Let me start off by stating clearly and sincerely that I have nothing but respect, compassion and empathy for the people that put their lives at risk or paid the ultimate price in the spirit of protection and defense of our way of life. I don’t know what it would have been like, had I needed to face violence and death against me, my family or maybe worse, to inflict it on someone else. But my compassion and empathy comes from perhaps a different place than some would imagine
You see, my stepfather was a soldier in the Nazi military. For those of us in the west, he was the enemy. He rarely spoke of his experience during the 2nd world war, the one that wasn’t supposed to happen, but did, because we forgot. What I did see of him was not good for most of my young life.
My stepfather could, by all accounts, be considered an alcoholic. From what I was told, he also carried out at least one, if not more affairs after he married my mom. My relationship with him was veiled in the shadows of his own darkness. I was disappointed with him. I felt betrayed and abandoned by him. I felt alone and isolated in the family that was created between my mother and him; though I loved my brothers deeply. My love for my mother became polluted with feelings of betrayal, abandonment and longing, but my love for her never died.
There were periods during my childhood and adolescence where I was abused, to put it plain and simple. There were instances of physical violence beyond the so called acceptable spankings that went too far. There was always emotional abuse, especially into my adolescence as I began to act out my anger and rebellion against his authoritarian if not intoxicated presence. I know that this became reciprocal. A vicious cycle of which one of us could hate the other more.
I never understood why this was. At least not during my childhood and teen years. It got to the point where I had to leave home for my own sake, and for the sake of my mother and brothers. Of course, this was framed as I was doing drugs and so I needed a healthy place to be. I was to blame and I was doing bad things. More fights, more betrayal, more abandonment. But leaving was an answer that helped lift that darkness from our lives.
Long story short, I did quit using drugs just before I left home as a deliberate and much wanted choice. I could sense where the lifestyle was leading me. I found a safe place to live thanks to connections that my mom had. I learned some profound life lessons at that place and walked out two and half years later, a peer counsellor.
It wasn’t really until I went to university at age 31 that I started to develop an understanding, a context, to what darkness surrounded my stepfather. I started piecing a very complex and personal puzzle together. In short, it was the war. It was the stormy discontent and angry world that was Europe, particularly Germany, that he grew up in during the years preceding the war. The horrors that he had lived through I could not even imagine having survived. In his words, the answer to many social problems was to “kill them all”.
As I studied family systems in social work as well as social history, his story began to unfold. This is bits and pieces of it the way that I understand it.
During his youth, Ziggy, I’ll start using his name, grew up in Austria and what was then, Czechoslovakia. There were a couple of key moments of monstrous and deadly horror that Ziggy had witnessed and been a part. I don’t think I have all the details in order but the impact and the wounds that impaled him are the point.
As he told me his stories, I could imagine they went something like this in his eyes; He was awakened one morning by his mother frantically shaking him and pleading with him to get up. Nazi soldiers were outside his home in the village he was living in Austria. I imagine he could taste and smell the terror his mother was feeling. He was very young, in early adolescence when Germany invaded both Austria and Czecheslovakia. He felt the terror but did not understand the why. He and his mother were ordered to leave the house and join the other villagers who were standing in the street. Speaking in german, the soldiers ordered the people to lay on the street. Fortunately, Ziggy and his mother were fluent in german and did as they were told. Those who did not understand german in this very non german town were not as fortunate. They were gunned down in cold blood. Ziggy watched in numb horror and disbelief (I can only imagine) as people he knew were snuffed out like candles. How could anyone live through this scene of senseless gore. Yet he and his mother did somehow.
Later in my studies, I learned that Ziggy’s father was involved in some sort of Nazi spy ring. I was told he was being targeted by the Gestapo. In the end, his father’s death was as mysterious as it was violent. He was killed in a targeted explosion.
I learned that his uncle later had committed suicide out of his own hopelessness and powerlessness in the wake of the Nazi regime. Apparently this happened at Ziggy’s home.
Ziggy volunteered for the Hitler youth. Why the hell would he do that after all the bloodshed and violence? Precisely because of the bloodshed and violence I can only imagine. I believe from the stories, that he was living a life of terror. That few people had any choice in the recruitment into the Hitler youth. But we also know historically that there was support for such things. Regardless, Ziggy was part of that youth and willing or not, certainly out of terror, and an instinct for survival, he was part of that system.
His involvement in the war itself was apparently short lived. He told me himself in later years during my studies, that he was serving under Rommel’s army in North Africa. There he was captured by the US army only two weeks into his deployment. He spent a short time in a camp in Africa before he was shipped to a POW camp in Louisiana USA. I think he said he spent two years there. He was very hushed about his experience as a POW. I could see his eyes and face darken as he talked about his time there. But he never got into detail. It only came out later and very vaguely that his treatment while in that camp was riddled with violence and abuse. Whatever the story was, it clearly rattled Ziggy to talk about it. He locked it away into some dark place in his mind.
It is this darkness that poisoned his life after the war. We often hear that we are aware of the personal impact that war has on veterans. But the poison and rot, excruciating pain and loss, that festers from that violence seeps into every aspect of a soldier’s life, regardless of who’s side you were on. And not always, but far too often this slime from war excreets into the lives of the people around the soldier. This is what I discovered about my step father. This was the muddy slime that was beneath our relationship.
Ziggy did what many men do who have experienced multiple traumas as children. He found solace and comfort in a bottle and in the arms of other women. What he did not find was a lasting peace. To make matters worse, he was uneducated and unskilled in any trades or profession. He struggled but did what he could to make ends meet for our family. But his dark clouds cast deep shadows, not only on our relationship but on his marriage as well. His own lack of belief in himself, his lack of confidence showed up as aggression and excess. These dark clouds were indeed the clouds that never dissipated after the war. He could not forget it so he tried to bury it.
I spoke at his funeral in 2000. Despite our conflicts and the damage to our relationship, that can never be reversed by the way, I did find compassion through empathy. Our conversations about his experiences helped me overcome much of my resentment of his abusive actions when I was younger. I have not forgotten them. But through our maturing, our reconnection through my studies, a new and more compassionate relationship grew between us. I was and am able to empathize with the struggles and horrors he had to persevere through; mostly because we started talking about it. We were able to scrub away a small amount of the black mould that was his childhood and young adult life.
As I considered what I would say at his funeral, I discovered that I had forgiven him. Again, I do not forget the brutal impact that our relationship had on me. But I now can see it in a different light; because I spoke about it with him. We were able to live out the remainder of his life in relative peace, and companionship.
I am not naive enough to say I do not carry some of the poison from that relationship with me to this day. But I understand its context. And in so understanding, I can be mindful and have power over that time in my life.
So I write this on the eve of remembrance day. Lest we forget, not just war, but the devastating and horrific damage it does to a person’s soul. Fear of one’s own life every day, and the fear of taking someone else’s life, opens a bottomless hole in one’s psych. We all choose our ways of coping with pain. Ziggy chose the only ways he knew through a toxic culture. I do not celebrate that he was a soldier in the Nazi regime. From a western perspective, I must not. I do celebrate the journey we took together despite, or maybe because of the conflicts and life lessons that were created from that journey.
That is what I cannot and must not forget this and every remembrance day.
