Your Mental Wealth

A few years ago my wife gave me the gift of a lifetime. A trip and tour of Europe. A very special one. A World War II Tour, complete with an accompanying historian from West Point (Vietnam Veteran) and a number of WWII veterans who were there in 1944, a Silver Star winner among them. It was a tour that traced the route of the D-Day Landings in Normandy, and moved overland through France to Berlin, where Germany’s surrender took place.

I have always been intrigued and fascinated by the lives and times that make up the World War II era. Why? I can’t tell you exactly. Maybe it was because I was born during those years. Maybe because my Dad worked for the air force and taught us all the names of the airplanes that flew over our house, the planes he worked on, and the planes he flew. Maybe it was because when I was young he went away for what seemed like years, to participate in the testing of the atomic bomb in the Southern Pacific after the war. Maybe it was because the first book I remember reading was Red Randall Over Tokyo, which was printed, as books were in those days, on recycled paper, because all the new paper went to the war effort. I remember reading and watching everything I could about those times. I still do.

The first night when we met with our group and the tour director (a pretty insufferable guy who shall remain nameless) we were asked to share why we were on the trip. I was surprised to hear the words, “So I can learn about my dad”. As the words left my mouth I thought ,“That sounds rather dramatic!!! “ I never forgot , when I was a kid, overhearing my aunts talk to each other about how, “Once our men went to war, they never quite came back”. There was a part of my dad that wasn’t quite there (until, thankfully, the last few years of his life) and I have always wondered what role living through those times might have had on him and my mom. It had to be a pretty scary time. I know it was scary enough when I became old enough to understand a little bit about what was going on in the world in the early 50’s, long after the war. “Duck and Cover,” fall-out shelters (we didn’t have one), Civil Defense radios and all.

From day one of the trip, I took full advantage of the opportunity I had to learn everything I could. At every turn I cross-examined our guides, our tour director and our resident historian. To my delight the historian started each day off with a lecture of what we were going to see and hear about on that day. I sat right next to both of them on the bus and pumped them with questions hour after hour. I would ask our tour guide a question. He would take the microphone and answer the question for the entire bus. Though his intentions were honorable, he failed to remember to repeat the question, so they just got the answer. My fellow tourists later confided that they felt like they were playing “Jeopardy”, the game show: “Ok, we know the tour guide said, ‘About 37 days.’ What do you think the question was?” They had quite a few yucks in coming up with their answers to what they thought the question was.

I read every book (that I hadn’t already read) about D-Day, the French campaign, about the Battle of the Bulge, Buchenwald (one of the many death camps), Dresden, and the actual house where the “final solution” (the plan for extermination of the Jews) meeting took place. We visited a dozen wartime museums and military cemeteries. I believe I read every “tag” on every exhibit. I was relentless and insatiable. Someone else might call it compulsive.

The one thing I never understood was how German citizens could “turn in” their fellow neighbors who were citizens like them, but were or were suspected of being Jewish. In one museum I found out. The German authorities would come to my door and ask if I knew of anyone in the neighborhood who was Jewish. They would tell me that nothing bad would happen to them. They would caution me that if I did not tell them the truth and they found out that I had lied, they would be back. Not necessarily for me, but for my children. I suddenly understood how I as a parent, I would tell them what they wanted to know.

Over the years I had always wondered about how, if I had been a Jewish person, I might not resist. I found out that they were manipulated and lied to even sometimes by their own religious leaders who believed the authorities when they said things like, “If you will just get your people to stop interacting with non-Jews, we will leave you alone and not ask for anything further. However, if you don’t get them to agree to this simple request, things will get very bad for all of you”. The insidiousness of the repression became clearer for me. At what point would I make the decision to resist?

I had always wondered what it was like to be an American soldier fighting their way to Berlin; or a French civilian watching their entire existence, except for life itself, be destroyed before their very eyes; a member of the French resistance; a young German soldier facing the D-Day invasion fleet; a German civilian whose home and city was under constant day and night bombing attacks from allied aircraft; a concentration camp prisoner; a guard, and finally a German citizen who would turn in his innocent neighbors. Being able to stand in some of the very same places, reading about how millions were manipulated, the trip supplied answers to many of my wonderings.

It all came together for me one of the last days of our trip. I was talking to our tour historian, the Vietnam Veteran, and said “You know, having gone on this trip, having seen everything we have seen, what I am left with is the realization that given the circumstances of the times, I, just because I am a human being, I could have been any one of these players. Any sense of judgment of those people, or sense of being better than, or “I would never” had evaporated.

He said “You are one of the very few who get that. It could have been me, too”.