Germans

I heard a story today that I cannot get out of my mind. Harry was talking to a "local" in Marathon (where our motel is) and the gentleman told him about his landlord who is a resident and who was a child during WWII. This man is a guest speaker who shares his experience during the Holocaust. When he was a preteen living in Budapest, the Germans invaded and he remembers his father gathering the family together and being told that they could drink a solution that would put them to sleep. It was poison. This man chose to take his chances so his family took him to a local Catholic Church in the hope of protecting him. The Nazis eventually entered the church and when the head nun tried to prevent them from interfering with the children, she was machine gunned down. The Nazis told the male children to drop their pants and those that were circumcised were tied together with wire and led to the edge of the local river, which was frozen. The children were machine gunned. This man was the only survivor and because he was covered with blood from the others, was left on the ice for dead. He awoke a few days later, very ill, at a Red Cross station. Eventually the Russians invaded Budapest and he was able to escape and survive. I do not know the other details of his family.

These stories are certainly out of our realm of reality. But, as we know, they were common.

We have numerous German guests at our motel. I have had to address my prejudices and feelings on numerous occasions. If a German male is abrupt and sharp in our interactions, I bristle. Last week a family with two teenage boys were guests and I was helping one of the boys figure out an electrical converter. He was a sweet boy, but I couldn't help myself from thinking that a couple generations ago, he could have been a naive teenage Aryan guard in the German Army ordered to send thousands of people to their deaths in a gas chamber. I was shocked at my thought process!

Maybe I am more aware of these feelings because my husband is Jewish, or because my father fought in WWII. I know that no one today is responsible for the sins of their fathers but in my gut, if I am really honest with myself, I still feel a slight discomfort when a guest speaks with a German accent or announces where he is visiting from. I wonder if they feel a discomfort also? If I were less of a WASP, and more like my husband, I would probably ask them! But, I behave politely and graciously while harboring my ugly thoughts! I know that time will erase all of these negative vibes, and my kids most likely do not even have the same feelings associated with a people like I do. What I do hope for our country, is that we never forget and casually slip back into our typical American complacency. How did we not know what was happening in Europe, and how did we not care?