“How long are you going to keep picking this up and carrying it around?” I asked Andreas. “What’s the legacy you want to pass on?”
Do you want to stay beholden to the past? Or can you find a way to release your loved ones—and yourself?
Until our trip to Europe, I had no idea how much my own daughter was struggling with this question.
Neither Audrey nor I remember ever speaking of my past during her childhood. She learned about the Holocaust at Sunday school and asked Béla about it. He told her I’d been in Auschwitz. Something clicked into place. She’d sensed the presence of things we weren’t talking about; she knew there was pain. Yet because she didn’t know to ask—or at some level didn’t want to know—the truth had remained hidden.
Now it was in full view. When I began to talk more openly and publicly about my past, Audrey didn’t know what to do with the feelings my history elicited in her. She wondered how my suffering, and Béla’s, too, might have transferred to her DNA, and worried she would pass the burden of trauma on to her own children. For years, she avoided books, films, museums, and events that dealt with the Holocaust.
When we carry a difficult legacy, we often react in one of two ways: we resist it or detach from it; we fight it or run away. Though from opposite sides of the same tragedy, Andreas and Audrey were walking the same path: reckoning with a brutal truth, and figuring out how to hold it and carry it forward.
Other than staying silent in an effort to protect my children from my pain, I hadn’t considered the broader impact of legacy until the early 1980s, when a fourteen-year-old boy came to his court-appointed therapy session wearing a brown shirt and brown boots, leaned his elbow on the table, and started ranting about how to make America white again, about how to kill all the Jews, niggers, Mexicans, and chinks. Fury swept through me. I wanted so badly to shake him, to say, “How dare you talk like that? Do you know who I am? My mother died in a gas chamber!” Just when I thought I might reach out my hands and throttle him, I heard a voice within say, “Find the bigot in you.”
Impossible, I thought. I’m not a bigot. I’m a Holocaust survivor and an immigrant. I lost my parents to hate. I used the “colored” bathroom at the factory in Baltimore in solidarity with my African American coworkers. I marched for civil rights with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. I’m not a bigot!
But to stop bigotry means you start with yourself. You let go of judgment and choose compassion.
I took a deep breath, leaned in, gazed at him with as much kindness as I could muster, and said, “Tell me more.”
It was a tiny gesture of acceptance—not of his ideology, but of his personhood. And it was enough for him to speak a little of his lonely childhood, absentee parents, and severe neglect. Hearing his story reminded me that he hadn’t joined an extremist group because he was born with hate. He was seeking what we all want: acceptance, attention, affection. It’s not an excuse. But attacking him would only nourish the seeds of worthlessness his upbringing had sown. I had the choice to alienate him further, or give him another version of refuge and belonging.
I never saw him again. I don’t know if he continued on the path of prejudice, crime, and violence, or if he was able to heal and turn his life around. I do know that he walked in ready to kill someone like me, and he left in a softer mood.
Even a Nazi can be a messenger of God. This boy was my teacher, guiding me to the choice I always have to replace judgment with compassion—to recognize our shared humanity and practice love.
All over the world, a resurgence of fascism looms. My great-grandsons stand to inherit a world still gripped by prejudice and hate, where children yell racial epithets on the playground and carry guns to school, where nations build walls to deny asylum to fellow humans. In this state of fear and vulnerability, it’s tempting to hate the haters. But I feel sorry for people who are taught to hate.
And I identify with them. What if I’d been born a German gentile instead of a Hungarian Jew? What if I’d heard Hitler proclaim, “Today, Germany, tomorrow, the world”? I, too, could have been a Hitler Youth, a guard at Ravensbrück.
We’re not all descendants of Nazis. But we each have a Nazi within.
Freedom means choosing, every moment, whether we reach for our inner Nazi or our inner Gandhi. For the love we were born with or the hate we learned.
The inner Nazi is the part of you that has the capacity to judge and withhold compassion, that denies you the permission to be free and victimizes others when things don’t go your way.
I’m still learning to let go of my inner Nazi.
I had lunch the other day at a fancy country club with women looking like a million dollars, every one of them. Why am I spending an afternoon with people who look like Barbie dolls? I thought. Then I caught myself in the act of judging others, engaging in the same us-versus-them mentality that killed my parents. When I put my prejudice aside, I discovered that the women were deep thinkers, that they’d experienced difficulty and pain. I’d been ready to write them off out of hand.
Another evening I spoke at a Chabad where a fellow survivor was in attendance. During the question-and-answer period following my talk, he asked, “Why did you fall into line so easily in Auschwitz? Why didn’t
