I hadn't really thought about it before, but it makes sense that with all the Nazi war crimes trials over with, extremely few Jewish people would ever have reason to return to Germany. I don't imagine Historic Jamestowne gets many Native American visitors for similar reasons.
I don't know about Germany, but I've definitely heard stories from parts of Eastern Europe of Jewish survivors trying to return home after the war and their former neighbors attacking them and forcing them out. In places where the Nazis had torn up the Jewish cemeteries, a lot of the towns (in Poland are the ones I know of) used the gravestones to pave roads or fill in holes in walls that had been hit by bombs or stuff like that, and people who grew up in those towns in the fifties and sixties said that, if they asked the adults why there were those weird symbols on the stones, the adults would just say, "Oh, it was a Jewish thing. They're not here anymore."
But there are still SOME Jews in Poland, and there are certainly Jews with Polish ancestry that can easily be found through the internet, so it does seem rather lacking in perspective to do a whole Jewish festival as a "historical" thing without even bothering to try to get any of the actual living Jews involved. Kind of like if Plimouth Plantation or Jamestown put on a powwow without consulting any of the tribes that are descended from the ones who'd lived there about what a powwow actually is, but just researched it in old books. (And, now that I think about it, I wouldn't be at all surprised if those places had actually done that in the past, but I'm pretty sure they know better now.)
My grandfather was from Vienna, and he didn't want to go back to Austria for years. He had some cousins still living in Austria (they ended up in Salzburg after the war, and decided to stay there), and they sometimes came to NY to visit him, but he never went to visit them, until in the early seventies he had some kind of paperwork that required going to Vienna. He went, and came back with several rolls of film worth of photos -- about two pictures of the apartment building where he grew up, maybe three pictures of the lumber yard his father had owned, then an entire roll of film of photos of Sigmund Freud's house, and about a hundred photos of construction sites. The rest of the family, after seeing these, pretty much decided to just let him have whatever coping mechanism that was and not try to ask him to explain it.
Oh, and that paperwork thing that my grandfather went back to Vienna for? Before the war, he'd been in law school in Vienna. At the time, to become a lawyer there, you had to pass a series of six exams. He'd passed five of them before the Nazis barred Jews from the universities. This was always a nagging thing in his mind -- that he couldn't honestly call himself a lawyer, because he was one exam short of really being one. When he came to the US, he couldn't work as a lawyer here, since the laws are all different and he didn't know much English at first, but he got a job in a factory making handbags, and used his lawyer skills there to become active in the union and all the contract negotiations and stuff. But then finally, after my father (his son) passed the bar and became a real official lawyer in the US, he decided that he was sick of knowing that he was just 5/6 of a lawyer, and that paperwork he wanted to take care of in Vienna was that he wanted to see if he could get some kind of honorary lawyer certificate. He didn't want to actually practice law, he just wanted some acknowledgement that he'd done all the work to be a lawyer, and if the Nazis hadn't come, he would have been one. He actually still had all the papers proving that he'd passed those first five exams. The people at the lawyer-certifying board in Vienna told him that, if he wanted a certificate, he'd have to pass that last exam. THAT was the point where he decided that he'd been right to begin with -- that the Austrians were antisemitic bastards and he should just forget about everything there and live his life in New York.
As I learned today, denial is the 8th stage of genocide -- after the killing. [link]
The perpetrators of genocide dig up the mass graves, burn the bodies, try to cover up the evidence and intimidate the witnesses. They deny that they committed any crimes, and often blame what happened on the victims.
That's a hell of a story about your grandfather, Hil.
people are horrible. how are there still so many of us. capable of truly awful things.
I may become a hermit.
Hil, your grandfather's story is amazing (and go him for deciding Austria could go to hell).
As I know we've talked about before, my grandmother also came from Vienna during the war; the part of the family that survived split between NY, Australia, and Israel. Neither she nor her sister went back for decades after (I don't think my great-grandmother ever went back at all), but she went a couple of times, and I went with her on what turned out to be her last trip. It was easily the most fucked up trip of my life -- days of walking around the old neighborhood while she pointed at empty lots or new buildings and said "that's where (cousin I'd never heard of) lived, but of course the Americans bombed it during the war..." "that's where (other cousin I'd never heard of) lived, but of course the Germans bombed it during the war..." Mixed with the schmaltziest kind of Viennese tourist kitsch (SO MANY PALACES AND WALTZES) and, yes, Freud's house.
But you know? She dealt with it all the only way she could, and wanted me to see it.
Our wonderful doctor when I was a kid had completed medical school in Austria before fleeing to the U.S. He had no way to prove that, so he started over and repeated medical school.
ARGH!
So we are now 0-for-3 in closing after going under contract.
These fuckers managed to weasel out with their bank, which means I don't even get the satisfaction of keeping their earnest money. (They were at the point of making unrealistic requests for workorders--like, say, a $26k whole-house rewire with integrated smoke alarms, but hadn't filed the extension, so were actually obliged to go through with it or pull out and sacrifice their earnest money if they couldn't get the bank to pull the plug: I will note, we actually offered do do a lot of stuff.)
So we still have to do the stuff we were going to do, if they were buying it, so it can be addressed in the Form 17, and now that it's gone under contract three times and fallen through each time, I can only imagine it'll be avoided, and it's empty and just costing us a ridiculous amount each month, and damn it.
As I know we've talked about before, my grandmother also came from Vienna during the war; the part of the family that survived split between NY, Australia, and Israel.
Just on the wild chance that it might be, was the side that went to Australia named Sallmayer? (A Sallmayer family that went from Vienna to Australia is a kind of weird mystery branch of my family tree, so that just struck me as "might as well ask.")
