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

So he joined the mounted SS. I think what you should remember is that the SS in 1934 was a 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.

And with no documents indicating that they've been instructed to do so. So that in part, I think this has a lot of relevance for today. So let's just go there. One way of making sure that your fingerprints aren't on something is to pump people full of ideology, and then we know enough about how ideology sits in the human mind to know what's likely to happen next. I mean, there's you know, this famous example from history of the king saying, "Will, no one rid me of this troublesome priest?" He doesn't have to give an order to execute he just has to say this idly to himself and then he knows what happens, and then there is no record. So in effect, there is no trigger pulling finger from the Central Command.

No. And this is also reflected in the way my grandfather and others who had a similar role as he had, as the war went on in occupied Poland, is reflected in the way they behaved. Because he became engaged in a mission set by the Ministry of Agriculture under the Third Reich to transform West Central Poland to the breadbasket of the Third Reich.  Because he was a trained estate manager he knew something about agriculture. And that can sound benign. What it in fact means is deporting or murdering the existing landowners, enslaving the local laborers and murdering anyone who's slightly troublesome, and torturing people on a more or less daily basis. Early on in the war, Himmler passed a law which established that these estate managers were the law in their estates. There was no higher law over them. It's exactly what you were saying. It's a law that says "I don't need to know, do do what you have to do."

 

Okay, so here you are a young woman who has grown up in this unusual developmental environment. You went to college with my wife. You guys knew each other, perhaps vaguely, and you're living this very modern American existence at that time. How is this playing out? I mean, America, you know, American father, you're in an American college. You're somehow also the granddaughter of an SS member. Who has. You have an inkling at this point that your grandfather's done unspeakable things in Poland or not?

 

Not so much at Wellesley. I didn't think about it so much, although I was very affected by it. Because these types of secrets when they're this heavy,

Yeah. I mean, I was very sick. When I was at Wellesley, I didn't eat most of the time and so that was the way it expressed itself there. In fact, Pia and I worked out that we didn't see each other that much, probably because I was hiding out a lot from people because I, I had pretty serious eating disorders. But these were all connected to a feeling of low self worth that were connected to the shame that I went around with, so I knew that there was something wrong. My relationship with my mother was extremely troubled. And as the years went by our family relationships, in fact, all of them became quite troubled. Because when you have something like this in the family that the adults knew something about, they didn't know the whole story, but they knew enough and that they try to keep from themselves. It's not so much they're keeping it from the next generation. They're trying to keep it away from themselves because they don't want to think about it. Then it starts to strangle their relationships. And that was already going on at that time. And that affected me at a cellular level. And so, when I returned to Europe, remember I only spent three years going to college in the US that was my American experience.