Love and understanding: The things we owe one another

Reconciling with the past

I have tried to start this piece of writing many times. In some ways, it feels like I’ve been trying to get these words right for my entire life. Now, more than ever, it seems imperative that I manage.

My grandparents, from Slovenia and from Austria, immigrated to Canada following the events of the Second World War.

When I was in the 10th grade, many of my peers in my history class were learning of the Second World War and its unimaginable atrocities for the first time. I watched horror transfigure their faces, I heard them ask one another in hushed voices, “How could this have happened?” I sunk lower and lower in my seat, dreading the moment when they would realize from where my last name comes. Sure enough, my friend turned to me and asked, “Sierra, aren’t you German?”

I can’t speak for every individual born of German and Austrian descent, but I would bet that most feel what Carl Jung calls “German Collective Guilt.”

I, like children born in Germany, was raised to know the events of the early- to mid-20th century and to understand culpability. To me, it isn’t a question of whether I personally ought or ought not to feel guilt. It exists above rationality, above emotions. The fact is and remains (for most individuals of Germanic descent) that my family members were more than likely at least complicit in the actions of the National Socialist Party, and were thus participants in a mass genocide that murdered, in a conservative guess, eight million people.

It is so hard to reconcile the images of my Omi and Opa—kind, hardworking, resilient immigrants—with utmost barbarism. My Omi, who made the best canadles, who didn’t have just a green thumb, but two entire green hands, and who saved funds for each of her grandchildren’s educations; and my Opa, a lover of cardgames, a man with an infectious laugh and a penchant for Schnapps, whose favourite photo was one of him driving the tractor with an infant version of me sitting on his lap—those are my grandparents. But, for all the love and goodness in their hearts, it doesn’t change the fact that the events that befell the years of 1939 to 1945 were never mentioned in my father’s household while he grew up.

My point is this: The most dangerous part of the Second World War and The Holocaust was not the callous violence of those who believed so firmly in the Nazi party. The greatest danger lay in the everyday citizens who turned a blind eye to to the slowly growing, unimaginable horror. The everyday citizens who believed in their biological, racial, and theological superiority. The everyday citizens who heard whispers of death camps but dismissed them as rumours. The everyday citizens who actively accepted their reality and wiped their hands clean of guilt because they weren’t the ones murdering eight million innocent people.

I, and others with names like mine, from places like me, carry a debt. Everyone in a position of privilege does. I will not act as my forbearers did and watch violence befall minorities. Now, more than ever, we must remember that which makes us human: love, compassion, understanding. We must protect one another.

We all said “Never again.” We should keep that promise.

Photo courtesy of US National Archives via Public-Domain.