I wrote this post in 2010. My Father didn't want me to publish it at that time, for the same reason he didn't want to publish the two books he'd written about his life as a half-Jew in Germany during WWII - he thought no one would be interested and he was very uncomfortable drawing any attention to himself.
In retrospect, now that he's gone, I think there's another reason Dad refused to tell his own Story (but wanted me to tell it after his death): Dad suffered from survivor's guilt.
I am now Dad's voice and I am finally (FINALLY!) getting down to the business of writing his story. If I were to do some self-reflection on my reluctance to get started with that story for the past two years, I think I'd realize that Dad passed some of that survivor's guilt on to me, and now I feel immense pressure to tell it right, just as he would have. I need to let go of that pressure, of those unspoken rules, and just tell his story and my story, in my own words. I need to allow myself that freedom, something that I find extremely difficult because dammit, I keep hearing Dad's voice in my ears, telling me to get it right.
Going through the thousands and thousands of pages of Dad's writings is the first step. Part of that process will likely be to blog about what I find. Maybe speaking to a very small audience first will help my own apprehension about speaking to a bigger, unknown audience.
My father recently turned 82. Lately he’s been very busy focusing on something he previously didn’t want to focus on: his past. As I was growing up in the late 50’s, 60’s, and 70’s, my dad was busy doing what other American families did – working, parenting, and simply doing what had to be done each day as a father, husband, head of a household, and employee. The past was the past back then.
Now, my father’s past is a lesson for our future. As more and more people who lived through World War II die, it becomes more and more important that their stories be told.
In 1979, prodded in part by his children’s incessant questions and curiosity about his past as a “mischling” (or “half-Jew”) in World War II Germany, my father wrote a book called The Longest Year in the Young Life of Peter Bauer (a pseudonym for himself, as telling the story in the third person was easier for Dad). That book has never been published, as he wrote it simply for his children – and now there’s been a new “printing” for his grandchildren.
This book describes my father’s life in 1944/1945 when, essentially, “all hell had broken loose” for him and his family. His father, a Jew, had married a non-Jew in 1919. It was my grandmother who, by her very existence, protected her husband and children from persecution by the Nazis.
Although my grandfather’s Jewish heritage had already stripped him of his job as the Vice President of a private bank and of his position (but not his title) as Vice Consul to Portugal, his fate at that point was not that of many Jews in Germany, surely due to his Aryan wife and his minor “half-breed” children. That story is told in my father’s first book. Here is the first page of that book, an introduction for my brothers and me.
I have asked my father whether he’d consider publishing The Longest year in the Young Life of Peter Bauer, and his answer has always been modest and self-effacing – “Oh, no one else really cares about the heart of a 16-year-old mischling…” (because the book is at least as much about my father’s developing “soul of a poet and mind of an engineer” as it is about wartime Germany), but perhaps he will consider publishing it if his children and grandchildren continue to stress the importance of his memories.
A few years ago, my 82-year-old father sent his grandchildren an e-mail saying, in essence, “OK, I’m ready to answer all those questions I didn’t answer for my children or for you previously. Ask me!”
And they did – as did I, thrilled that he was finally so willing to tell those stories that, when I was growing up, he’d only reluctantly tell when he was captive in the car on the way to Lake Tahoe or on those rare occasions when a story from his past would bubble up and he couldn’t resist telling us. Those stories, though, were usually happy and funny memories of Dad’s life before the Nazi regime – stories like the one about the Christmas when Dad and his older brother stole their little sister’s favorite doll while she was napping and when she awoke they tormented her as they pulled a slightly burnt gingerbread man out of the oven, explaining that they’d put her doll in the oven just to see what would happen…
But I digress.
So in answer to his grandchildren’s questions, Opa spent the past few weeks again at his computer (because he is exceptionally tech-savvy for an 82-year-old… gotta love it!), and when I arrived in Ashland over Christmas vacation, there was a binder with a 66-page memoir waiting for me in my room. Needless to say, I didn’t get much sleep that night, as I devoured every word, so grateful that Dad is finally willing – and even eager – to talk about the poignant, and often painful, memories of his youth.
Again, Dad doesn’t think that his memories warrant publishing, but he has agreed to allow me to share some excerpts here. Last time I visited I methodically photographed almost every photo I found in his albums on the shelf in the guestroom, so I’ll include some of those here as well.
Dad didn’t list questions from his grandchildren and answer each one. Instead he created a chronological narrative with headings.
(Just a quick note here: I have a copyright notice on my blog, which I normally don’t enforce all that stringently. In the case of my father’s writings, however, I am adamant: these are HIS words and photos and he has been gracious enough to allow me to share them on my blog – reluctantly, I might add. Please do NOT copy them for any purpose, anywhere. Thanks!)
The Early Years
“My father had been brought up Jewish, the oldest of initially four brothers. My grandfather died when my father was 10, so it fell to him to raise his three younger brothers in a fatherless family. The second oldest died at the young age of 21. I know really nothing about him, beyond that he, too, was a bank employee when he died in 1909. I have tried for years to learn something about him, but I have been utterly unsuccessful in digging up any information on him, what he did, where he was from, etc. Nobody even has a single picture of him. Any possible documents about him were either destroyed by the Nazis (because he was Jewish), or by the bombs in Cologne, where my father was born.”
