Dachau

As a person of European-Jewish-Slav descent, I have a lot of interesting heritage to draw on. For example, one of my ancestors is this fellow named John Howland whose descendants include Ralph Waldo Emerson and Christopher Lloyd. He came over on the Mayflower, as did a bunch of other people I'm related to. One of them even fell off the Mayflower--which shows we're related more surely than a slew of DNA testing would.

There's a common theme in my ancestry: religious persecution. Somehow groups of people who were hated and scorned because of their religious beliefs all came together in the living, breathing forms of my siblings and I. We're descended from pilgrims and Puritans. My mother's father's family is almost pure Mormon pioneer stock. And on our father's side--we have the Jews.

My dad's family, the Obnoxiouses, came over from Germany to America in the late 1800s. We had Great-Great-Grandpa Obnoxious, who was married to Great-Great-Grandma Obnoxious, nee Generic-stein. Her father's name was Generic Jewish Name Generic-stein. Not even kidding. If I wrote a story with a character who had the same name as the father of Great-Great-Grandma Obnoxious nee Generic-stein, you would accuse me of choosing the most stereotypical Jewish name possible.

A while back, one of my father's sisters and my grandfather decided it would be jolly to head back to Europe and scope the place out, maybe see if they could find any interesting ancestral records for the Obnoxiouses or the Generic-steins or for specific offshoots of German-Jewish families that we know intertwine with ours.

Well, they didn't find any ancestral records. They didn't find anything to witness to the people who lived there and who must have left behind family members that would have produced multiple descendants. There were no Obnoxiouses or Generic-steins around. There was nothing.

How can this be? How can whole families and records of whole families and the least, tiny traces of whole families simply... disappear?

I'll tell you how. The Holocaust, that's how.

The Holocaust. It means something to everyone, I think. To me it meant knowing that had my family still been living in Germany in the 1930s, I would have been put in a concentration camp. It meant knowing that had Hitler not been stopped, eventually he would have made his way over here to the Land of the Free and put me in a concentration camp.

Never mind that I was born in the 1990s and that had either of those things happened, it would have been my great-grandparents and grandparents, not me, who would have suffered the consequences. Logic had no place in this kind of waking nightmare. It was always me I saw in the concentration camp, my face and my siblings' and my parents'. And so I read about it, and was horrified by it, and asked myself, "What would I have done? Would I have borne it well? Would I have made choices I could have been proud of?"

And then I would be glad, so glad, that I hadn't gone to a concentration camp, and that my branch of the Obnoxiouses, at least, had escaped the Holocaust by fifty, sixty years. We American Obnoxiouses get to lead safe lives. Hitler never touched our country. We don't go to concentration camps.

Well, most of us don't, anyways.

One of the first things I did when I went to Europe was visit Dachau, the first concentration camp in Germany.

The original building where they processed prisoners is still standing, toilets and all. It's a sort of museum now. We walked through and there were some displays but mostly I was looking at the aged walls and the fixtures, thinking of the people who walked through the gates all those years ago but didn't walk out.

The crematoriums are also still standing and completely furnished. I went in and looked at the gas chambers and ovens. The ovens are left open.

We looked at the memorials and ended up near the crematorium again. "It's awful in there," said one of my companions. "It's awful. You can feel it in the air..." She shivered. "Have you been in there?"

"Oh yeah," said another. "Let's not talk about it."

"Let's not."

Let's not.