German family history, glory and shame

When a person firsts gets into genealogy they often go in to prove a family legend. Perhaps the family has a story about a famous relative or an infamous relative. Or they just want to look into who were the peoples of their family, what did they believe, what were they about, were they like me? My family, on my Dad's Swedish side, had just such a story for 150 years. My great grandfather had a stepfather. Although the stepfathers name was on his birth record it was common  "knowledge" throughout my great grandfather's family ( a family that now numbered in the hundreds throughout Scandinavia and North America) that great grandfather's biological father was Oscar II Bernadotte ,King of Sweden and Norway. And the story did seem plausible. He looked like Oscar. Oscar was a ladies man who had a few mistresses and sired quite a few illegitimate children he never claimed as his own. DNA proved otherwise. Great grandfather was just another illegitimate child who fathers name we will never know. The truth was very hard to take for many of the family members who had considered themselves "royal". Some refused to believe the family legend was not true despite the conclusive evidence.

Illegitimacy is no big deal now and I think many of us would almost like knowing we had been related to some infamous person with a racy past. Someone like Billy the Kid, Napoleon etc.  What if the "truth" is closer to home and not that far past? What if it was just a generation or two behind you? Someone you knew? This is the issue that gives my husband, a first generation German immigrant, Collective Guilt.

Collective guilt is a concept in which individuals 

are responsible for other people's actions by 

tolerating, ignoring, or harboring them, 

without actively collaborating in these actions.

A part of him doesn't want me to dig into the story of his family, mainly the story of his parents generation. I would guess that many of those born in Germany in the generation after World War II would at least wonder. How could a country of people, my people, be involved in something as horrendous as the Holocaust? The wholesale murder and attempted extinction of another group of people? Could someone I knew as a loving father or trusted uncle also have been a part of that? As I began to investigate my husbands genealogy he confided that he  was curious about the family story in general but he truly feared and did not want to know if his family had any part in that awful time in German history. I get it. I am of Scandinavian ancestry, no doubt directly descended from some of those Viking hoards that raped and pillaged their way across Ireland, England and all parts of Europe. But I do not feel responsible or guilty that some guy in Dublin carries Scandinavian DNA along with his Celtic DNA. Because that was long long ago. That was history. Hubby and I grew up in a Chicago neighborhood with a large Jewish population. When my family moved to the suburbs we lived in a heavily Jewish northern suburb. So much so that our school was closed not only on Christmas but on the Jewish high holidays of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. We saw the tattooed arms of concentration camp survivors. We had friends in school who not only did not have any grandparents (while I had all four until I was high school age) but had no extended family at all. Their parents had been the only member of their respective family that walked out of the camp the day it was liberated by the Allies. I get it. For some, like my husband, it is just too soon. 

In his Nobel Prize Lecture in 1986, Elie Wiesel recalled the eminent historian Simon Dubnow, who over and over implored his fellow inhabitants in the Riga ghetto: “Yiddin, schreibt un farschreibt” — “Jews, write it all down.” However painful it was they felt compelled to preserve the truth. The truth was that Germany, and their  collaborators (and there were many) wiped out a full third of the world's Jewish population, along with millions of Poles, Russians, Romany, homosexuals, dear God the list goes on and on.  Israel’s parliament long ago added Yom Hashoah, or Holocaust Remembrance Day, to the Jewish calendar each spring. "Never Forget" is the mantra of the survivors of the Holocaust. Our personal truth is that it is possible our ancestors may have had a part in the unthinkable or at the very least witnessed the atrocities and did...nothing.  

It is difficult and painful truth for the German generation that followed World War II, but just as our ancestors glory is their's alone, so is their shame. As time goes on generations that follow us will also see it as long long ago. We are responsible however to be  brave enough in spite of our fear and shame to "Never forget" and tell our family's story just as it was. It is after all part of history,
the history of the Feicks of Groß-Bieberau Germany.. 

“Those who don't know their history are doomed to repeat it. You have to expose who you are so that you can determine what you need to become.”
― Cynthia A. Patterson