This year marked the 20th anniversary of my father's death so it was hard for me to get into the pomp and circumstance of Father's Day. However, I spent much of last week pondering the complexities of familial bonds and how a single unit shapes the community. No grand conclusions yet, and there's surely some overlap with today's immigration debate but I'll leave those topics for others to hash out.
For now, I'd like to share some of my recent discoveries about my grandfather, Zalman Grinberg, a physician and Holocaust survivor who was kind of a big deal in the ultra specific world of Jewish DP (displaced people) Zionism in the post-World War II era. (Say what? I'll get there.) He died when I was two years old so I have no personal memories of him. For most of my life I only knew him as a figure from the pages of history books and this NYT obit (yes, that's me in the NYT, nbd).
I knew that he earned a level of acclaim for smuggling Jewish babies out of the ghetto in Kovno, Lithuania, including the uncle for whom I am named. I got to know him a little more last week while visiting St. Ottilien, a Benedictine monastery in Germany where he helped start a hospital in April 1945 for Holocaust survivors -- most of whom were Jews -- who had nowhere to go after their liberation.
St. Ottilien, a Benedictine monastery in Upper Bavaria, was home to an American camp for displaced people after World War II.
Have you ever been to a monastery? It's like a little village centered on religious life, with men casually walking around in black robes. St. Ottilien rises out of undulating green farmland on the approach along on a winding road from the village of Eresing. It has modern amenities -- guesthouse, gift shop, beer garden -- along with a primary school, an organic farm and a printing press. These modest facilties sit in the shadow of the monastic residence, adorned by a collection of church spires, including a bell tower that sounds every 15 minutes. It was ringing when I first arrived at St. Ottilien on a misty late Saturday afternoon; it was easy to imagine the bells clamoring in my grandfather's ears when he took up residence there 73 years ago.
He had spent the previous nine months at a slave labor camp in Kaufering after being separated from his wife and son. As Allied Forces closed in, the Nazis loaded him and other captives on a train to Dachau to be exterminated. Shortly into the trip, Allied Forces bombed the train, mistaking it for a munitions transport. Those who survived, including Zalman, buried the dead in their first autonomous act in 6+ years. From there, they made their way through the forest to St. Ottilien, which had been turned into a German Army hospital four years earlier. Zalman is credited with brokering an arrangement to house the survivors in a gymnasium on the grounds, alongside German doctors and patients and the monks. Several people died on the way and after they arrived at St. Ottilien, and they are buried in the Jewish cemetery on the monastery's grounds.
The survivors were free, but their future remained uncertain. Zalman attempted to articulate what he perceived as their plight in a semi-famous speech at what a "liberation concert," one month after the Nazi regime surrendered to Allied Forces:
“We act as delegates of millions of victims to tell all mankind, to proclaim all over the world how cruel people may become, what brutal hellishness is concealed within a human being, and what a triumphant record of crime and murder has been achieved by the nation of Hegel and Kant, Schiller and Goethe, Beethoven and Schopenhauer.
However, we do not want revenge. If we took this vengeance it would mean we would fall to the depths of ethics and morals the German nation has been in these past l0 years. We are not able to slaughter women and children! We are not able to burn millions of people! We are not able to starve hundreds of thousands!
We are free now, but we do not know how, or with what to begin our free yet unfortunate lives. It seems to us that for the present mankind does not understand what we have gone through and experienced during this period. And it seems to us that we shall neither be understood in the future. We unlearned to laugh; we cannot cry any more; we do not understand our freedom: this probably because we are still among our dead comrades!
Let us rise and stand in silence to commemorate our dead!
The site of a liberation concert where Zalman Grinberg described the plight of Holocaust survivors.
The speech was one of several steps on Zalman's part that drew him into the leadership of Jewish Holocaust survivors, in particular, those who advocated for Israeli statehood as a solution to the DP question. He co-founded the Central Committee of Liberated Jews and served as its first chair to advocate for this goal. He toured America and spoke to large audiences to raise money and support for the cause, all the while throwing major shade at the American and British governments and international aid groups (Jewish and secular) for what he and others described as a policy of neglect toward survivors. Sound familiar?
As his stature as a public figure rose his influence as a physician waned at St. Ottilien, the Benedictine monastery in Germany where his work on behalf of DPs began. As I learned last week, St. Ottilien became a haven for Jewish survivors from 1945 to 1948. It was the home to the only hospital in an American DP camp run by Jewish staff, who worked alongside monks and German nurses and doctors. More than 400 "Ottilien babies" were born there as part of the DP baby boom. I had the great pleasure of meeting several of those former babies last week, and many of them described their parents' stints at St. Ottilien as the happiest time of their lives. Those are stories for another day.
Then a bunch of other stuff happened to Zalman, including a move to Israel, then to the US, but those, too, are stories for another day. But it was definitely surreal to be regarded as the granddaughter of a hero, especially in relation to a person I never knew -- someone who had actually chosen to not have a relationship with me or my family for reasons that certainly merit their own story. More on that later, but the experience of last week certainly left me wishing that I had heard more about St. Ottilien from Zalman instead of from historians.
For all of those reasons, ever since my trip -- Zionist politics aside -- I've been searching for parallels between me and Zalman, apple-doesn't-fall-far-from-the- tree style.
I was struck by what Israeli historian Dr. Ada Schein described as Zalman's penchant for "spontaneous leadership" -- quick-decision making under chaotic circumstances through a mix of charisma and fast action. "Sounds like me," I thought, although on paper I have very little to show for it. My resume of spontaneous leadership largely consists of breaking stalemates on where to go for dinner or rousting friends for impromptu hikes and a stint as an employee council chair. And that time in kindergarten I wrote a letter to the NYC DOE requesting doors on bathroom stalls in my elementary school (and prevailed!). But I still like this idea of spontaneous leadership, as it shifts agency to the individual to get s--t done from those who are supposed to be in charge. Maybe that's what we have in common, a healthy skepticism of officialdom in various forms. I'm confident that those who know me will back me up on this.
So this is the pressure people face in the shadow of larger than life relatives. Let's see where it leads...