My mother came out to me this evening, after 84 years.
Last week my aunt passed away in Holland and my 84 year old mother in Australia hasn't handled it well. She's under Stage 3 Covid quarantine restriction in Victoria, Australia, feeling old and isolated, and struggling. For the last 3 evenings we have had EPIC conversations between Melbourne and Thailand; about dying alone, migration, disappointment, not feeling loved and about the decisions we make for ourselves and our children which have unintended, but painful, consequences for others that cause sadness. I feel my mother is starting to mentally tidy up this life in order to move on.
And then it started. This morning. She sent me photo after old photo, in Messenger. Clearly she was getting some things ready to talk to me about. And then she sent this.
My great grand-parents with their children - the Beinema Family - in Germany in about 1908. My grandmother, Louise, is the girl on the right at about 7 years of age. The small girl on the left is the great-aunt I was named after, Tante Marike: she was committed to an "insane asylum" at the age of 12 where she eventually committed suicide. For having fanciful ideas and making accusations against men in the family.
Our Dutch family has ALWAYS talked endlessly about the proud history of my father's family - the van Breugel family - of it's unbroken lineage, father to son, going back to the 1400s, and then, after a vague bit, more family traced back to the 1100s. We have been raised on the stories of connection to the famous painters, the family crest, and visits from Queen Isobel and King Ferdinand of Spain.
My mother's family? I know almost nothing directly from my mother, although I have pieced some of the story together in my travels to Holland and in long, franks talks with my Uncle, my mother's little brother.
Tonight, for the first time in 84 years, my mother admitted to me that her family was Jewish.
That little 7 year old girl in the photo, Louise, grew into a wealthy and fashionable woman - a social reformer who attended Hitler's rallies about economic reform in the early 1930s when Germans were starving to death and Hitler was the only one putting food on the tables. She later fled to Holland, and adjusted her identity with her husband - miraculously losing an umlaut and having my mother and her little brother very publicly baptized into the Catholic Church. In 1942 when the extermination of the Jews in Holland was escalating, my grandmother sold some valuable furniture to buy bright orange wool, to have a jacket knitted for my mother. In somber, wartime Holland, my mother's orange jacket must have screamed Dutch Protestant loudly enough for the Nazis to sidestep them. And she donated what tiny little money they had hoarded, in 1944, during the HongerWinter, to old friends who were collecting for the thousands of civilians who were starving to death. Read more about the HongerWinter, when 20,000 Dutch civilians in Holland starved to death, HERE. The people she donated to were connections of old friends, but also, apparently, Nazi sympathizers.
My great grand-mother did not survive the HongerWinter, passing away in 1944. But my grandmother's little family did - despite having their house bombed and spending the final months of the war huddled in a tiny basement room they claimed by removing the decaying corpse of the previous occupant.
After the war, both my grandparents were tried by the Dutch government as possible Nazi sympathizers. There were not convicted due to no evidence, but had their passports cancelled for some years and my grandfather, a postal clerk at that time, was officially marked as never to be promoted. He worked as a low-level postal clerk until he died of stomach cancer, brought on by the hunger years.
Tonight I listened to my mother's shame.
Her shame was all muddled up. Initially about being Jewish - about hiding that from us all these years - about switching to be a Catholic of convenience while others died for their faith. But she also had shame about her parents being branded as Nazi sympathizers, and the social stigma & economic ruin it brought to her family after the war.
I listened a lot. And then I did something unexpected.
I asked my mother to listen to how I saw her mother. Not through the lens of a disappointed child, but as a detached observer.
I described my Grandmother as a vivacious, fashionable woman of means who COULD have ignored the thousands of Germans starving in the late 1920s and early 1930s. But she didn't. It was a SERIOUSLY radical woman who went to public political rallies with all the men in the 1930s! She was strong, educated, opinionated and cared about the people in her country.
When the extermination of the Jews started, they fled. As you would. I described to my mother how clever she was to have her children baptized publicly - and to make sure that her little girl was seen as on the right team in her bright orange jacket. I described my grandmother as an activist who did not have the benefit of information or the internet, and who had to rely on propaganda and speeches for her decisions. I talked about the strength of a Jewish woman letting everything go to give her children a chance at a future. Of a woman who cleaned up a decaying corpse so her children had a place to sleep out of the snow & be safe from more air-raids. I spoke of her loyalty during the Nazi Tribunal years, and how she stayed with her husband and did not flinch.
My mother was really surprised.
"You really see her like that?" she asked. And yes, I do.
She was even more surprised that I have known for nearly 30 years that she - we - are Jewish. And that it does't matter to me in the least. I am not a believer in organized religion of any kind, so it's a simple matter of fact. Of heritage and lineage, nothing more.
We spoke for hours tonight, and we also came to that place where I said to her that ALL our relationships deserve that impersonal, step back. Perspective. To be viewed through a different lens.
We are all products of our time.
My mother finally said she had a lot to think about - to reframe the way she has always seen her own mother, as not a loser nor an opportunist, but as a political & social activist in turbulent times who gave money to starving people regardless of their politics. In a funny way, me voicing the way I view my grandmother has given her permission. To release 75 years of terrible shame she has carried with her, and also to release her sense of fear. About being Jewish.
She said it tonight. Tentatively at first. But later, with a firmer voice and no tremor: "My parents were Jewish".
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