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Reading, reviewing, and now discussing Dan’s paper has been for me a moving twinship experience, one felt at many levels:
We are both Diaspora Canadian Jews growing up in the shadow of World War II and the Holocaust.
We both bear the name of the one family casualty of that terrible war: For Dan a cousin murdered by the Nazis (or their collaborators), and for me, my Uncle Max, who was killed in action under tragic and heroic circumstances in a parachute mishap while flying over France on a bombing mission designed to kill German civilians.
While my conscious revulsion and fear of Germans was not to the extent of Dan’s, I nevertheless, as a young adult in the 60’s, whenever I encountered an older and recent immigrant of German descent, I would immediately estimate his age in 1943 and wonder: Where was he then? Was he a camp guard? How many Jews did this apparently amicable man kill?
While my parents and extended family thankfully were in Canada during the war, my three closest buddies were sons of survivors. Furthermore, regardless of the details of one’s family’s war experience, we were all part of a close-knit Jewish community in the Canadian Midwestern city of Winnipeg, where the unspeakable horrors of the Holocaust cast a silent but palpable shadow over us all. The Holocaust constituted a collective trauma that deeply imbedded all world Jewry (and of course all Germans and others).
And from the perspective of both my family and my community the non-Jew was a “goy” clearly an “other” not to be trusted. I still recall my father, in response to my letting him know that I had made some non-Jewish friends during my medical school sojourn in Montreal, saying to me: “Yes you have some non-Jewish friends, but let me tell you: You will discover during your lifetime that the only friends you can really count on will be Jews!”
I also resonated deeply with Dan’s struggles with shame, an emotion that dominated my experiential landscape during my most vulnerable moments
And there is