows under his cheeks. His eyes were cool blue marbles under a golden brow. He didn’t talk much. I invited him out for a drink later; we were staying in the same neighborhood.

“Why did you decide to visit a concentration camp while in Berlin?” I asked, wondering what someone so clearly non-Jewish and so young and normal-looking would be doing on a tour like that.

“Don’t you think it’s important,” he asked, “to learn about those things?”

“It happened to my family. What’s your relationship to it?”

He cleared his throat and pushed his drink away. “It’s obvious to you, no?”

“Was your family involved somehow?”

“No, they were not, but in some way I think we all feel connected to this event, from both sides. We all participated in a way, even just by being bystanders.”

I remembered meeting a German man in my coffee shop back home. Peter was his name; he had been born shortly after the war. “Every German has a story,” he had told me, “of being refused service, or of a door slamming in their face, or of a hand left dangling during an introduction. We take it for granted. But when I was a child in school, history stopped at the First World War. The education about the Holocaust didn’t start until recently, until people felt they could sufficiently separate themselves from the actions of the Nazis.”

I walked back through the streets of the Scheunenviertel, the old Jewish neighborhood, in the late afternoon. There were some lovely, quiet side streets, with neat rows of beautifully restored homes once occupied by working-class Jewish families, now gentrified by skinny jeans–wearing residents. I approached a beautiful gated park, and then noticed the haunting sculpture at the entrance. This was once the Jewish cemetery, I read. Since the stones had been completely destroyed by the Nazis, it was now a public park. I saw a young mother and her toddler in there, and the little girl was running down the garden path on chubby legs, squealing happily. My heart skipped a beat at the sight. Did that mother know her daughter was running over the desecrated graves of Jews, that their violated bones lay just beneath her innocent soles? What kind of reality is this, to raise children on the very streets on which so much blood was spilled, and so much havoc wrought? Did that young woman ever stop to think about it? Wouldn’t she eventually have to explain it to her child, once she grew old enough to read the words on that sculpture for herself?

I burned with the desire to ask them this but remained silent, watching. It was difficult to admit that I had come here wanting the satisfaction of knowing that this earth was somehow permanently scorched, that it couldn’t sustain a replete life anymore. But here were children frolicking among the ghosts, as if none of it had occurred. To my right, a group of artists were working on a colorful mosaic on the wall of the apartment building next to the cemetery. It was a happy mosaic of dolphins and butterflies. The banner beside it read, “The Peace Wall Project.”

Finally, on the way back, I saw my first
Stolpersteine
, those stumbling stones I had searched for so fervently in Salzburg. I noticed it by accident, embedded in front of an elegant home, four of them grouped together, a name on each one. They were for a family that had lived there. The stones gave the date of their deportation as well as of their death. Yet from above they seemed so innocent, a part of the touristy decor. How chilling it was to think of the people who walked over these stones nonchalantly every day. Even more haunting to think of the people who now built their lives in the apartments that had been systematically freed up for “true” Germans. Did this generation not have to worry about guilt anymore? Could they simply blame it all on their ancestors and say those were crazy times and we had nothing to do with it? Even so, how could one stand to be around all of these reminders? I could never live in Germany, I thought, not when I risked running into memorials around every corner.

Odd’s wife, Turid, called unexpectedly. She and her daughters were staying in their apartment nearby. They took me out to lunch,
which was comforting. Alone in Berlin, I had felt disoriented and uneasy, and it was nice to sit with people I knew for an hour and recoup my sense of self.

“We’re heading back to Norway tomorrow,” Turid said as we paid the check. “Why don’t you come visit us before you leave for the States?”

Germany had positively exhausted me, and I was only too happy to agree. On my last night in Berlin, I dreamed that a war had broken out while I was still abroad, and the airline canceled my ticket. The only way home that remained was through a German airport, but it had already been occupied by Nazis. “That’s okay,” Markus said. “We’ll smuggle you out.” But his friend Wolfgang gave me up to the authorities just before I awoke.

The next day I caught a train to Denmark, where I would take a ferry across the Skagerrak to the seaside village where Odd lived. I sat next to a divorced single father and his seven-year-old daughter, and as the ride was quite long, we started to converse. I asked what it was like, learning about the Holocaust as a child.

“I must have been seven years old when my class visited Auschwitz on a field trip,” he told me.

“How did you feel?” I asked, almost dreading the answer. I couldn’t even imagine a child that age, a child like his daughter sitting across from us clinging to her doll, being shown such a horrific place.

“To be honest, I felt nothing,” he said. “I was simply too young to even process what was happening, I think, so my brain simply rejected the whole experience. I think it was only when I was
older that I was able to read about it and deal with the information.”

“Do you think it’s wrong, that the educational system allows for the exposure to this kind of information at such a young age?” I asked.

“What can you do? It happened. We have to educate the kids about it, otherwise how are we going to stop it from happening again?”

“Surely, you don’t believe that eliminating the possibility of another Holocaust rests wholly on the education of young Germans? That would be like saying there was something genetically or culturally built into them that has to be eradicated.”

“But it was the Germans who did it, after all, not anybody else. What does that say? Is it not dangerous to ignore that basic fact?”

At that point in our conversation, his daughter began to resent not being the focus of her father’s attention and tugged on his sleeve as he was explaining his views to me. He brushed her off a few times before getting frustrated and reaching over to force her back into her seat on the other side of the table. She began to cry loudly, and her tears soon escalated into a full-on tantrum.

“Her mother spoils her so much,” the man said. “I’m the only one who provides any discipline.” Then he proceeded to grab his daughter by the shoulders and shake her, quite hard, while ordering her to stop her antics. Her high-pitched wails became shrieks that filled the entire train car. Bystanders watched uncomfortably. The old woman sitting next to us looked extremely distressed; I could tell she was thinking of intervening. I cringed as I watched the situation worsen; the daughter’s shrieks were positively terrifying at this point, and her father was growing angrier and angrier.

Eventually her tears subsided into whimpers, and she spent the
rest of the ride huddled against the window, clutching her doll. As they left the train, her father handed me his card. “Call me next time you’re passing through,” he said.

I felt a quiet joy wash over me when I first caught a glimpse of Odd’s estate; already I knew that my stay here would smooth over all the knots and bumps in my spirit that had formed on my trip. The property featured a small complex of buildings painted brick red and arranged around a lovely courtyard filled with haunting sculptures—a small Viking boat, a maternal angel. But what immediately drew the eye was the vast sea beyond, with its Neolithic rock formations scattered out into the horizon like a treacherous series of steps. Between the sea and the home, flowers grew wild and tall, in many different colors. Somewhere out on a rock was a sculpture of a man meditating peacefully while facing the water. I had the sense of being outside of time.

Over a dinner of freshly caught salmon and a salad of herbs and nettles just picked from the garden, Odd and I drank a crisp white wine that put us both in a talkative mood before the meal was halfway through.

I told him a little bit about my trip. He was impressed with how much ground I’d managed to cover in so little time.

“Deborah, what is it about the Jews that makes them so smart?” he asked. “I think it’s because they’ve had to be so vigilant! Did I ever tell you the story about the lobsters?”