HOLOCAUST STORIES
One by One: Descendants of the Third Reich
and the Holocaust in Dialogue
By Steve Pfarrar
Daily Hampshire Gazette
November 6, 1997
As a little girl growing up in German-occupied Poland during World War II, Helga Mueller didn’t know much about her father—only that he served in the German army and was "a good person," according to her mother.
Mueller has a much more vivid memory of the day about eight years ago when she obtained some German war records and learned her father had been a high-ranking Gestapo official—and that he was responsible for the execution of some 40,000 Jews, Poles, and Russians in an area of western Russia occupied by the Germans from 1941 to 1944.
"Whatever you know about sadism in World War II, it was written (in those papers)," Mueller said Tuesday night at the University of Massachusetts, where she shared stories with three other people whose lives are inextricably linked to World War II and the Holocaust.
Mueller and her three fellow speakers—Clemens Kalischer of Stockbridge, Gottfried Leich of Germany, and Milena Pribis of Boston—were part of a group known as One by One that brings together the children of Holocaust survivors and German families to try to heal, through dialogue and understanding, the scars left from history’s most staggering case of genocide.
Tuesday’s presentation [11/4/97], sponsored by the UMass Office of Jewish Affairs, was at times frightening and openly emotional, particularly for Mueller, who described the shock, guilt, and suicidal thoughts she experienced when she learned of her father’s past.
"I feel his guilt on me—I’ve carried this burden ever since," she said. "I have sensed (genocide victims) walking through my bedroom."
According to Deborah Roth-Howe of Amherst, a member of One by One, the nonprofit group was started four years ago in Germany by people like Mueller who were struggling with their shame and guilt, and children of Holocaust survivors who had inherited their parents’ legacy of horror, trauma, and distrust.
Now with about 200 members in Germany and the United States, and offices in Berlin and Brookline, One by One sponsors private, small-group "dialogues" in which members share their stories with each other and bare their emotions. There are also public presentations like Tuesday’s program, Roth-Howe said, designed to remind people of the Holocaust and to serve as a model for reconciliation between different opposition groups.
"I grew up in a Jewish family and was told to stay away from all things German," said Roth-Howe, whose German-Jewish parents fled Nazi Germany in the 1930s while other members of their family perished in the Holocaust. "But I’ve since started to reassess a lot of that."
Roth-Howe’s colleagues all had different stories to tell Tuesday night. Pribis was born in the former Czechoslovakia in 1956 to a Polish-Jewish mother who had survived a Nazi death camp, and a Yugoslavian-Lutheran father who had fought the Germans and their allies as a partisan. He was captured at one point and tortured, she said, and for years after the war he woke screaming from nightmares.
"Both my parents were survivors," said Pribis. "They would fight and act out World War II at times. My mother was unpredictable, explosive."
Pribis, who was raised a Lutheran, then lived in Israel before coming to the U.S. She said she’s only recently learned of all the members of her mother’s family who died in the Holocaust, while the still-smoldering ethnic wars in the former Yugoslavia have also left their mark on her. "This organization is the first time in my life all these pieces can come together," she said.
Leich, born in 1929, grew up the son of a Lutheran minister in Germany who "refused the Nazi influence in his church" but didn’t speak against it outside the pulpit. And as a boy, Leich said, he was a product of that seemingly mixed message, a member of the Hitler Youth who was in love with the pageantry of the Nazis: the parades, the rallies, the stories of Germanic knights and heroic military victories.
Leich, a retired Lutheran minister himself, recalled that the day after Kristallnacht in 1938, when German citizens and secret police systematically destroyed Jewish shops, burned synagogues, and attacked German-Jewish citizens, he went into a Jewish shop that people were ransacking and took a flashlight battery. When he showed it to his father, he said his father frowned, but said nothing. Then Leich threw the battery away.
"I’m still trying to understand what happened to me during that time, what happened to our country," said Leich.
And Kalischer, whose German-Jewish family fled Berlin for France in 1933 when he was 12, remembered working in labor camps in France after the Germans occupied the country in 1940. His family narrowly escaped to the U.S. in 1942 by boat, he said, capping a 10-year period where "mentally, I felt hunted and in danger ... the family didn’t discuss it, but I could tell everyone was worried (we’d be sent back to Germany)."
For Mueller, Tuesday’s meeting, though painful to take part in, was part of the long process she’s started in an effort to come to terms with her past. "For years I had avoided World War II—I knew nothing about it," she said. "Then (when) I learned about my father ... I had no one to share my story with. Here, I’ve found a place where I’m welcome."
This article used with permission of the Daily Hampshire Gazette.
Photo: One By One panelists Clemens Kalisher, Gottfried Leich, Milena Pribis, and Helga Mueller speaking at UMass Amherst on November 4, 1997. (Photo by Ken McDonald, Massachusetts Daily Collegian)
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