Tracing the Cobblestones of my Family’s Past : A Personal Essay
By Carly Kay
As I walked through a busy street corner on my fifth day in Berlin, I couldn’t help but keep my eyes glued to the cobblestones that appeared beneath my feet. Occasionally, I lifted my head to glance at the building numbers above, but quickly returned to the self-assigned quest I had tasked myself with.
When I finally arrived at number 174 Köpenicker Straße, I suddenly became uncertain whether the sweat dribbling down my crooked spine could be attributed to the record breaking 104-degree weather or to my nerves, from standing in front of a scene I had only seen in pictures. Three brass plaques shinning in the blazing sun were subtly embedded amid a sea of dull stones. With my feet drilled into the ground, I stared down at the words engraved on the center plaque: ‘Hier Wohnte Renate Lesser. JG. 1927. Flucht 1936, USA’. Here lived Renate Lesser, Born 1927. Fled 1936, USA.
I ran my fingers over my great aunt’s name as if physically touching the memorial plaque would somehow make me feel more connected to the events that resulted in my family being abruptly torn apart and our name being permanently installed in the streets of Germany. A six-hour drive south in Heidelberg, a similar Stolperstein — or stumbling stone —has been installed where my Opa, my grandfather, had his life irrevocably altered.
As I now stood rooted in front of his sister-in-law’s childhood home, I waited for a greatly anticipated invisible wrecking ball to collide with my stomach at any given moment. I did not try to shield my abdomen from the impact, but instead exposed my front side to the building fully prepared to deal with the repercussions of having the wind knocked out of me.
But as the minutes faded, I did not double over with overwhelming grief nor spiral into an introspective black hole of revelation. Instead, my breathing remained steady and my face retained its expressionless affect. Technically, I had fulfilled my duty and desire to visit Köpenicker Straße, yet it still felt as though as I had simply checked off a box on a sight-seeing list as opposed to witnessing an incredibly personal piece of my family history.
Reluctantly, I compartmentalized the picture of Renate’s Stolperstein to the ‘deal with later’ file of my mind and redirected my built-up mental energy towards a new challenge: coping with a bus ride while in a state of agitation that reached far beyond today’s heat and deep into the past.
In the next days, I observed tourists walking by hundreds of plaques, scattered throughout the city, without blinking an eye. They couldn’t possibly know that these Stolpersteine were part of a national project designed to acknowledge those Jews who were forcibly displaced or slaughtered by the Nazis. Just as it would be impossible to know that an eager international journalism student like me had been regurgitating the phrase ‘My Opa is a Holocaust survivor’ for more than 20 years before arriving in Berlin.
To unaffiliated visitors, the stumbling stones were not silent mouthpieces for the cries of a tragic past, or healing bandages for the wounds of a broken lineage. They were simply plaques to be pondered — if one had enough time to notice them between leaving the Brandenburg Gate to head toward a piece of the Berlin Wall.
While travelers unknowingly separated themselves from the cataclysmic history they were walking by, I consciously tried to combat the urge to distance myself from the grim reality that had shaped my family. Before Berlin, I had never linked my Opa to the 12-year-old boy, Erich Kahn, who was forced to leave his home town to board one of the last ‘kinder transport’ trains out of Nazi Germany. Nor did I associate him with the little boy who watched his father beaten over head with a club by the Gestapo, on the infamous Night of the Broken Glass of November 9th 1938.
For some reason, my mind had forged the delusional idea that the main character of these stories was fictional. I could not fathom that the man who had been sitting across from me at family dinners my whole life shared the same narrative as the Jewish boy I imagined in my head, who had endured Hitler’s Germany.
I always knew that my Opa was (and still is) an extraordinary person. But the fact that he survived the Holocaust only played a small role in my calculation. The fact that he was an accomplished physicist at IBM or that he had written a 190-page memoir delving into his experiences growing up in the Third Reich, seemed far less impressive to me, when I was a child, than his ability to wiggle his ears or his knack for mastering funny faces for photographs.
Understanding my Opa’s past seemed like a task only a mature ‘real’ adult could digest. I can recall often averting my eyes from the gold lettering on the cover of his book back at home and thinking ‘wait until you’re older.’ From the moment I learned about the Holocaust and its relationship to my Opa, I began chasing a nonexistent ideal age when it would feel appropriate to fully comprehend my German-Jewish heritage.
But the older I got, the further the task went down on my subconscious to-do list. Each time I learned about the Holocaust in school, I chose to look at it as an objective truth instead of a lived experienced. The genocide of the Jews was something I read about in my textbooks books, just another fact of history, not an event that eradicated 17 members of my family.
I had built a wall around myself to separate my emotions from my personal history, refusing to acknowledge that heritage through the empathic lens I felt it deserved. But now, in the city famous for dismantling walls, I knew I could not avoid the responsibility of coming to terms with my family history.
The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe was the next stop on my list of attempts to connect with a past I had adamantly evaded. As the S-Bahn steadily barreled towards the destination, I settled into apprehension.
My uneasiness escaped through each beat that I unconsciously drummed on my upper thigh and each bounce that I unintentionally produced with my leg. I felt as though I had been tip-toeing around the edge of a deep water trench, contemplating my point of entry, when suddenly someone unknowingly thrust an anvil into my arms and pushed me in. I was rapidly sinking into a pit of self-created pressure and inescapable expectations.
I had traveled over 5,000 miles across Atlantic to get punched in the gut by memorials to the Jews and of the Holocaust, but I feared the numbness of my mental barriers would override meaningful interpretations. What if I felt nothing? Would I be disgracing my ancestors if I thwarted experiencing the gravity of what these art installations and museums represented? What if I felt too much? Did I even have the right, as an American three generations removed from the Holocaust, to express strong emotional responses to an event that occurred over 70 years ago?
Logically, I understood that none of these spiraling worries mattered. I knew my 92-year-old Opa understood that we grandkids would address our history when we were ready and that no one could possibly tell me how I was supposed to feel when I arrived at places like the Sachsenhausen concentration camp or the Jewish Museum of Berlin. Still, my imagined societal and family expectations of how I should absorb the past incessantly gnawed away at the logical section of my brain.
When my classmate and I finally arrived at the memorial by architect Peter Eisenman, the fear that haunted me during the months leading up to my trip to Germany suddenly vanished. A rock the size of my fist suddenly materialized in the back of my throat as I timidly approached 2,711 concrete slabs of varying heights. Almost instantly saliva dissipated from my mouth, leaving me with a thick paste-like substance on a sand paper tongue. It felt as though my tongue had swelled three sizes too big and was slowly slipping into the back of my throat to meet the newly formed stone, which rested somewhere between my tonsils. Each breath became a small battle against suffocation.
My classmate broke off on her own to give me time to take in my surroundings. As I moved deeper into the maze of columns a heaviness draped itself over my shoulders and branched into my chest like a cold, weighted shadow. My stomach periodically dropped as I was hit with waves of emotion that I could not yet categorize and that made me feel as though I was sinking two inches into the ground.
I stood in the center of the columns, where the cement slabs are the tallest. I resisted the sudden urge to cover myself up with a jacket as the 15-foot-tall slabs towered over me. I began to think of the slabs as graves and tried to comprehend how many concrete blocks there would be if each victim was given a proper burial.
The thought consumed me as hot liquid streaked down my checks. The tourists around me did not seem to understand what the blocks represented. They walked on top of the slabs and took selfies with saccharine, rehearsed smiles. A man hesitantly walked pass me as I unapologetically sniffled and he doubled back to ask if I was okay. I nodded, but was utterly perplexed by my visceral reaction. Although I was close to vomiting, I could not help but feel a simultaneous relief. I had finally allowed myself to feel something. In that instant, all of the suppressed emotions that were cached somewhere deep in the cavern of my soul seemed to pour out of me.
From then on, each additional place of remembrance I visited caused my body to fall into an almost routine pattern of restlessness.
When I arrived at Bayarischer Platz, or Bavarian Square, the familiar cool, heavy shadow wrapped its invisible tentacles around my shoulders and clung to my chest like a needy child desperate for human contact. The small neighborhood square was dedicated to commemorating the hundreds of Nazi laws and regulations that solidified official anti-Semitism.
Moisture was zapped from my mouth when I saw the first sign in front of a local school. Although the sign is written in German, I could make out one word: jüdische.
Quickly typing the foreign sentence into my translating app, I read the English version aloud to my classmate: “Jewish children are no longer allowed to attend public schools.”
The date 1938 is stamped below the quote. In 1933, my Opa, then known as Erich Kahn, started school at age six at the same time German citizens began to view Jews as subhuman. At age eight, he was kicked out of school solely for being Jewish. In 1939, he was forced to endure a lonely adolescence as a German enemy alien in England until he was later able to emigrate to the United States with his parents, to meet his brother and cousin under the new name of ‘Eric Kay’ in 1948.
Upon reading the signs that delineated the laws discriminating against the Jews, I felt as though I was standing next to my grandfather 86 years ago, attempting to understand in real time what these regulations must have felt like to him. I tried to grasp the confusion he must have felt when he arrived at the playground that now segregated children based on how Aryan they were. As I walked, I imagined him walking by my side at age eight, reading all these new rules that would suddenly dictate our lives.
One of the signs displays a large graphic of a newspaper. On the other side, it describes how journalists must prove Aryan ancestry for themselves and their spouses dating back to the 1800s in order to continue in their profession. Suddenly, it felt like I was lugging around a large boulder instead of a flimsy journalism notebook in my backpack. My cheeks grew hot as I thought back to my time spent at UCSB preparing for my first international journalism trip.
On the way home from Bavarian Square, I tapped through my Instagram to give my weary mind a break from placing myself into the Germany of the 1930s. Just as I began to come back to reality, I scrolled through a barrage of posts that make me question my sanity. Did I just read the word ‘concentration camp’?
I checked the date on my phone to ensure I had not violated a law of the space time continuum and had accidentally time traveled. News of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) forcibly removing undocumented immigrants from their homes to be placed in detention centers across the United States saturates every social media platform. As I read about the raids that separate children from their families, I think back to the Gestapo officer described in my Opa’s book, who vehemently spat the words ‘Jew die’ to my great grandfather before shipping him off to the Dachau concentration camp.
That beastly weighted blanket which only appeared on my shoulders at places like the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe and Bavarian Square suddenly seemed to take up a more permanent residency. Upon learning about the grossly overcrowded cells that migrants were confined to, I was immediately transported back to the barracks at Sachsenhausen that I had recently visited.
I remembered walking up to the glass pane that separated spectators from tightly-packed rows of three-tiered bunk beds, and imagining visitors’ reflections as ghosts of the prisoners who once slept there. While I listened to an audiotape about the camp’s squalid living conditions, my mind meandered back to the American detention centers along the U.S border.
My head felt on the brink of exploding from the pressure caused by conflicting thoughts pressing against my skull. Weren’t all these memorials that I had spent the past 14 days trying to absorb supposed to amount to an eternal proclamation that these horrific events were to never happen again? Did merely re-posting an article that protests ICE raids — instead of taking to the streets to demand an immediate halt to blatant social injustice — not make me just as bad as the ‘good’ German citizens who passively allowed the mass murder of my family members?
Now, back in California, as I continue to grapple with how to move forward in light of our country’s current political state, a line from my Opa’s book burns into my memory:
‘The absolute minimum requirement for each of us is never consciously to be a part of or tolerate any of these social injustices in our own personal interactions with others.’
In the context of the Holocaust, it seemed so obvious to me what was right and wrong. I always so quickly to direct my resentments towards the people who said nothing when Hitler came to power. Yet as immigrant women are currently being forced to drink from toilet bowls and I sit here writing this memoir, my perception of black and white grows increasingly gray.
With the words from my Opa’s book circulating in my mind I search for answers on how to insert myself into this human crisis. We can read the news, we can try to eradicate hate speech, and we can speak out against injustices within our local communities. But just as my Opa writes in his book:
‘Even there, who among us has a clean slate?’
Carly Kay is a fourth year Communication major at UC Santa Barbara.
