The Long Silence
I am the granddaughter of an Auschwitz perpetrator.
Whenever I want to speak about my grandfather, contradictions arise in me: "That is not important because it was so long ago." "Nobody is interested in that." "What do I have to do with it? I never even met my grandfather."
On the other hand it is healing for me to share my thoughts, my experiences, my strong emotions with others, so that I do not feel alone with all that is within me. It is a great gift when there is someone who takes interest and listens with an open heart.
I am the granddaughter of Wilhelm Boger. However, I never knew him personally. My father is a son of his first marriage. Almost everything that I know about Wilhelm Boger I learned from books and the internet. He was in prison, and died when I was 7 years old. I do not know why I never asked questions about him. My father kept visiting his father in prison and I never knew. In my family there is complete silence about my grandfather.
When I was fourteen or fifteen years old, we spoke about the Holocaust in school. One of my teachers told us that his grandfather had died in a concentration camp. I was very shocked, and talked about it with my mother at home. She said, "Your grandfather was also in Auschwitz, but as a perpetrator." That was all she said. I felt the floor falling out from under my feet. For nights I had bad nightmares. I did not know who I could speak to about it. I feared that if I would speak about my grandfather in school, everyone would hate me. And at home there hung a thick "cloud of silence" about the topic. So I also remained silent, and felt very much alone and burdened with this knowledge. Ten years later, my brother told me in a phone conversation that there was a book documenting what happened at Auschwitz, in which my Grandfather was one of the culprits. I borrowed this book from a library. To read the stories of the surviving victims must be an absolute horror for anyone who reads it. What was revealed there in detail is gruesome and inhuman beyond measure. How can people be so cruel?
I had to realize that my grandfather was one of the most brutal torturers in Auschwitz. My shame in being one of the granddaughters of this 'monster' was so great that I did not tell anyone about it for a long time. Only gradually I broke my silence.
By chance my path crossed with Ingo Jahrsetz, a transpersonal psychotherapist. I did not know that for years he had been intensively trying to sort out the continued effects and fallout of the Nazi time and the Holocaust here in Germany. Each year Ingo Jahrsetz, together with Judith Miller, a Jewish psychotherapist from the USA, organizes retreats for the descendents of Jews and Nazis. I have now taken part several times in these. It was a great challenge to speak of my grandfather in the presence of Jewish participants. I thought they would hate me. But it was not so. At one seminar there was a Jewish woman from the USA who was in Germany for the first time. It was not easy for her to come. During the seminar we both opened up, and I will never forget how she came up to me, put her arms around me and said, "You are my sister in light." We have now been good friends for several years, and our friendship grows ever deeper.
When I told my German friends about this retreat, most were not interested. The reaction was, "What do we have to do with the Holocaust?" One friend said to me in surprise: "I did not know that your ancestors were Jews." I said," They were not Jews." Long pause, great pondering. "Were they, like, Nazis?" (I live in a country where most of the grandfathers were Nazis.) Another friend said in relation to my grandfather, "finally someone is identified." She knew, as we all did, about the Nazi crimes, but had not yet learned from parents or grandparents who the Nazis were, even though there were so many.
I was once asked by a literary scholar, who published an article about Wilhelm Boger, whether I had never thought of changing my last name. But how would that make a difference? That is a bit like when Germans don't want to travel abroad because people might notice that they are Germans.
But I am the granddaughter of Wilhelm Boger, even if that is difficult for me to accept. I used to think that the Holocaust perpetrators were "other people," some monsters out there. It was very abstract and therefore very far away. And suddenly I had to realize that my own grandfather was one of them. He had brutally killed even small children and a photo of me as a small child hung in the prison on the wall over his bed among all the other grandchildren. I could not put it together. To look away, not to want to know about it, seemed much simpler. But it worked its way slowly but surely into my life. And to look back is unendingly painful and keeps making me speechless. Even though I know that I am not guilty myself, and I am not my grandfather, I feel shame; and in my heart is deep sadness and an ocean of tears.
At a "Healing Event" for the Second World War in May 2008 in Berlin, at which I had the honour to speak, my tears came to the surface and during a healing meditation strong and deep emotions flooded through me. Moshe Mendelssohn, a survivor of the Holocaust, held me in his arms during this meditation. To get to know him was a great gift for me. Moshe Mendelssohn survived Dachau as a child because he was hidden. He met me with an open heart and told me many things from his life. In November 2008 I visited him again, and he invited me to a memorial service for the 70th anniversary of the Reich's Pogrom night. I am very thankful for that.
For the last couple of months I have been in email contact with a young woman in Israel. She is the granddaughter of an Auschwitz survivor and is making a documentary film about the third generation after the Second World War in Israel, Poland, and Germany. We will get together in summer. I feel very connected to her. She was happy to read my story. Step by step I learn to look back, even if it is painful. Step by step I learn to be courageous and break my silence, and in return I am given deep encounters.