FOR ALL THE ONES TAKEN

Last summer I had a conversation with a wine grower in my native Germany.
“Our family has been living and working on this vineyard for four hundred years,” he told me.
I am in awe. I think of my own family: five generations, four different countries, four different languages, cultures. My Catholic, Polish paternal grandparents moved to Germany at the beginning of the 20th century. I myself, born shortly after WW2, immigrated to Canada as a student. Of my Canadian born children, my oldest son made Aliyah to Israel after he had officially converted to his father’s Jewish faith. He is a rabbi in Jerusalem now.
I played with hordes of kids in the rubble in Duesseldorf, We shared our apartment with a refugee family; I shared a room with my two brothers. My three children each had a room of their own in our spacious house in Kingston. They played on the shore of Lake Ontario, a lake so big that all of Israel would fit into it. When I told this to my Israeli grandchildren, they exclaimed: “Wow, Israel must be big!” My four granddaughters, again, share a room in their Jerusalem apartment, the boy sleeps with his parents. The children play with hordes of kids in the alleyways of this ancient city.
As a child, I wore skirts and dresses. My daughter wore mostly pants; my granddaughters now don skirts, shirts and dresses that cover knees and elbows.
When “my Israelis” come to visit us here in Canada in the summer at our cottage by a pristine lake, all generations jump into the water, enjoying nature and the coming together of our diverse family. Three languages echo across the lake. Hebrew, when the children shout to each other, English in a joint conversation or joyful shouting match. My little Israelis doze off at night to the gentle sound of German lullabies.
Seven year old Hallel asks: “Do you have border patrol for your big property?” It hurts to have a seven-year-old child think in these terms, though I understand where she is coming from. “The people in the country next to you? Are they your enemies?”
“No, we don’t always agree, but we are not enemies.”
“In Israel we have enemies; sometimes I am scared at night, and want to sleep with the window closed.” I feel heavy around the heart.

When I was a child, there were many reminders of the past war: ruins, rubble, duds, damaged infrastructure, maimed people hobbling on their crutches, room on the mantle piece for pictures of the war-dead of the family only. Yet somehow I believed that all bad things had happened before my time. The ruins were our playground; when I heard no bombs had fallen in America, I was sad. Where would the American children play, then? Anecdotes of miraculous survival were more frequent than tales of terror and destruction. Though I was shocked and haunted by images of concentration camps, I heard all too often: That was then, this is now. Our parents’ generation fervently wanted a sane, safe and secure world for us removed from the horrors of the recent past.They wanted their children to be innocent-- for better or for worse.
My grandchildren have no reason to assume that everything bad happened before their time. But still, they live their happy lives, structured by every day routine, the week culminating in Shabbat and frequent religious holidays each with its own colorful story and almost magical rituals.
The street games of Israeli kids resemble those of my childhood, unlike the past times of most children in Western developed countries nowadays which are structured to the extreme.
On Friday night at dusk in Jerusalem, I am fascinated by hordes of children appearing outside clad in Shabbat clothing; little fairy tale figures: the girls in their festive, often frilly dresses, the boys in their white shirts, which soon hang halfway out of their black pants when they run and play. Yarmulkes sail from boys’ heads and are expertly caught and put back on.
I watch young children looking after younger ones. Seven year old Hallel takes two year old Moriah piggy back and makes very clear to her she has to keep quiet during hide and seek.
One Friday night I sat next to an old lady on a bench.
“How does Hallel manage to keep Moriah still?” I wonder. The old lady takes a deep breath: “If the little one makes a noise, the two of them will just be found by their playmates. We…we had to keep my little brother quiet so that the Gestapo wouldn’t find us—for three years we had to keep quiet—. My little cousin… his mother suffocated him when she could couldn’t keep him still… in order to save her other children. And now I love watching these kids play their harmless hiding game.” I, moved to the core, gently, touch her hand.
A boy is racing by on his bike.
“Riding a bike on Shabbat is mukse,(not permitted)” five year old Maayan explains.
“Why?”
“He might have to fix the chain. Fixing is work. No work on Shabbat. I’ll ride on Sunday again.”
From all the rules, all the mitzvahs they have to follow, the children learn appreciation, restraint and self-discipline. Our children love to draw. It’s forbidden to hold a pen on Shabbat. So they create interesting lego structures and play with their bubbas, their stuffed animals. Any kind of making a fire or spark: turning electricity on and off as well as driving or telephoning is off limits for Orthodox Jews on Shabbat, I learned early on. Yet any law may be broken if it means respecting a more important one: such as protecting a life, for example, calling for a taxi when the mother is in labour.
Some laws make less sense to me than others. No toilet paper torn off the roll?! Odd. Nothing should be ripped apart on Shabbat, the children explain to me.
On the Seventh Day thou shall rest: I have come to appreciate this. Heavenly peace on Shabbat. No talk about problems or money, no rushing around. Family time. Tasty meals embroidered by rituals which the children know so well and are happy to guide their Safta through.
Children take the world and culture they live in for granted.
“When are we going to be blessed with a large family?” nine year old Hadas wants to know after the birth of her 4th sibling. I gasp.
Yet, my grandchildren, like all other kids, love individual attention. I do a special outing with each child each visit. These times are precious.
During a recent visit I took six year old Maayan to the playground in Gan Sacher. Suddenly a class of Arab Israeli girls, first Grade, I would guess. Down the slides, hanging from the monkey bars, climbing onto the swinging basket. Maayan seemed overwhelmed.
“There is a free swing , hurry,” I encouraged her. She raced a little Arab girl to the swing. They shove each other. The other girl trips, cries, clutches her knee. Maayan mounts the swing, jumps off and squats next to the crying girl. She then runs to me. “We’ve got pretty band aids, right?”

On the last day of my recent visit ten year old Hadas asked me about Nazis who killed so many Jews in the Shoah.
“You are from Germany, Omannette?!” I attempted to explain the unexplainable to her. Her reaction similar to that of my children when I tried to talk about Germany’s dark past to them. Hadas wanted to know if our family, my parents, had been Nazis and done bad things to Jews. I assured her that Opa had crossed his name from the Nazi party list on which he was automatically put by his employer, and he consequently lost his job. Then I showed her a brass plate hanging on the wall with Hebrew writing on it. It had been a present to my mother from a Jewish couple who tried in vain to immigrate to Israel.
“They brought her this plate as a thank-you for letting them live at her place even though the Nazis told her not to.”
“Did they live? Did Oma save them?”
“No, the Nazis caught them in Holland.”
“Why do so many people in the world not like the Jews and hate them?” Her big brown eyes shine with sadness. “So many have tried to kill us, again and again.”
I search for an answer I know I will not find. Suddenly the other kids bounce into the room. “Yoel can walk!” He hobbles towards Hadas. She beams.
Touched at the core, I look around me. My Jewish grandchildren. Jewish children. For all the ones taken, I have given some precious ones back.

TO FIND THE RAVENS (synopsis)

The novel is a fictionalized autobiographical account of a Canadian woman, born in Germany. It shows Bettina’s struggle to come to terms with the complexities of Germany’s problematic past. Bettina was born in Germany in 1946, but as a young woman left her country of origin to live in North America, first in the U.S. then in Canada. She married an American man of Jewish origin. Her physical distance from her native country as well as her older son’s increasingly Jewish identity and growing awareness of Germany’s devastating history of the Third Reich, have added to her own strong ambivalence towards her native land.

In December 1989, a month after the opening of the Berlin Wall, Bettina travels back
to Germany, accompanied by her three children: Leon (12), Jonathan (9), and Jessica (6).
This proves to be a journey of psychological and emotional intensity. With the Berlin Wall
crumbling, Bettina senses a possibility for other “walls” to come down, walls not too securely
erected in the psyches of the German people during the early post war period. They had been
erected to block from view the suffering inflicted by the Nazis .The novel examines the
traumata experienced by some ordinary Germans and culminates in the focus on the Jewish
victims of the Holocaust and the struggle of individual Germans with the more than shameful past of their country...

Significant memories from her early childhood, triggered by events immediately following the collapse of the Berlin Wall, are resurrected. They include encounters with a kaleidoscope of characters: an emotionally destroyed German war veteran suffering from post-traumatic stress; a housekeeper who lost several brothers in the war and is convinced Hitler is still alive; a woman who, confused by the conflicting ideologies at home and in public life, has turned to prostitution; and another woman who had been driven to infanticide. The reader is witness to Bettina’s emotional upheaval after a beloved father figure from her childhood is exposed as a former SS officer. The reader witnesses her moving encounter with a young Jewish girl who reluctantly lives in Germany. Brought back to life are the stories of a young German boy whose longing to re-unite with his veteran Afro-American father has tragic consequences, and of Bettina’s own grandmother, who in her Alzheimer dementia, believes a soccer game to be a Nazi assembly. Finally, we meet Bettina’s history teacher who is tormented by the fact that she has to teach year after year about the Nazi regime of which she was a willing and naïve supporter.
These characters and their stories together exemplify the confusion, crushed hopes and stripped illusions, the sufferings and wrongdoings, the denial and insights of those whose life was forever shaped by the Nazi experience – of all those human beings who lived in the Third Reich, some in the limelight and some in its deep shadows.

The child Bettina used to dig in the rubble for remnants and “…treasures mostly broken. It was almost impossible to find anything undamaged.” The adult Bettina digs deeper and deeper in the rubble of memories. She initially confronts the people only in her mind, in internal dialogues, the “safer” way of exploring. She then realizes she has to take on the risk of confronting real-life individuals, often prompted by her son’s probing questions.

As confrontations mount, there arises the dilemma of one who feels compelled to scrutinize and therefore hurt those who have never personally caused her any harm. Hers are the dilemmas and scruples of one who “didn’t live through it all,” but is nevertheless deeply affected by the fallout. Though not personally responsible for what happened, she feels a responsibility to expose, to tear down walls or at least poke holes into them. She struggles with her right to expose tragic flaws that led to the communal failure of a people – including her parents, who had raised her with love and care.

Bettina comes to understand that the driving forces which enable human beings to surpass limitations and limits, and give them wings to fly, can also, as with the Germans of the Third Reich, deliver us to evil and rob us of our humanity. She, the native German, reaches for her share, not of communal guilt but of communal shame. She embraces the responsibilities that arise from this. She comes to realize that her strong ambivalence towards her country of origin is not something to suppress or overcome, but to acknowledge and accept. For Bettina, this is not merely a desirable option but the only one that is emotionally and morally possible.

Annette Weisberg

( If you are interested in obtaining a copy of this novel, please contact me at: weisbergann@hotmail.com)

BEDTIME RITUAL

BED TIME RITUAL

by Omannette--written for Hadas when she was two years old.

She's had a busy day
Her abba tells me
Who took her for a walk
Just before bedtime
'lellow car 'she says
'Scary dog!'
And now she's ready
For her bed time songs.

Abba leaves the room
So it's just us
'Kommt ein Vogel geflogen'
The song of the messenger bird
Carrying words of love
To the one far away.
We sing
In a language
That for her
Still is only a language of lullabies
And I wish
I could keep it that way.
I hear her soft breath
And feel her relax.
Between songs
She talks about
Lellow car and scary dog
I bark for her
And she laughs
So it can't have been
All that scary.
It's bed time, Hadas,
No more barking
Just singing.
Sometimes her Abba holds her
When we sing
And her eyes in slow motion
Close
Yet open again
Because she wants
to be the one
to push the button
on the telephone,
Send back that messenger bird
Carrying words of love
From 6000 miles away.