omi

When I was a teenager, I took my grandmother to the bank, where she cashed a check from the German government. When she saw me looking at the check, which looked very different than American checks, she said only one word to me, "Reparations."

Until that day, I knew vaguely that my Grandmother had somehow been involved in the Holocaust, but I never had really connected the things that I had learned in school to the woman that I knew as "Omi."

Omi rarely talked about it with me, but after my grandfather ("Opi") had passed away, we began talking a bit more, and she related some of the stories of her life. And what a life it was… Her 93 years spanned an incredible change in the human condition – her life began with oil lanterns and outhouses, and ended with an email account and central air conditioning. She also saw some of humankinds greatest achievements such as the man on the moon, and some of our greatest horrors like the Holocaust and the Peronistas in Argentina.

Omi was an only child born to a rich family of Jewish and Dutch descent. They lived in a small city called Duisburg on the Rhine river, where she enjoyed a fairly typical childhood. She talked fondly of her times in that city, and she always spoke of the group of friends that she had at that time – children of all different religions that went camping, swimming, and walking together.

Things changed when the Nazis came to power, of course, and Omi always spoke of those men as “thugs.” It seems that her most vivid memories of that time were the way that these thugs treated her friends and neighbors. They ruined Jewish businesses, and she said that the worst part of it was that there was no repercussions for these men. They would beat up Jewish men and women on the street, and no one would bat an eye or come to the person’s aid. I could still sense the fear and impotent rage in her voice when she spoke of those times.

What saved her, Omi always said, was her Dutch passport, which she had due to her parent’s heritage. Unlike most Jews, she could still travel freely and didn’t have to wear any identifying badges. So, she did travel, and work, and tried to live as normally as possible, but she said that she could tell that things were changing, and sometimes, some of her friends simply were no longer there – they just disappeared.

At that time, she was dating a man named Otto, who would become known to me as “Opi.” His father sensed the imminent danger, and sent his two sons to Argentina (one of the few places that would take the German Jews), while they could still get out. Some time later, my Omi joined him, and they were married on the docks of Buenos Aries. Although she never said so to me, family lore says that she was on the last boat to leave Hamburg harbor that carried Jews to Argentina, and the only reason they were allowed to leave was that none of them carried German passports.

Eventually Omi wrote down her memoirs (in German, which my uncle translated), and I’ll publish a few of the stories here that are relevant to the NING over the next few weeks.

I also will try to share with you a sense of the lessons that she taught me from this life experience. The one thing that jumps out at me as I write this is her depth of pride of being an American. She lived though not one “holocaust,” but two – she said that what happened under Peron in Argentina was in some ways as bad as what happened in Germany. She said that she loved how we (her grandchildren) took for granted the freedom that we have here in this country. She said that never once in her life in America did she go to sleep afraid that someone she loved would “disappear” during the night.

I’ll try to post more over the next few weeks about my Omi.

Mike Heidelberg McGinnis School Language Arts Teacher