One summer day, years ago, I chanced upon the diary of a German soldier from the early 1940s in a flea market in New York City. It was buried among a bunch of other random items — hat blocks, Matchbox cars, an Underwood typewriter.
There was so much I might have missed it, but I am Jewish; books adorned with eagles perched on swastikas tend to catch my eye.
It was a small notebook, filled with German writing. Though I don’t speak German, I was able to make out the months — Februar, März, April — and the year.
The black-and-white photographs of the soldier’s life, tucked into the yellowing pages, were what interested me most: a photo of the beaming young diarist in his sharp new uniform, a rifle slung over his shoulder; one with his fellow soldiers in a countryside somewhere on what appeared to be a pleasurable weekend furlough of some kind, their field caps tipped back upon their heads; others featured him with what I assumed to be his family — an older couple, perhaps his parents, and a group who might have been siblings, gathered at a festive dinner.
There were a number of him posed beside a pretty young woman I assumed to be his wife or girlfriend.
Young love.
To me, what was most notable was what I didn’t find: There were no photos of death camps, or mass graves, or starving prisoners. Instead, there was one of him with his parents in front of their house. Proud.
I shook my head at what I saw as this man’s almost pathological ability to compartmentalize the madness he likely played a role in and the quaint, pastoral life he led at the same time. It reminded me of something I was told as a child.
“How could people do such things?” I often asked, around age 9 or 10.
That’s Germans, I was told by my parents and teachers. They were evil. It was in their blood. The only good German is a dead German, they would say.
Most of my grandparents’ families were murdered in the Holocaust.
And so in my upbringing, there were no “ordinary” Germans, to borrow a phrase from the Holocaust historian Christopher Browning.
They were all hateful, fascist murderers — fools who could be led by a fearmonger to commit atrocities he claimed were necessary and good.
How the Germans came to be this way, no one could say. One thing was certain, though: We, thank goodness, were not like them.
We were Americans.
We weren’t so easily fooled.
