10: Julie Lindahl: Shaking the poisoned fruit of shame out of the family tree: Difference between revisions

So your grandma was a was a Nazi to the end of a fairly long life

A 103 year life

Oh, wow. So it's pretty amazing to think about it, there are Nazis in 2014  

That's really an interesting conundrum that we can all worry about but you've really been been through this where you're you realize that your deepest emotional and loyal, your your loyalty connections are running to people who are a mixture of pure evil and pure normal and goodness. I mean, you know, an educated family from from everything I can discern a family where there was love and caring, and then there's just this horrible festering, I don't know what even to call it. It's just some stain that can't be removed.  

Yeah, absolutely. And which is why when I go out to schools and talk about this, I take out an image which is painted by an artist in Michigan called chemo and it's a face that has many different surfaces and dimensions, and you can't really figure out where exactly the face is at some level. But the point is that there are many different facades.  And that's what I learned, speaking with my grandmother and when I when I think about her today, but our conversations as time went by ended up troubling me a lot, and particularly my own reactions troubled me. I was also troubled by the fact that I was, was influenced by her perspective of Jewish people. Because, you know, she kind of imparted in various ways that Jewish people were dangerous to us, which was kind of a reaction of her generation because they were being punished for what they did in the Holocaust. But I didn't know that at that time, of course, and I did a number of kinds of crazy things to try to counteract that inheritance of mine to really dig deep into myself and blow the whistle and say, "Hey, that is a totally insane idea." Jewish people are not dangerous to you.  

I don't feel that way at all I feel very well taken care of.

So, do you think your mom knew a great deal of this history that you somehow were screened out of? Or do you think she she was also in the dark about it? Or even the idea of how much we know about our histories? Is that word too sharp and that there's some need for a kind of layered concept of knowing where you sort of know something but maybe you don't know. You don't keep a copy of it. That's too crisp in your mind, because it's too dangerous to have it in that state. What what's the right question I should be asking?

No, she didn't.  I know that she didn't, and neither did her siblings, and neither did their mother. Because my grandfather went to war in the autumn of 1939. And first of all, not all of that is documented what those men did in Poland. Secondly, a lot of the documents were destroyed. Thirdly, they haven't seen any documents. I'm, I'm the one who has bothered to go and find the documents and read them and there were a lot of them. And so I probably know more than any family member because I've read primary documents, specifically about what my grandfather was doing and also just what people around him we're doing in the areas where he was

can you name your grandfather, so that we have a an individual

I just call him opa. I don't name his name because the people are there are people who are alive who bear his last name and I, I don't I don't want to make their lives difficult.  

So opa for the purposes of this podcast.

Yeah. Yes. And as to these layers, I think you're right, very right there. In my experience for the sake of the family unit, you look away from certain very glaring facts. I did that. I think my mother and her siblings did that. The family has been our most important unit of survival since forever, and so that's probably a natural knee jerk type of thing to do. I think my or I know that my family knew that my grandfather was in the SS, because later on I met an uncle. So he was the oldest of the siblings. I met him in Paraguay.  

So he, you opa not only volunteered in 1939, but went straight for the SS.  

He was he joined the SS back in 1934 already  

So he joined the mounted SS I think what you should remember is that the SS and 34 was a political primarily political organization. And the buffin ss are the military wing of the SS emerged out of this as the 30s went on. But he joined as one of Hitler's political soldiers and specifically the mounted SS in 1934. Mainly because, well, the mounted SS was very prestigious. The organization was also, the mountain SS was created of riding associations that were drafted into the organization. So, you, some people argue that they didn't have a choice, but it's more complicated than that. But so he, he was pumped full of propaganda throughout the 1930s, because he was a member of the SS throughout. so that by the time he got into Poland, he was really quite full of it. And, you know, Hitler and Himmler and the other Nazi leaders didn't really give very precise instructions to the SS when they went into Poland.  Because they trusted that they pumped these people so full of propaganda that if they just unleashed them, they would fight a very brutal racial war, which is exactly what they did,