I loved Venice — brightly colored air, sparkling water, and spires gleaming in the sun. My sixteen year old romantic heart dreamt of the day I would return and kiss a boyfriend in the shadow of Saint Mark’s Basilica. Even the presence of my mother with her rules and my little sister with her tears could not ruin my first trip to Europe. But now we were in Germany. I found no romance in the heavy food, square houses and stout people. Land of my dad’s youth. We were visiting family I didn’t know and today we were off to a cemetery.
The tires of the black Mercedes crunched across gravel as we entered an iron gateway. Aunt Ida parked the car and got out, followed by Renata, my newly discovered second cousin, and my dad. Renata was okay. Something about her reminded me of my beloved grandmother back in California, sister to this aunt we were visiting.
The scent of pine drew me out of the car. My sister looked up through wisps of straight blonde hair and twisted in her seat. Mother held her wrist. “We’re going to wait here,” she said, her voice icy. Dad had wandered off, oblivious to everyone’s discomfort. He stood in the distance under a big tree, rubbing leaves between his fingers, sniffing the aroma of the crushed vegetation, and inspecting a seed pod. I tagged after Aunt Ida and Renata.
In Italy I had seen plenty of crypts, but I’d only been to a cemetery once before at the age of ten, to the Rose Hills Memorial Park for my grandfather’s funeral, now only a vague memory. I looked around. This cemetery had no even rows of white headstones, no brass plaques nestled in neatly clipped grass. Here the grass was long in places and lumpy. Most of the blackened and chipped grave stones tipped drunkenly or were half buried as if they were hiding. Some stones were inscribed with a queer kind of writing, lines and curves even stranger than the old-fashioned German letters I had seen in the books my father kept on his bookshelf.
Aunt Ida and Renata stood near one of the few straight monuments and laid a bunch of flowers at the base. None of the other graves had flowers. The inscription on the mottled gray stone was in German. Only the name, Walter Erlanger, and his dates of birth and death made sense. Above the name a six pointed star was outlined in gold, a Jewish Star of David. I turned around and searched the graveyard. There were no crosses anywhere.
As we walked back I fell in beside Aunt Ida. “Were you born Jewish?” I asked. “Was my grandmother born Jewish too?”
Aunt Ida stopped. She looked at me, her eyes both tired and sad. “Born Jewish?” she said. “Yes, and still Jewish. Once Jewish, always Jewish. Especially in Germany.”
I didn’t know it then, but this was the first day of years of asking why, of trying to make sense of family stories. I had not yet heard the word Holocaust. It was less than twenty years since Hitler had poisoned Germany, then all of Europe. School children knew about Hitler, but history books were still silent about the worst part of the story. It was all waiting for me to learn.
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