August 15, 2016.
My mother and the Holocaust — Iniana 1965
Last night, I watched to 60 minutes episode that described a French priest who seeks out the locations of murdered Jewish families in Eastern Europe. This was a repeat episode, one that I’d seen before.
What was different, as I watched the program this time, was it caused me to remember my mother’s experience with the Holocaust.
My mother was not Jewish, she did not witness the atrocities firsthand and yet she was forever influenced by what she saw in the first few years after World War II in Germany.
I knew nothing of this, nor did I have any real understanding of the depth of its effect on her. Until one day almost 50 years ago when she went to the mailbox and found a copy of a magazine printed by the American Nazis.
In the summer of 1965, my mother was very pregnant, and would have twin daughters in early August. Between school ending for the summer and the end of June, we entered the summer with my dad at worked more than 3 hours drive away, coming home on weekends. I was 10 years old and would find this summer to be my last one as a child.
When the mailman made his delivery that day, I was in the front yard and saw him come and go. My mother heard him at the mailbox and came and picked up the mail like any other day. Then I saw her dropped to her knees, and cry in a way I had never seen before. I ran to her to try to help, but there was no help I could give her.
After a few minutes, she strained her self and went to the phone and call the police department.
In a short while, a patrol car pulled to the front of our yard and a policeman came to the door as she met him. She had clear signs of having been crying, but by now, she was very angry as well.
The policeman listened to her carefully, yet he had already decided to refer her to the postal inspectors. As best I remember, he made a call and a postal inspector came to our home after the policeman left. The postal inspector told her that she would never hear from the American Nazi party again, and, as best I know, she never did.
She worried for a long time that she might be placed on a list just for receiving the magazine. In those days, it was commonly accepted that the FBI tracked subversives, and she was afraid that she would be labeled one because of someone sending her an unrequested magazine.
It’s hard for me to describe how badly this impacted her at that moment in time. I learned from her over time more about the Holocaust, though it wasn’t called that back then. She told me about Anne Frank and her diary My mother had read this in her teenage years and I had read the book later myself. Why would anyone take a child of 10 to 13 years of age to such a place? Even so soon after the war, it would seem that to the adults this was just part of everyday life, even to the Americans.
In the early years after the war , I think about 1947, my mother, Peggy, was taken to Germany as a military dependent. She told the policeman that at some point she was taken on a trip to a death camp where she saw where the people of been kept’s, she saw the ovens and as I learned on that day, and in subsequent conversations. She never really got over the shock of the situation. I do not know why anyone
Until that moment, my only experience with mail was to occasionally get a birthday card or something I had mailed away for from the back of a magazine or comic book. Mail was a time of celebration for a 10-year-old boy.
At that moment I learned that mail can bring into your home a world I could scarcely believe could exist or could have existed anytime. Many things happen when you’re 10 that opens your eyes to the real world. Mine was that morning, and I learned my mother, a normal American girl, found herself confronting something American girls are usually and hopefully protected from.
On that day I learn the reality of Evil. From that day, I have learned that even good people can slide into evil. They need not, nor even recognize Evil or their part in it.
She never found out why she was singled out to receive that magazine with its links to shadowy, violent perversity of that group.
As for me, I know that she felt the power of the souls who left our world in that terrible camp. And this magazine, from out of the blue, linked me, through her, to those souls.