Dear Gert,

In 2008, when I visited  the glass-box memorial on the tracks at the  train station in Darmstadt, Germany, I found it to be moving, with the shards of green glass aptly portraying how lives fragmented at this location. This was where my grandparents were deported in the late 1930s.

For me, the most stunning aspect of the memorial was simply seeing my grandparents’ names – Siegmund Westerfeld and Frieda Westerfeld – etched on the glass. I have rarely seen my grandparents’ names written on anything, even documents. Since they were murdered in concentration camp long before I was born, I never met them and, as you know, my mother rarely spoke of them. It was too painful for her to remember.

When I saw their names, I was  struck by the thought that I was standing in a place they once stood and seeing what they once saw. I tried to take in the entire scene – the sights, the smells, the noises. Since we have no shared experiences, I thought, this is the closest I will ever get to them.

But then, I felt sick. I realized that 60 years earlier, I would have shared their fate. Like them, I would have been marked. My heart hammered as I thought about how afraid they must have felt as they boarded the train. My grandfather, a decorated World War I veteran, must have had a deep sense of betrayal; his country and fellow soldiers had turned against him. I felt what I imagined he felt that last time he was at the Darmstadt train station -- a toxic brew of anger and hurt.

Seeing the names of Siegmund and Frieda (I never knew them so I never called them by an affectionate grandparent name) on that glass in that location made the incomprehensible reality of the Holocaust more real for me. It is difficult for anyone to understand the inhumanity and the scale of this horrific genocide, even someone like me who has had to integrate this history into my identity.

The glass memorial in Darmstadt is another piece of evidence confirming the Holocaust. And, given my experiences last week at a school in a small town in Texas, that is critical.

The librarian at the school where I was giving presentations about my books told me that many in this town of German immigrants are Holocaust deniers. “Yet, they live right next door to neighbors who have their Hitler Youth uniforms stored in their attics,” she said.

Though it has been defaced and damaged in recent years, the memorial at the Darmstadt train station isn't hidden in an attic.

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Fern Schumer Chapman

The quote from Michel Friedman that resonates with me is “Imagine what it means to be a child of a father and a mother who had been broken. My mother saw how her father was beaten up and murdered. My parents later tried to rebuild themselves from millions of mosaic pieces. As a child of such a family you carry more responsibilities than is good for you.”

Sadly, the Holocaust produced many mother and fathers who were “broken.” Broken parents often raise broken children. As I’ve written many times in this blog, trauma is transmitted in families.

Based upon recent studies of mice, scientists recently discovered that some animals and some people are genetically wired to develop PTSD. A team of neurobiologists at the University of Zurich found that environmental factors can alter genes that can be passed on to the next generation. This study indicates that the children of those who have been traumatized aren’t just affected by living with the disturbed parent; the anxiety can be expressed in the genes. In other words, trauma can be imperceptibly transmitted from parent to child, through nurture and nature.

But let me return to Friedman’s comments. His image of “mosaic pieces” is apt. Someone who suffers from great trauma is left with shards of themselves. Fragments. A deeply damaged self. An individual survives great trauma by denying what happened , insulating himself or herself from the memories, and splitting off the part of themselves that is damaged so that the individual doesn’t remember or feel the pain. But that individual also remains stuck in the moment the trauma occurred. They have not fully integrated the experience into their being.

Consequently, children, who live with a traumatized parent who are stuck in a younger self, perceive the parent’s vulnerabilities. The children worry about the parent’s weaknesses and try to insulate them from pains that they fear will overwhelm their parents. Consequently, we “carry more responsibilities than is good.”

What gets confused is an understanding of boundaries. What are a child’s responsibilities to a damaged parent? What is a child’s responsibility to himself or herself? What does it mean to be a good daughter or a good son? Since the demands of that role are defined by the parent’s needs, and damaged parents expect much more than is realistic, the children feel like failures as sons and daughters when they can’t meet their parent’s inappropriate needs.

Friedman says that “When his parents had died, he had felt he almost died with them.” Here again, he is alluding to a lack of boundaries. He cannot define himself without his parents’ needs or demands. The child’s identity is subsumed by the parents and the child isn’t sure where he or she begins or ends. The relationship becomes so tightly intertwined , the child isn’t sure how he or she will survive without the parent.

New research and recent understandings of trauma and its transmission in families have helped children address this experience. Often, children raised in these families aren’t aware of the psychological dynamic; they only know their own pain. But thankfully, therapists and specialists who are knowledgeable in the field are better able to help children cope with the guilt and shame children like Michel Friedman know all too well.

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Fern Schumer Chapman

You (and your daughter) raise fascinating questions…questions I’m often asked by students at schools. “Why,” they ask, “do you spend so much time writing and telling your mother’s story?”

I tell my mother’s story for both personal and political reasons.

My personal reasons were captured perfectly in a recent New York Times review of a new book called, Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything. “Memory is intricately tied to identity; we are a product of our own experiences. What we perceive is shaped by what we have perceived before; what we learn is bootstrapped on past learning. Amnesia seems to many so horrifying because it robs us of our own autobiography, and thus, it seems, ourselves.”

For years, my mother coped with her losses by cutting off her story. In doing so, she inadvertently deprived me of an essential personal narrative to understand her and myself. It was her maternal impulse to insulate me from her own painful history. She believed she was protecting me; instead, I felt alienated from her. Now that she’s shared her story with me and I’ve recorded it, we both feel we have an autobiography.

Still, it’s difficult to balance the past and the present… but it’s critical. Sometimes, like you, I feel the past has overtaken my present and I want to leave it behind me. I simply want to fully experience each moment without worry of my responsibility to tell this story. Yet, when I distance myself from the story and my own history, I feel I have shirked my responsibility to my mother and her family and I have lost part of myself.

Politically, there is an even greater mandate to tell the story. Of course, there is the old adage that those who forget history are doomed to repeat it. So that drives me. More importantly, I recognize that it’s important to be one of the many voices that interpret the past.

George Orwell summed it up best: “He who controls the present, controls the past. He who controls the past, controls the future.”

So I keep telling our story.

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Fern Schumer Chapman

Happy New Year, or I should say Guten Rusch to you.

The new year is a time of great reflection. We ask ourselves how can we improve ourselves in the coming months. It is a good time to think about the question you have posed: What is a hero?

I have been mulling over how I can answer you these last days. I agree with Mr. Primor’s definition. ”Heroes are people who show the courage of their convictions.” The truest “hero” I know is Mina Lautenschlager who is featured in my book, Motherland. Her heroism is rooted in her steadfast refusal – in big and small ways –to succumb to the pressures of Nazism in the 1930s and her absolute belief that, as she told me in 1990, “You simply cannot do these things to people.“

That may not sound particularly heroic, but in the political climate of the 1930s, that kind of resistance was rare. Interestingly, when I asked Mina at that time if she saw herself as a hero, she completely rejected the idea. She simply saw herself as human. If you ask others who have performed heroic acts, I think that they would agree with Mina’s assessment. My son is a paramedic and I have become acquainted with that culture through his stories. I often think about the many firefighters and paramedics who lost their lives in 9/11. That culture doesn’t see these acts – risking their own lives to save the lives of others – as heroic. They simply see it as doing their jobs.

Heroism is evident to me in large acts of rescue and small acts of defiance. I think it’s even evident in how we conduct ourselves in our day-to-day lives. For example, it seems to me, even an individual who has been raised in an abusive or dysfunctional family who tries to alter the dynamic and protect his or her children from that pattern is heroic. That transitional person refuses to fall victim to pattern or be a bystander, thereby continuing the damaging family dynamic and can lead to a public effect as well (as we have discussed in earlier blogs). The commitment to change requires awareness, steadfastness and resistance – three elements Mina embodied.

One of the international organizations that teaches tolerance to school children is called “Facing History.” It tries to instill in youngsters the understanding that each of us is confronted with small moral choices every day. The organization emphasizes that how we respond in those circumstances is critical to our own self definition and our citizenship. I completely agree. Nazi Germany is a great example of the dangers of doing nothing.

Here’s hoping that all of us around the world will make small, mindful, moral — even heroic — choices in 2011.

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Fern Schumer Chapman

You concluded your last entry by saying that my grandfather, Siegmund Westerfeld, may have had some similarities to your grandfather, given that they were about the same age. I’d like to share with you some of what I know about my grandfather and his life.

Siegmund Westerfeld and his parents

Siegmund was born on September 22, 1891 in Stockstadt am Rhein. His mother, Sarah Westerfeld, gave birth to him in the family home that their ancestors had built in 1721. (I believe my mother, born in 1925, was the first child in the family who was born in a hospital in Crumstadt.) Both my grandparents, Sigmund and Frieda, had the same family constellation – three boys and a girl. Siegmund was the third son.

As you know, Siegmund served in World War I and received the Iron Cross for his service in the German Army. He became a successful businessman in Stockstadt and something of a community leader; no one in town brought crops to market without Siegmund’s services. The Westerfelds were trailblazing, owning the first car and installing the first telephone in the area. Sigmund introduced the cucumber as a cash crop. In addition, he was known for his sharp wit and tasty homemade sausage.

Siegmund perceived the dangers in the late 1930s and decided to send his daughters to America. Most rescue programs only took one child per family, yet somehow, Siegmund was able to place both of his daughters on ships out of Germany (I suspect he bribed the authorities.) He hoped that he and Frieda and his mother, Oma Sarah, would follow. However, Oma Sarah refused to leave her homeland.

Complicating matters, Siegmund and Frieda had signed a deed that decreed that the couple would care for Oma Sarah for all her remaining days. In exchange, they would inherit the Westerfeld home and all of its belongings. As Nazism intensified, Siegmund’s brothers and sisters escaped Germany, fleeing to Palestine and South America. But that deed essentially locked Siegmund and Frieda into staying in Germany and caring for Oma Sarah. She wouldn’t leave because she said, “I was born a German and I will die a German.” Siegmund wouldn’t emigrate without his mother.

In time, no one would do business with Siegmund since an SS guard was stationed at the front door. Eventually, without any income, the Westerfelds were forced to sell their large home, which had been in the family for over 200 years. As a prominent Nazi took ownership of the house, Siegmund, Frieda and Oma Sarah were forced to rent and live in one room. Eventually, the Nazis made the family leave Stockstadt in the early 1940s and live in a Jew House on Sudetengaustrasse in Darmstadt (his last known address). While there, local companies such as Volkswagen forced Siegmund and other Jews in the house to serve as slave laborers.

Sadly, Siegmund was taken to Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp on June 14, 1941. I learned from the Gedenkstätte und Museum Sachsenhausen that Siegmund Israel Westerfeld (all Jewish men in Nazi Germany were assigned the name “Israel”) confessed to “mosaisch” — that he believed in the laws of Moses. The record shows that he was assigned the number 38067 and he lived in hut 38. He died on February 15, 1942. The record does not report the cause of his death.

Siegmund Westerfeld's grave

As you know, there are no headstones or graves for Jews who were killed in the Holocaust. However, in the Jewish cemetery in Gross-Gerau, there is a tombstone for Siegmund, though it is highly unlikely that his remains are buried there. No one knows who placed the stone there. Engraved on it is my grandfather’s full name, Siegmund Westerfeld. Just beneath, someone has scratched with a sharp tool the words, “Sarah Westerfeld.” On the other side of the tombstone, Siegmund’s name is written in Hebrew.

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Fern Schumer Chapman

In many ways, Reunion captures the fault-line in the lives of young Germans of the Nazi era. As you know from Is It Night or Day? and Motherland, there was a clear demarcation, a fault-line when my mother’s childhood was over – all too early — because of the political situation in Germany. There was a before and after.

In both of my books, my mother identifies the moment when she boards the ship to America as the end of her childhood. She was 12. In Reunion, there is a specific moment when Hans’ childhood is over — when Hans confronts his friend, Konradin, about why he snubbed Hans at the opera. The protagonist is 16. No longer naïve, Hans can’t ignore the anti-Semitism and the political reality. In some ways, the title resonates with Hans’ reunion with his younger self – the moment that defined him, the fault-line in his childhood. “He (his friend) came into my life in February 1932,” Uhlman writes, “and never left it again.”

The fault-line was especially pronounced because Jews were deeply assimilated into society, having lived in Germany for hundreds of years. My mother’s family had helped settle Stockstadt am Rhein in 1721. Uhlman claims that Hans’ family had lived in Stuttgart for at least two hundred years, perhaps much longer. No one knew for sure because there were no records. The narrator asks, “could one be sure they had not been here before the Hohenfels?” (The Hohenfels, the narrator explains of his friend’s family, were part of our history. Their Burg was situated between Hohenstaufen , the Teck and Hohenzollern.) .

In addition, Germans deeply identified with their country’s strong sense of place — its rich history and culture, and beautiful surroundings. The sense of heimat invaded and took hold of every resident at that time – Jew and Christian alike. As Uhlman writes, “All I knew then was that this was my country, my home, without a beginning and without an end, and that to be Jewish was no more significant than to be born with dark hair and not with red. Foremost we were Swabians, then Germans and then Jews.”

Building upon that false sense of security was the fact that many Jews served in World War I. Uhlman powerfully illustrates this point when he describes his parents’ deaths at the end of the book. Just before their suicides, his father “put on his officer’s uniform together with his decorations, including the Iron Cross, First Class and took up his stand beside the Nazi.” (The Nazi was posted outside his father’s surgical office to ensure that Germans avoided all Jews.) In my books, my mother explains that her father had the same false sense of security; he believed he was safe because of his World War I service in the Germany army. He told my mother, “my comrades will never turn against me.”

Without documenting the graphic details of the atrocities, Reunion is haunting. It captures the imminent threat of the New Germany, a child’s first taste of ostracism and prejudice and the legacy of those experiences. The accumulated losses of homeland, culture, language, and identity are particularly devastating and disorienting to refugees. Despite the dislocation, the narrator — and, for that matter, my mother — remains devoted to his childhood, his country, his classmates. Though the protagonist has made a life thousands of miles away from his homeland, his soul is forever tied to and defined by his German origins.

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Fern Schumer Chapman

Reading your blogs about your friends underscores the differences in our experiences. I’m continually struck by the fact that every German of your generation was shaped by the Holocaust. The descendants of those directly involved in the Holocaust must sort out his or her identity in relation to their parents’ acts at that time.

As I’ve discussed in previous blogs, I have been defined by the uniqueness of my experience. First, I am not technically a child of a survivor, if that word is strictly used as a label for one who survived the camps. I am the child of a child refugee. Since America saved only 1,000 children, this is a rare experience. I have only met other children of refugees at reunions for the 1,000 children. The children of survivors (a more common American experience) tend to dismiss my mother’s history, claiming that she was “lucky.” While I’m grateful that my mother was spared the devastating traumas of the camps, you know from what I have written here that she suffers with the same losses as the survivors.

It sounds to me like Germans of your generation have an understanding of your shared legacy. You can discuss your parents’ acts and how they shaped each of you. It’s perfectly understandable to separate and distance yourselves from parents and their personal histories. I can see from your last two blogs that this is a process that you openly discuss with your friends.

It has taken me decades to understand my personal history. Since my mother never spoke of her past, I have had to slowly investigate and uncover what happened to her in childhood and how it shaped her. This has been a particularly arduous task since few in my mother’s family survived and could offer perspective on my mother and her early life. My mother was determined to cut off her past and her own history partly because that’s how she coped with the trauma — by compartmentalizing it. But there’s more. Like most immigrants, she wanted to fit in. America offered her a fresh start where her history was less important than her ability to contribute and to be productive to society.

So two factors have produced a sense of isolation for me. First, I have no community of friends with similar experiences. Second, my mother had a strong desire to eradicate her past so that she could become an American.

But there’s a third factor as to why my legacy has been particularly difficult. Dr. Paul Valent, a psychotherapist for 35 years who founded the Child Survivors of the Holocaust group in Melbourne, Australia explains that children of survivors experience what he calls “double trouble”. “Not only are they required to adjust to their parents’ alternating physiological circuits, emotions, behaviors and attitudes, but they must copy with their own automatic survival responses to their parents.”

So the children are reacting to experiences they never had directly. They know that something horrific shaped their parents’ lives, but they can’t see what it was. They are completely defined by this indirect experience. I wrote in Motherland about the “moment in which I was made long before I was born, the experience I never had but couldn’t escape.”

The children have patterned themselves psychologically after their parents’ anxiety. For the children of survivors and refugees, that unseen experience and misunderstood reaction intensifies the terrible sense of alienation.

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Fern Schumer Chapman

1938- my grandmother, my mother, my grandfather. The last picture taken of my mother and her parents, just before she was sent to America.

Your comments about Kandel’s observation that people have the desire to destroy people outside the group to which they belong struck a chord with me.

What happened in Vienna in 1938 also occurred in my mother’s town, Stockstadt am Rhein, a village of 2,000 people and two Jewish families. My grandfather was a respected civic leader in town, which his family had helped settle in 1721. No farmer in the area could bring his crops to market without the services of my grandfather, Siegmund Westerfeld. In addition, my grandfather introduced the cucumber as a cash crop. His family had the first telephone and the first car in the area. The family was assimilated into the town and he served as a trusted lender to many members of the community. In fact, most families in the town had borrowed money from my grandfather; that way, they could stay solvent and keep their farms afloat.

When Hitler came to power and, as Kandel puts it, “the successes of the Jewish community generated envy and a desire for revenge among non-Jews.” The townspeople of Stockstadt did nothing to defend or protect Westerfeld and his family. After all, how convenient it would be if the town lender would simply disappear and the loans would be eradicated.

A daughter of one of the townspeople who owed my grandfather money came to me about ten years ago and cried. “My father was indebted to your grandfather a great deal of money and I feel that his blood is on my family’s hands,” she said. She was trying to take responsibility for, as you wrote in your blog “what we do and who we are.”

Even though we cannot change the past, I deeply appreciated her candidness, just as I value your deep reflection on envy. Both of you examine your lives and contemplate possible scenarios, guarding against impulsively dangerous reactions. Interestingly, this daughter is a member of your generation who you say “must sort out the complicated relationship between guilt, innocence and responsibility.“

The children of survivors and refugees also struggle with issues of identity, but it seems to me that you and your generation face the fundamental question: If that is my mother or father, who am I? The inhumane and criminal acts of the Nazis make this question especially difficult and painful to evaluate and answer.

For the victim’s children, we struggle with our own issues of guilt and responsibility. How can I be a good daughter to this parent who has lost so much of her family and her self? What is my responsibility to her well-being? What are the boundaries of parent/child love? The answers to these questions are unclear since the victim/parent is so dependent upon the little family that remains.

Sadly, we, the victim’s children, often see ourselves as inadequate in the face of our parents’ distorted expectations. We carry a sense of guilt and we feel we come up short: We can never replace the basic nurturing that our parents should have received from their parents when they were children. In terms of our own identities, we never feel we are good-enough sons or daughters…because we were children and we could never fill the role of the victim’s parents.

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Fern Schumer Chapman

Since the 1940s, one of the few ways that American Jews protested the Nazi regime was to avoid certain German products. High on the list was the Mercedes. (Volkswagon and German wine were other targets.) Evidently, the protest didn’t make a dent in Flick’s financial portfolio.

Still it was a matter of principle. When Chrysler Corporation bought a majority share of Mercedes manufacturer Daimler-Benz, some newspaper and magazines posed the question of whether some Jews would begin to boycott Chrysler. Jewish writer Cynthia Ozick said that, as a “private memorial” to the Nazis’ victims she would boycott Chrysler. But others say that mega-mergers and the global economy make it impossible to know who owns the product. Others think it’s simply time to move on.

If this is a conundrum for American Jews, I can’t begin to wrap my mind around the problem Flick and his company posed for generations in Germany. What a complicated legacy!

* * *
On a trip to Germany in 1999, my mother and I the guests of an organization called “The German Society to Preserve Jewish Culture.” In 1988, fifty years after Kristallnacht, “Night of Broken Glass,” churches marked the mournful occasion by creating a “Night of Remembrance.” Services were held, candles lit, names of survivors and escapees read at memorials and churches. During those ceremonies, many church leaders asked elder members if they remembered the Jews who once lived in their towns.

A grass-roots movement emerged and Germans began to research the Jewish families who once lived in the area, restore the local synagogues, and
create organizations formed at that time to remember the Jews and their contributions in Germany.

This German Society to Preserve Jewish Culture brought back to Germany all the “children” in my mother’s religious class. Of the seven, all except my mother had gotten out of Germany with their parents (like Kandel).

“It is a very different experience to get out with parents,” one of my mother’s religious school classmates told me on that trip. “Yes, it’s traumatizing since they have lost the means of earning money, their home and homeland, but the family is still in tact.”

For my mother, as I described in my new book, Is It Night or Day?, to lose your parents as a child to genocide is devastating and incomprehensible. In addition, as I’ve described in this blog, the psychological consequences live on in the generations that follow.

On one of my trips to Germany, I came upon a metaphor for the effect of genocide on victim and perpetrator.

A 30-year-old man who worked in a nursing home in Crumstadt, Germany said he had only “encountered” Jews through the intrusive memories of his patients. Some had served in the SS. Sometimes, when disturbing memories flooded, they blurted out what they had done at that time. The caregiver said, “They are haunted.”

Interestingly, some concentration camps survivors living in American nursing homes also are plagued by persistent, painful memories. Uniquely challenging to the nursing home staff, survivors often refuse to take showers or do anything that triggers the memory of their traumas.

Sounds like Flick was so lacking in empathy and so well defended that he didn’t suffer with the consequences of his actions.

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Fern Schumer Chapman

Here’s a summary of Alice Miller’s work in the obituary the New York Times ran last week:

painting by Alice Miller

“Unable to admit the rage they feel toward their tormentors, Dr. Miller contended, these damaged children limp along through life, weighed down by depression and insecurity, and pass the abuse along to the next generation, in an unending cycle. Some, in a pathetic effort to please their parents and serve their needs, distinguish themselves in the arts or professions. The Stalins and the Hitlers, Dr. Miller later wrote, inflict their childhood traumas on millions.“

Corporal punishment is one form of cruelty and I suppose, as you mentioned, it can be legislated. But there are other forms of cruelty that are less overt, difficult to legislate and equally damaging. For example, attachment to a primary caregiver is critical for a child to develop empathy and to form future relationships. During the first three years of life, the track is laid in the brain for future emotional, behavioral and social functioning.

Child psychiatrist Dr. Bruce Perry

“Children without touch, stimulation, and nurturing can literally lose the capacity to form any meaningful relationships for the rest of their lives,” writes Dr. Bruce Perry, an internationally recognized authority on brain development and children in crisis. “…There are, however, many millions of children who have some degree of impaired bonding and attachment during early childhood.” How these experiences shape the individual, Perry says, depends upon how early in life, how prolonged, and how severe the emotional neglect has been. So neglect can be as damaging as abuse.

Dr. Perry scientifically explains what Alice Miller has identified. So much more is known now about the brain and its development than when Miller was writing. Dr. Perry’s and Dr. Miller’s observations support the idea that one person can save a child by providing a safe, loving relationship. If no one loves the child, he or she may become a sociopath.

That, too, fits in with the concept of secondary injury, where the damage to a child is compounded because his feelings and his reality are not verified by some adult. Since children have so little understanding of the world, they need to know that what they see or what they feel is valid.

But the question remains, can World War II and the Holocaust be explained by upbringing?

I believe it is only part of the reason, as your psychologist friend suggests. Maybe this question is simply unanswerable…but what seems obvious to me is that we must intervene in the lives of these children at a young age to protect future generations. One program in Harlem, New York has created a school for new parents so that they don’t perpetuate the abuse cycle and they replace cruelty with love for their children. In addition, I’m hoping schools will offer more social education, cultivating empathy and emotional intelligence, thereby inoculating individuals from insensitivity that can lead to crimes against humanity.

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