My Grandmother's War
Lately I’ve been thinking about my grandmother. She was a lady. By that I mean a number of things; like, until the end of her life she refused to wear old lady clothes, drove everywhere, and the last book she was reading at the time of her death was literary history. She loved the ballet and opera, and in fact was the person who introduced me to ballet, which I would come to love all my life. She had been a child refugee from Germany during World War II, one of the select number of Jewish children who were allowed into England. After the war, she taught herself French, and volunteered at a Jewish orphanage in France. She volunteered as an usher at the Old Vic, in order to see as many Shakespeare plays as she could. Later in life, after she was married, she would go to college for the first time, to study English Literature. Our family in Germany included the nineteenth century author Lion Feuchtwanger; and to her, I believe he was a symbol of the cultural life her family had cherished before the war.
I will never know if her stringent sense of propriety came from her Germanness, or Englishness, or some combination of both. Just as her accent, nearly English, was also indefinably something else. She thought women’s sandals were the height of crude exposure of one’s toes, for example, and that form-fitting clothes were not much better than going naked. I once overheard her on the phone during a distressing customer service call, in which she cried out, “You’re a very rude man!” There could be nothing worse.
Yet none of these things are the reason I’ve been thinking of her these last few weeks. Instead, what recurs is a particular memory: Her telling me that when she was eighteen, she had wanted to go and fight in Israel’s war of independence. I recall pushing back, saying something incredulous. The idea of my dainty grandmother with a gun, participating in a war, seemed impossible.
She was serious. “I wanted to go and fight,” she said. “I would have. My father begged me not to go.”
Her father. This was the most I had heard of him. After the war, I now think, he was broken. He had gotten out of Germany, to England, to join his young daughters. The plan was to get his wife and their two babies out of Germany. My grandmother used to keep a pile of letters her mother had written to her father, from Germany. No other trace of her survives. My impression is: at some point, the letters ceased. Now, the only question is not whether my grandmother’s mother and baby brother and sister perished in a Nazi camp, but which one.
With this in mind, it’s hardly surprising that my grandmother’s father begged her not to go to war. Nor that she relented.
I’ve been thinking about this precisely because my grandmother had seemed the last person to fight in a war. I had found it impossible to picture. But in my attempts to picture it, there was something I had not accounted for: The world in which she lived.
In my grandmother’s world, what had been a stable home, with parents who had gone to Venice for their honeymoon, dissolved to ashes. (Perhaps literally: their house in Frankfurt is gone, poured concrete where it stood.) Their neighbors, their non-Jewish friends had turned on them during Kristallnacht. And then, globally, something else happened. My grandmother had had a front row seat to how the world responded to the Holocaust. She was witness to the way the western world, from the U.S. to Australia, refused to take a single Jewish refugee. (England’s agreement to take a token number of children was an exception.) For her, the S.S. Saint Louis was not a detail in history books, but emblematic of a world that preferred to let Jews be murdered than take them in. A world that told them “Go back to Palestine!” but refused them entry to Palestine.
In her world, hatred of Jews was the norm, not the exception. She might have felt that her children, and their children, were spared this knowledge. After all, by the time I was born, the world had changed. Most seemed to agree, by then, that the Holocaust was bad. Never mind that Jews could have been saved. They hadn’t, and that was sad. Schindler’s List won some Oscars.
Then October 7th happened, and much of the world celebrated, from Times Square, to London, to Black Lives Matter. They celebrated Jewish families tortured, raped, mutilated, burned alive, and abducted. Closer to home, friends of mine turned away. Suddenly quiet. And in the weeks that followed, as I grieved publicly, their silence sent a pointed message. Maybe they weren’t celebrating, but, well. There were, after all, reasons this had happened. If I were a reasonable person, like them, I would see that.
While attempting to come to terms with this new world, images running through my head of horrors I had never before imagined, while now acquainted with the true faces of these “friends,” I feel as if I have some taste of the reality my grandmother experienced, however slight. As I struggle to find my balance in this new world, I think of her. Of course she wanted to go to war, and fight for the survival of her people. She knew—had seen firsthand—how precarious was that survival. And how no one would care if the worst happened. The worst had happened, and the world had collaborated in allowing it.
She knew that no one will come to save us but ourselves.