Denial by Jessica Stern Page A

them?”
    â€œNo, I don’t think so.” My father cannot imagine that he would forget something like this. I know that he could.
    â€œI believe my mother told me afterward. I knew they had drawn guns, but I’m not sure how I knew.”
    â€œSo the door opens. What happened after that?”
    â€œI don’t recall,” he says.
    â€œDid she come over and hug you?” I ask.
    â€œI don’t recall. I think she might have come out, and we hugged each other. She would have picked us up.
    â€œI’m surmising,” he explains.
    â€œWhere was your father?” I whisper.
    â€œApparently my father was in the fields at the time of the attack, when the brownshirts marched into our house. My motherwas deathly afraid that my father would return with a scythe in his arms,” he says.
    Why was my grandmother afraid that her husband would go after the Nazis with a scythe? Could the Nazis have raped my grandmother?
    Is my father telling me that he understands what happened to me, that he understands why I knew it was not sensible to be hysterical under the rapist’s gun? Is he warning me that after this brief interlude he will go back behind the wall that shuts out the recognition of terror, the terrors of his past and the terrors of mine?
    For now, in this very moment, we are allies, my father and I, in the war against terror and rape. In this very moment, we are together.
    Now my father switches to the present.
    â€œExcept for the beating of the boys, I never suffered anything comparable to what you went through,” he says, shocking me with a bolt of empathy. He seems to be considering my past experience in a new light. And with this return to the present, I sense new rules—he seems to be giving both of us permission to feel for the other, at least for the moment. We are no longer in an empathy-free zone.
    â€œThe beatings didn’t bother me very much because in my family children were physically punished if they were bad. It wasn’t as bad as it would be for a child today, for Evan, who has never been beaten,” he says, referring to my son.
    I am thinking now of when Evan was a toddler. Like many toddlers, when Evan got too excited, he would sometimes try to bite me. My father offered to cure him by biting Evan back.
    â€œI prefer to be spanked than to be yelled at or made to feel guilty. It was less painful. I felt warm in my bottom and that was it,” my father says.
    â€œI was afraid at night, afraid during the day,” he continues, without prompting from me.
    There is a noticeable lessening of tension in the room.
    â€œDid you have trouble sleeping?” I ask.
    â€œBut I didn’t know I was terrorized,” my father says, as if he hasn’t heard my question. So he didn’t feel his terror in the moment, either.
    â€œWhen did you realize?” I ask.
    â€œI still remember the feeling,” he says. “As soon as the U.S. ship started pulling away from the dock in Hamburg, I felt a huge upwelling. Then I realized that my fear was leaving me—the ship was American, and American law applied there, although there were some Nazis on the ship. The USS Washington …a passenger liner…March of 1938…so I was almost ten.
    â€œI got very sick. I couldn’t hold anything down. I’m not sure, maybe I got food poisoned. As soon as I recovered, I was voraciously hungry. And everyone else was sick, and I was getting to run around the ship. And getting to eat four or five meals a day. We didn’t have much to eat in Germany—we had fake flour. I got to eat real food. I was small and thin for my age at the time.”
    It is hard for me to imagine this muscled man emaciated and starving.
    â€œBut I still had German habits,” he says, by which he means, the habits of a German Jew, petrified of the Nazis. “If I saw Boy Scouts, I would go way out of my way to avoid them because they reminded me of