Stumbling Blocks

Let me tell you a story. My great grandparents were a pair of scholars who lived in Berlin at the start of the twentieth century. They converted to Catholicism from Judaism as adults, and in 1920 had a daughter, who they named Veronika Annunziata Jezowa. They died in a camp in Riga before her 18th birthday. By the late 1930s, the world they’d known as big and bright had become a cramped dark room, with a swastika daubed on one wall. The expansive collective of artists, writers and thinkers that had made up their Berlin district had shrunk to the size of the trunk that was my grandmother’s sole possession when she arrived alone in the United Kingdom. As one by one scholarly societies closed their door to my great grandfather, they began to make discreet enquiries about Quaker families willing to take in and sponsor Jewish young people fleeing mainland Europe, and were able to place my grandmother with one, with the understanding they would be following her as soon as possible. Of course, as so many didn’t, they never did.
This isn’t a new story, or an original one, and most Jewish families living in England have one much like it. The trauma of our close escape is woven into our shared history and the swastika on the wall is always there no matter how many times we paper over it. The trauma is a club, a club with members who were shushed into silence when they asked their grandfather where he got the numbers on his arm, a club where every piece of good news is accompanied with a quick glance at the heavens to make sure God’s not listening in and planning to spoil it all, a club that has made a name for itself by laughing wryly at our historical misfortune; a club whose main question is, finally, ‘what do we tell the children.’ Each family is a nation and our private tragedies are part of a huge shared map we keep in the attic, behind a velvet curtain; it is a cruel necessity that sooner or later our children have to look behind it. We believe in God, but only for the bad things.
*
My grandmother died in 2003, and my cousin’s oldest daughter was born the year afterward. Some years later my uncle was contacted by someone who was working on the Stolpersteine (literally ‘stumbling stones’) project which was begun in the 1990s by the artist Gunter Demnig. The project aims to mark the houses of victims of the Holocaust with small cobble-like stones or stolpersteins — plaques really — in the ground. They were going to lay one outside the house in Berlin where my family had lived, and they wanted to know if we would like to attend the small associated ceremony and to meet the current owners of the house. My uncle invited my cousin, my father and I, and it was casually brought up not long before we were due to leave that my cousin was planning to bring his daughter, who at the time was eight or nine.
I tried to remember what age I’d been when I’d learnt about the Holocaust, and had a cloudy memory of being shown photographs of stack after stack of shoes, and of reading half of the Diary of Anne Frank before losing interest and abandoning it. I also remembered not making the connection to my Grandmother, even though I had known she was German and knew just as clearly that I had never heard her refer to the country or speak a single German word. I worried that confronting a child with so terrible a chapter in our family’s past without the right grounding (her mother is not Jewish and she has been raised in the Church of England) would distress her beyond all measure, and asked my uncle to make sure that the purpose of our visit had been properly explained. My concerns apparently weren’t shared. Her father and grandfather were convinced that she’d learnt about it at school, and in any case wouldn’t be likely to make the link with a woman who had died before she was born. I didn’t agree, but I also didn’t bring it up again.
The day itself was bright and grey, which is not so great a paradox if you consider the reason for it, and we all wore our best clothes. The puddles from the recent rain were silver and shining where they caught the weak sun, and I limped slightly from the ridiculous shoes it had seemed important to wear. When we arrived at the house we stood at the plaque, and laid two white roses on it, one for each of them. We shook hands with the woman who lived there, who told us that she often stood at the plaque to think, and that she made a point every day of sweeping the pavement around it. My uncle read aloud from my Grandmother’s memoir, which she had begun in the year I was born and had written ‘for Phoebe’ in the front. While he was speaking my father, my cousin and I were drawing steadily closer together until we stood in a little row, like mourning rooks. My uncle, who has never had the greatest sense of propriety, stopped and took a picture.
As he read out the words on their solperstein — ‘Here lived Ignaz Sebastian and Erna,’ followed by the year they were deported and finally the year they died — we all began to cry. All, that is, except for my little cousin, who was skipping in circles on the paving stones nearby, plainly bored by what she thought of as another uninteresting adult event. The final words of my grandmother’s account were ‘I couldn’t save my parents’ which turned the crying to sobbing; this, at least, was a foreign enough event to catch her attention and she wandered over to see the source of it.
‘Who were they?’ she asked after she’d read the words for herself.
‘I told you, don’t you remember?’ said her father. ‘They were your great great grandparents.’
We waited while she took this in. She frowned.
‘What does ‘mordet’ mean?’
‘It means ‘murdered’,’ said my uncle, absorbed enough by grief not to think of the impact his words would have. I saw it though; her lip quivered like someone had hit her. In a moment, she seemed half the size and less brightly lit. She left another pause, a stricken one this time.
‘Why were they murdered?’ she asked, her voice small, her eyes brimming.
None of the adults felt equal to answering her. Her father, after a long, stretched silence said ‘it’s complicated.’
*
The next few days were spent seeing the sights of Berlin, carefully avoiding all memorials. We didn’t talk much, but none of us were as preoccupied and reflective as my little cousin. The day we were due to leave our hotel I asked her if she had any questions. Her relief was so strong it could have been a third presence in the room; a more superstitious woman would say that my grandmother’s ghost had settled to listen too. The questions she asked were halting and fearful — I think she worried that she would make them true by voicing them, and they were all about death and monsters and hatred — and they were unanswerable. I answered as best I could, using words like ‘evil’ and ‘peace now’ and as I spoke her shoulders straightened and the colour came back to her cheeks. She smiled at me — a small smile, and a sad one, but a smile all the same — but her eyes were still troubled.
‘Are you worried that it’s going to happen again?’ I asked. She nodded, and I suddenly felt the weight of this new knowledge we’d visited on her as a hard pressure in the centre of my chest. I held my arms out to her and she burst into tears and leapt into them. I held her and said into her hair ‘it won’t, it’s not going to happen again.’ Our tears and our hair mingled, hers curly, mine straightened, and I said ‘it’s never going to happen again’ over and over.
Crying like that is difficult to keep up. I told her to go and wash her face, and tried to think of what would have cheered me up when I was her age while I splashed my own. When she came back I handed her a lipstick and said ‘would you like some?’. She nodded, and took it from me and we stood in front of the sink and looked in the mirror while we put on our lipstick. Her reflected eyes never left me, and I wished I could lend her my adult body so she could contain the adult things that she now knew. I felt responsible for it, so I showed her how to blot her lipstick and the face I always pull when looking in the mirror, which she imitated. I taught her how to fluff up her hair, and told her that the girls who bullied her for her curls would be eaten by dragons. When we’d finished, she went to her little satchel and brought out her notebook and asked if I’d help her design a mermaid, and we spread out her felt tip pens and sat on the floor cross-legged together until her father came up to our room see what was keeping us. She snatched up her drawings and was out of the door like a shot, fears forgotten or assimilated, and I could hear her bombing up and down the corridor while I zipped up my bag and tidied up her pens.
When I was ready to leave, I sat back down on the bed, and began to pray. I don’t do this very often, but that day I asked God for forgiveness; God who I only believe in for the bad things, God because there was no-one else who could ever forgive me for the lie that I had told.