As part of the activities around International Women’s Day, I attended an event billed as “Conversations about Race, Gender and Sexuality.” An implicit sentiment that bounced around the room that was finally stated explicitly, was “You will never know how it feels to be **********, you will never know what it is to be *********.” I was immediately overcome by a wave of sadness.
Of course the statement, “you’ll never know…” is true. Neurologist Antonio Damasio even makes a convincing case that no two people can ever share a single thought in exactly the same way, much less share a common experience or existence in a manner identical to both people. But the way the thought was expressed, it was as if there was an eleted phrase at the end of the sentence: “...so don’t even try.” As I continued to think about that “conversation” throughout the next day, I could not shake the implications of “not trying” to understand another person regardless of the label that might be attached to their being. That is because, if that were the case for everyone that it is pointless to try to understand another, I would not exist.
My family history is a long one, spanning several hundred years, five countries and two continents. My father’s side of the family was Wolgadeutsche, Germans who accepted grants of land and emigrated to Russia in the late 1700’s to escape religious persecution. Several generations later, my grandmother’s husband, refused to join the Red army, for which he was drawn and quartered and his farm burned to the ground. They pointed my grandmother and her children to the west, and they walked the thousand miles from Kukes in the Volga Autonomous Region to a refugee camp in Krakow, Poland. There she heard that a schoolmate was working for the railroad in America, and wrote him with a proposal of marriage. He sent tickets for passage for her and the one son who had survived the exodus from Kukes. My father was their first child. They lived in a poor neighborhood in Lincoln Nebraska called “Russian Bottoms.” It was so named because of all of the Wolgadeutsche who lived there and because it lay low alongside the Platte River and often flooded in spring with the winter thaw.
My father entered elementary school hardly speaking a word of English, for the 18th century alt-Fränkisch dialect of German was the language spoken at home. The children from Russian Bottoms were the social pariahs at school, due to their poverty, appearance and language. They were very distinctly “other.” When World War II came along, he was eventually drafted into the army and served in the European Theater. Because of his knack with German dialects, his skills as an interpreter led him to remain in Germany for a couple of years after the surrender of Germany.
My mother was born a world away from Lincoln, Nebraska in Naples, Italy, of a German father and an Italian mother. Her early life was filled with happiness until her younger brother died horribly at the age of four. My grandmother sank into a depression that ended when she succumbed to tuberculosis. My mother was only twelve. With the rising tide of nationalistic fascist fervor in Italy, and with the loss of legal standing due to his wife’s death, my grandfather took my mother home with him to Altdorf bei Nürnberg. My mother entered school speaking only limited German, as her primary language was Italian. She was advanced two grades so that she could be helped by a cousin who was two years older than she. As a result, she finished Hauptschule at age fifteen, and started to work as a draftswoman at a construction firm in nearby Nürnberg.
One of her cousins was conscripted into the German Army and fought on die Ostfront. I don’t know much about his thoughts or actions, but I do have a photo album that contains photos that he took at that time. The album begins with tourist shots that his parents took of their travels. Then there are the formal portraits of their son in uniform, and the candid shots of his comrades. And then there are the photos from the front. The last photo in the book is of Russian peasants in the doorway of a farmhouse, surrounded by soldiers. The angle from which the photo was taken would imply that the photo was taken surreptitiously, with the camera held low by the hip. By the garb and surroundings, this easily could have been from the area where the Wolgadeutsche lived. (see photo above)
In 1941, my mother was sent from home to make her own way. A secretary who had befriended my mother at the construction company helped her find a small apartment, and my mother was “adopted” by this new extended family. The secretary and her sister, an opera singer, lived together. The shortage of men after World War I made this a common occurrence in Germany. My mother spent much of her time there. It was an active social sphere, with the brother of the sisters (himself a concert pianist who taught at the Nürnberg Conservatory), several writers and artists frequenting the sisters’ abode. At one point, around 1943, my mother arrived to work to find her friend in tears. Her friend told her that it was too dangerous for my mother to continue visiting them, for they were “Halbe Juden” (Half Jews) and now the Gestapo were coming for the Halbe Juden. My mother told her, “No one tells me who can be my friends.” They continued as before, and my mother moved in with the two sisters after her own apartment building was destroyed in the air raids of January 2, 1945.
It was shortly after the war that my parents met in Altdorf bei Nürnberg. My father came to Altdorf as a member of the forces that had destroyed her home. He was from an ethnic group that the German army tried to destroy. As an interpreter for the Stars and Stripes newspaper, he knew full well what the Nazis had done. The Nuremberg Trials were already underway, yet his letters home to his mother were filled with pleas for her and her neighbors to send food and clothing “because these people have nothing. They are worse off than we were [sic: during the Depression], and winter is coming.” My mother saw beyond his uniform, and he beyond her citizenship and family relationships. And only because of that ability to see the person rather than the label, do I sit here typing tonight.
I was raised to believe that no one is the captive of their history, so looking at someone’s history may inform you as to where they have been, but it does not inform you as to where they are going. I was raised to believe (as one of the Nürnberg sisters counseled) that “You don’t judge a person by their family but by their friends… because they didn’t get to choose their family.” I was raised to believe that the best of what we can be is miraculous indeed; but we are capable of great evil when we listen to the darker angels in our midst.
And so, what I wonder is this: Can we have discussions about things that are meaningful without weighing one person’s suffering against another’s on some perverted butcher’s scale? Can we find ways to keep our history close enough that we can learn its lessons, while keeping it far enough away to remove its pain? Can we see within our experience the core of someone else’s experience? In order to do that, we must be able to share our experiences, even though we know that no one else can ever truly know our experience. If we can do this, we may well find that the solution for one may well be the solution for many.
So… can we talk?