My mother was a Holocaust survivor, and my father left Germany in the mid-1930s when Hitler came to power. I grew up in Washington Heights – a neighborhood in Manhattan nicknamed “Frankfurt on the Hudson” because of its large German Jewish population.

Most of my friends were children of survivors or children of refugees from Hitler’s Europe. Most of our parents didn’t talk much about the Holocaust, but we grew up in the shadow of the trauma: the ghosts of family members who didn’t survive, the lingering fears of persecution, the pressures to succeed, contempt for all things. German.

Although I grew up speaking German, I was taught to identify the dialect spoken by non-Jews. When we heard it during our very occasional visits to the Yorktown neighborhood of Manhattan, we would quietly cross the street. My parents also boycotted German products.

When I was first invited in 2023 to participate in the Frankfurt Visit Program – a week-long event for children of survivors whose parents lived in Frankfurt before and during the Holocaust – I was not sure you want to attend. The program, organized and sponsored by the city, is designed to show what Jewish life in Frankfurt was like and what it looks like today, with a vibrant Jewish culture and several active synagogues.

The author traveled to Frankfurt in 2022 for the installation of four Stolpersteine ​​– commemorative brass “stumbling stones” – in front of his mother’s original residence, one for each of his grandfather , his grandmother, his mother and his uncle. (Courtesy of Stewart Florsheim)

Having grown up with an antipathy toward anything German, I did not want to support any program that might begin to absolve Germans of responsibility.

But I had begun a journey – reading more and more about the progress of German responsibility for the Holocaust and talking to individual Germans about their role in remembrance and reconciliation. Maybe it was time to accept the past and face the ghosts that inhabited my childhood.

My grandfather ran a very successful kosher meat market in Frankfurt. During Kristallnacht in 1938, everything changed. During this two-day Nazi pogrom, the butcher shop was vandalized and closed. The Gestapo stormed the family apartment above the store and deported my grandfather to Dachau. When he left, he told my grandmother not to worry and not to go to the Gestapo to try to get him released. After all, he says, he defended Germany in the First World War. Whatever is happening now, he insisted, it will eventually collapse.

My grandmother had sisters living in New York and, as a result, was able to obtain a visa for the family to move to America. Contrary to my grandfather’s wishes, she apparently went to the Gestapo every day to try to have him released.

My mother told this story: “Six weeks after my father was kidnapped, I woke up at 2 a.m. because I had a feeling he was coming home. I ran to the station and there he was, on the way home, crying. He cried for weeks. He was never the same.

The reunited family left everything behind and headed to New York in March 1939 to rebuild their lives.

I was surprised when my parents decided to participate in a program called “Wiedergutmachung” (literally “repair again”) more than 20 years ago, when the local German government invited survivors and refugees to return to their hometown to express their remorse. I was against the visit, but my parents won their case. My father often spoke of his idyllic village and he suddenly wanted to see it again. When he returned, he was treated like a VIP. This proved to be a great closure to his life, as he died a few months after his return.

I started to change my mind when a few of my friends told me about their positive experiences with Stolpersteine. program: Starting in 1992, small brass plaques, or “stumbling blocks,” were placed in front of places where victims of Nazism had lived, worked and studied. My friends were happy to have the opportunity to pay respects to their families and witness the installations. I decided to participate in the program with this simple aspiration in mind. I traveled to Frankfurt in 2022 for the installation of four Stolpersteine ​​in front of my mother’s original residence – one for my grandfather, grandmother, mother and uncle.

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The next step in my journey was a little more complicated: becoming a German citizen.

I never thought I would want to live in Germany, but, motivated in part by the current political situation in the United States, I was attracted by the idea of ​​having access to the EU. Now, after some recent trips to the country, I’ve started fantasizing about what it might be like to live in international centers like Berlin or Frankfurt. I applied in March 2022 and received my naturalization certificate in October of the same year.

Having become a German citizen and learned how the Germans taught about the Holocaust, supported refugees and fought ring ideology, I saw no reason not to participate in the Frankfurt visit program last September.

Participants of the Frankfurt visit program, including the author, gather at the European Central Bank in Frankfurt, Germany, September 20, 2024. The bank is built on a site where Jews were rounded up during the Holocaust. (Salomé Roessler/lensandlight)

During the week of the program, we met with local students to talk to them about our experiences as children of survivors, a program hosted by Project Jewish Life. I asked them when and what they learned about the Holocaust, and if they felt any remorse. Most of them agreed they were too far away, but they wanted to know more, in part to make sure it didn’t happen again. By comparison, one of the teachers, a woman in her forties, said her grandparents never talked about the Holocaust and that she was too ashamed to admit that she was German when She traveled across Europe as a teenager.

The conversations shifted to the present time; for example, students wanted to learn more about anti-Semitism in the United States given the crisis in the Middle East. I told them how impressed I was that Germany accepted responsibility for the Holocaust, as evidenced by many actions, including accepting refugees fleeing persecution, climate change and others disasters.

Since I have been writing poetry, I have also met a group of students from the University of Frankfurt who study poetry. They wanted me to read poems about my experiences as the child of a survivor. The class included ethnic Germans as well as refugees, and they asked me questions about my writing process and whether or not it helped me come to terms with the past.

I told them yes, as shown in the last verses of one of the poems I read called “My Mother’s Favorite Drawing.” The poem is based on a drawing by Käthe Kollwitz entitled “Mother and Child”:

Mom wants to hang it above her bed in one place
now framed by the shadow of the fire escape,

the steps and the ladder imposed on the mother and child
preparing them for flight forever.

I told them that my writing helps me grapple with the ghosts of the Holocaust, but that I will always be aware of the horrors of persecution and genocide, and that I will be on the verge of understanding that at any moment, I might need to run away.

My mother said the Holocaust affected me more than it did her – partly because I never stopped asking questions and reading about it. I felt like I was living in two worlds: a world inhabited by ghosts and our comfortable middle-class American life. I have always tried to reconcile the two worlds, which later extended to activism against contemporary genocide.

On my trip from Washington Heights to Frankfort, I discovered that reconciliation was well underway.

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is the editor of “Ghosts of the Holocaust,” an anthology of poetry written by children of Holocaust survivors (Wayne State University Press, 1989). He lives in the Bay Area.

The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of NYJW or its parent company, 70 Faces Media.