In 1939, Herbert Lindenberger was a 10-year-old living in Seattle, watching his parents agonize over relatives still in Hitler's Germany. He has since spent a lifetime absorbing the cataclysm of the Third Reich. The result is One Family's Shoah: Victimization, Resistance, Survival in Nazi Europe (Palgrave Macmillan). The book is at once a haunting memoir, a carefully documented account of horrendous events and their repercussions, and an appreciation of echoes to be found in the author's usual scholarly fare: literature, music and drama.
Even so, the professor emeritus of English observes that grappling with history is a task that can't be finished. His chapter titles are gerunds—Deceiving, Memorializing, Liberating, Surviving, Compensating and Repositioning—because unlike "the verbs that we decline," he writes, gerunds "suggest processes that never want to end, never work toward any ultimate resolution."
The Lindenbergers were a large clan; the author's father was one of 11 children. Grandfather Isaak (1849-1941), originally from East Prussia, ran an international fish business based in Berlin. The Nazi crackdown scattered the siblings and their families in many directions. Whether they survived or perished often hinged on happenstance, split-second timing or available funds. Some had the chance to leave but didn't. One Family's Shoah tracks them all.
Three brothers, including Lindenberger's father, had left Germany decades earlier, dispatched to the U.S. West Coast to expand their father's company. Others who got out in time went to Israel, England and the United States, but escape from Nazi Europe was no guarantee of a smooth future. Many had to rebuild their lives from scratch. There were struggles with depression, alcoholism and suicides of family members. Lindenberger observes that some brought with them, and succumbed to, problems they'd had all their lives, while others turned tough new challenges into opportunities.
Even what Lindenberger calls "the only happy note in an otherwise pretty grim story" was a close call. This cousin lived a comfortable life with her two children and husband in Denmark, where his job had taken them in 1933. For a time, Denmark enjoyed considerable autonomy under German occupation, but in September 1943 word leaked to the Jewish community that they would be deported en masse—within 48 hours. Aided by Danes who arranged hideouts and mobilized fishing boats—for a price— most Jewish Danes made it to Sweden. Lindenberger's relatives hid in a cellar for 10 or 12 days until the time came for their nerve-racking night crossing, stacked in a cramped and lightless boat.
Lindenberger writes movingly about the interplay of grief, guilt and the need to assign blame that can beset survivors, who endlessly wonder what more they—or other family members—could or should have done. The Depression bankrupted two of the three Lindenberger siblings in Seattle, including the author's father, who pressed the third to get a visa for the brother still in Berlin. It never happened—"Who will support him?" was the argument—and he died at Theresienstadt, forever souring relations. Lindenberger reasons that it would be more just to blame Hitler—or the U.S. government for its restricted immigration and anti-Semitic policies stretching from the Hoover to the Roosevelt administrations. Yet his father remained staunchly patriotic to the United States.
Among the stories of family who didn't escape, none is more shocking than that of Hanni Meyer, Lindenberger's first cousin (pictured above). He learned of her fate from two of his grandfather's former (non-Jewish) employees during a 1953 visit to Germany. As a teenager, Hanni had joined what became known as the Baum group, young antiwar activists and communist sympathizers. In 1942, they firebombed a Nazi anticommunist exhibition, resulting in little damage and minor injuries. For that, she was executed by guillotine in 1943 at age 22.
In one of the book's signature philosophical interludes, Lindenberger asks: Should the Baum group be judged heroic for its attempt, however naïve, to spark wider resistance to the Hitler regime—or foolish and reprehensible because it failed and brought deadly reprisals? Till then, authorities had left Hanni's family alone because of their connections—possibly bribes—to the Berlin police chief. Afterward, they lost that protection, and her mother was deported to Auschwitz. Lindenberger thought his cousin was heroic, but his grandfather's employees judged her harshly. He parses both arguments, citing Shakespeare's historical plays and the Irish Easter Rebellion to show that attitudes toward momentous events can vary sharply and change over time.
Indeed, the passage of decades keeps bringing long-hidden facts to light through opened archives and an upsurge of published first-person accounts and documentaries. As successive generations seem more prepared to face the past, towns and cities across Europe have staged commemorations and installed memorials to Jewish victims (including several Lindenbergers) and non-Jewish humanitarians.
Time and distance may also explain Lindenberger's even-tempered approach to heart-wrenching situations. Never, until this book, had he spoken to friends about his family's wartime experiences. As with many others affected by the Shoah—he prefers the Hebrew word for catastrophe to the fiery, ritualistic overtones of "holocaust"—the unspeakable remained unspoken outside the family and, often, within. As a 19-year-old, Lindenberger found an outlet writing a novel in which "Germany was to appear only within my characters' minds." With this volume, facts are paramount.
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