June 2006
Englewood, New Jersey
“It was a simple ceremony, but romantic.” Mama’s cheeks are flushed with love and the memory of her wedding.
My stomach twists. My father was an SS officer. This is a sentence no sane human wants to hear. Eleven million dead because of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party. Eleven million. There’s no excusing that level of evil.
Everyone knows there’s no such thing as a “good” Nazi—even if the one in question had a Jewish grandmother and fought to help other Jews emigrate to safety. Karl von Strassberg denied his heritage. He hid behind his uniform. He was part of the machine.
“Do you have a picture of him?”
She pulls a photo from the box, traces his face tenderly with a finger before handing the photo to me. It’s the same one that had me shaking this morning on the floor of her bedroom.
“I look like him.”
Her eyes fill with tears. “Yes, darling. You do.”
I understand now why she never remarried. There have been a handful of men in my mother’s life over the years, but nothing approaching the love I see in her face.
“He sounds … extraordinary.” My careful wording brings both understanding and pain to her gaze.
“Karl was trapped,” she says, “by circumstance and the choices he’d made as a young man. But he tried to atone. He thought he could change things.” Her good hand covers her heart and taps it, as if in need of soothing. “He risked his life to save others. You must believe me.”
I nod, giving in to the need, the pain, in her voice.
I understand why she’d never spoken of my father, an SS Gruppenführer—and perhaps, why she kept our Jewish heritage a secret. My mother spent most of her adult life attempting to forget her past in its entirety, and then trying to forgive herself for doing just that.
How can you share such details with a ten-year-old, or a teenager? How do you try to explain your past in shades of gray to that child, when all a child is capable of understanding is black and white? Even the smallest revelation would have prompted an avalanche of questions from me, ones she wasn’t prepared to answer.
As for friends and neighbors … I understand, now, why my mother was so fiercely independent. Never accepting help from others, she was always hustling, ever busy, and singularly focused on giving me the best possible life. But always alone.
My heart aches for the enormity of her burden, and for our shared history—our heritage—lost to those secrets for nearly seventy years.
Mama squeezes my hand with a bony ferocity that makes me wince. “There was never a right time to talk about any of these things. When you were small, it was out of the question. Should I have told you in high school? Or before you were married? Or once you’d had children of your own?” She shakes her head. “As the years passed, I found more excuses. I committed the same sin my aunt and uncle did.”
Yes. She had. But I accept why she did it.
Now, for the sake of my sanity, I must know the rest. And I owe it to her to listen.
“I need to know more about my father, and how he helped you save those children, the ones at Hochland Home. And what became of him … in the end.” Maybe that will help me understand.
My question brings another radiant smile to her lips. “Their recovery was remarkable, a miracle. The children taught me to never underestimate the human capacity to heal, even under the most difficult circumstances.”