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Among my parents and their friends, all of them survivors of the Holocaust, were many mismatched couples: an educated city girl and an uneducated farmer boy, a handsome card player and a homely dullard, a shrewd businesswoman and a slow husband who tagged along. They met during the War or after the War, having landed in places they’d been cattle-carred or escaped to, far-flung from anything familiar, starving and having lost entire families. Theirs were not romantic courtships. One person had enough food for the other, they became a couple. One came from the same town as the other, they became a couple. It was simply the force of life that married them and bore them children, and for many it was simply the force of life that created their new lives, some creating meaning and joy and richness between them. About those couples whose misery with each other never let up, the others muttered, “Hitler matched them,” while knowing deep inside that Hitler matched them all.
Mismatched fate brought Roger Frie and I together as well. Though we are both graduates of the White Institute, we hadn’t crossed paths until, several years ago, we each traveled a personal and professional journey to understand the impact of our Holocaust history. Within weeks of each other, we presented papers to our shared analytic community about our journeys. And then, several weeks later, when I was asked to write a review of Frie’s book, I thought yes before I felt no. I thought, what an interesting match and what a challenging project for me to take on: I, a child of Holocaust survivors, having recently taken the difficult trip to Poland to confront my family’s history, would now read and review Roger Frie’s, Not in My Family: German Memory and Responsibility after the Holocaust, his personal account of confronting his Holocaust history and the knowledge that his grandfather was a Nazi. But even as I write this, all these months later, I can’t shake the knowledge that “Hitler matched us.” Frie and