Healing Holocaust Scars
Nazis and descendants, survivors and their children work for understanding
By Nick Grabbe
Daily Hampshire Gazette
April 16, 2005
AMHERST - When Martina Emme was growing up in Germany in the 1960s, she felt she wasn't allowed to ask questions about World War II.
The granddaughter of a Nazi soldier, she now helps heal lingering wounds of war through conversation with the descendants of Holocaust survivors. Five members of her group, called One by One, were at the University of Massachusetts this week.
''Everything connected with the past was something bad, something painful, so one shouldn't mention it,'' she said. ''Now the only people I feel close to are the people who want to find the truth.''
The visit to UMass was sponsored by the Office of Jewish Affairs, which marks its 10th anniversary this month. One by One has lessons to teach about conflict resolution on campus, said director Larry Goldbaum.
''It provides a powerful model of how former adversaries can move beyond their hatred and find reconciliation, and in this case, even friendship and healing,'' he said.
Emme said she was shocked when she recognized her beloved grandfather's handwriting, which she remembered from birthday cards, on letters he had sent home from Russia during the war. In them, he used anti-Semitic language to describe sympathetically the destruction of a Jewish village in Lithuania.
''That village is where my father's family was killed,'' said Rosalie Gerut, another member of the group.
Emme, 46, who lives in Berlin, Germany, said she now feels closer to Gerut than to her own family, and considers herself the ''godaunt'' of Gerut's daughter.
''My whole life I've been searching to take away the pain and the heaviness,'' said Gerut, who lives in Sudbury. The daughter of Holocaust survivors, she found that talking with descendants of Nazis - and hugging them and crying with them - lightened her burdens, she said.
Otto-Ernst Duscheleit of Germany, now 80, was pressured into joining the Waffen-SS at 17 and participated in the withdrawal from Russia as a radio technician in 1943 and 1945. Startled by a dream 20 years ago, he began to write about what he had seen.
He saw villages burning every night. But unlike his brother, who shot himself while awaiting transport to a penal colony, he didn't question what he was doing.
''I don't want to excuse anything I did, but I didn't commit criminal acts,'' he said through a translator. ''I feel guilty the most about the fact that in contrast to my brother, I was so compliant, so uncritical and followed all orders.''
In addition to his conversations with descendants of Holocaust survivors, Duscheleit talks to neo-Nazi groups about what life was really like under the Nazis. Sometimes, he says, the neo-Nazis shout ''Traitor!'' at him.
Zella Brown, who was born in a displaced-persons camp in Germany in 1947, inherited from her survivor parents feelings of distrust, rage, being unsafe and even an aversion to trains. She lived in Israel as a girl and now lives in Stoughton.
''The word 'German' in my house was evil incarnate, the monsters in my dreams,'' she said. When she realized she was passing this prejudice on to her own children (''Don't buy BMWs'') she remembered that Nazis told Germans not to patronize Jewish stores.
''We were doing the same damn thing,'' she said. ''It was a catharsis. Today, my best friends are German, and I go on vacation only to Germany.''
Brown's father, who was in a concentration camp for four years, used to show her a photograph of bodies piled up there. Through One by One, she showed the old photo to Marga Dieter, who was born in Germany in 1939, the year the war started.
''Something inside me cracked,'' Dieter said. ''This was so real, these were her people. I held her hand and knew we were the same. The world as I knew it was changed.''
Dieter recalled coming to the U.S. in 1961 and meeting a man at a party who became enraged when he heard she was German. Now a teacher in Brookline, she is writing a novel about German mothers and children during the war.
One by One, which is based in Brookline and Berlin, started about 12 years ago as a way to achieve personal transformation through dialogue between the descendants of Nazis and Jewish survivors. Members often speak in schools. A branch is now forming in Peru, where members and victims of the Shining Path revolutionary group often live near each other.
Elizabeth Trahan of Amherst, a Holocaust survivor, said she was reluctant to attend the One by One presentation at UMass, which drew over 100 people. But she went.
''It was very good, primarily for the young people there,'' she said. ''This should continue, even though it's a minuscule effort considering the enormity of the problem and the revival of anti-Semitism everywhere. I was very moved at the earnestness and dedication and wondered at the pain they must feel. I thought it might be tinged with guilt, masochism or voyeurism, but it seemed very genuine.''
This article used with permission of the Daily Hampshire Gazette.
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