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Prologue: A Tale of Two Trains
- University of Wisconsin Press
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Prologue A Tale of Two Trains [3.235.251.99] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 13:30 GMT) 3 Iam on a train heading into Magdeburg, in eastern Germany, about two hours southwest of Berlin. Sixty-one years ago my late mother was on a very different sort of train headed for Magdeburg. Hers didn’t have a dining car or changing electronic displays updating the train’s speed and distance from its next station. She was one of three hundred Jewish women internees being transported from the particularly brutal concentration camp of Stutthof, on the Baltic coast twenty-one miles from Danzig, in sealed and stinking cattle cars. In Magdeburg she would be a slave laborer for over a year at Polte Fabrik, Germany’s largest munitions plant. The factory was the scene of many accidents, and every night she would dream of her fingers being cut off. These dreams haunted her many years after her liberation. They haunt me as I look down at my middle-aged hands. I’m coming to do a very different kind of work. I’m on a hectic two-week book tour, scheduled to speak about and read from my novel The German Money, the story of a Holocaust survivor’s adult children, who are arguing about their dead mother’s will. 4 The title refers to German reparations paid to the survivor in the novel. Not all survivors did so, but my parents applied for reparations from the German government to Holocaust survivors. Because they were never well off, the monthly checks made some difference in their lives. Did they resent that? They never said, though my mother detested the word itself, Wiedergutmachung. How could you make things good again? I found it puzzling and even embarrassing that my parents took this money at all, given how they felt, and when those monthly checks came, I stared at the envelopes with repulsion and fascination. Those mixed feelings are at the dramatic core of The German Money. As my train nears the station, it hits me that this entrance could not be more American. My mother was a slave, considered subhuman by the very people whose language she spoke so perfectly that it might have saved her life. She survived, immigrated to the United States, and bore me in the world’s freest country. Now, I’m returning to the scene of her brutal imprisonment as a successful American author with two more books scheduled to be published in Germany after this one. And not just any American author, but a pioneer in writing about the children of Holocaust survivors who has been publishing on the subject longer than any other American writer: over thirty years. My mother was brought here to Magdeburg against her will, while I made the choice to come. To Germany—the country I had sworn never to visit. It wasn’t just a graveyard, it was a gigantic thieves’ warehouse. I had read in Holocaust histories of the massive European-wide plunder of the Jewish people as they became enslaved and subsequently slaughtered. Nazis didn’t merely confiscate shops, businesses , factories, apartments and homes; gold, jewels, money, and art. They also snatched up pianos, furniture, silver, fur coats, candelabras , household goods, mattresses, clothing—whatever they could, wherever it lay. Anywhere I turned in that country, I might face something that had belonged to a murdered relative. It was likewise the country whose products I could never buy, the country that was so alien and radioactive that when I was a child I [3.235.251.99] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 13:30 GMT) 5 used to imagine maps of Europe without it—as if I were a superhero whose laser gaze could slice it away from the continent and sink it without a trace. Then Switzerland would have a seacoast. Austria, too. And I would have revenge for the camps and killing squads that not only murdered dozens of my parents’ relatives but also poisoned their memories. Poisoned mine. Talking about their lost parents, cousins, aunts, and uncles was so painful for my own parents that I have no family tree to climb in middle age, no names and professions and cities to study and explore. The Nazis certainly won that round—like a giant grinding his victim’s bones to dust. Yet here I am in Magdeburg, going over an introduction that a German-speaking friend helped me write. It seems only polite to...