Today’s issue of the International Herald Tribune had this interesting article Germany’s new ‘textbook’ on the Holocaust about rewriting German history, which has been long overdue.
Like most people of my generation, we did not learn much about the Holocaust in school. And what we learned we only got through questioning primary sources. I remember questioning my parents and not feeling satisfied with their answers.
Then came a time I was ashamed to travel to foreign countries for fear of being rebuked for my country’s past. This was confirmed on my second trip out of the country when in 9th grade, our mandatory Religious Instruction class offered a one-week retreat in Taizé, France. We were just a bunch of young ignorant girls, not really knowing why the French could hate us with such a passion (justifiably so), and wondered why some old folks refused to serve us at the cafe in town.
As I got older I took trips to the metropolitan city of Paris, and my nationality felt totally ignored there. In big cities like Paris I felt only my money counted, not my historical baggage.
Then I learned about the Holocaust atrocities from foreign books, available around libraries in the world. There was not much printed material in German on the market. I learned more about the Holocaust from an English book in Japan than in all the years I had spent in Germany.
In 2002, my husband and I decided to take our first family trip to France, and we went to this lovely town of Chateauneuf-en-Auxois. While there, I instructed both of my kids to speak only in English to me. I did not want to let on I was German in this small village of 800 residents, and I wanted to hide my own past. Of course, my two small children could not keep up with my personal demands of insecurity and spoke to me in German. But then guess what – there was a French woman wanting to practice her German with me! She was an antique shop owner, a woman a bit younger than me, who was very talkative. We conversed in German, and I remember being grateful for her kindness towards me. It only took one person to let me know I was not only a German with a past, but also a “normal tourist”.
I felt relieved that at least a few attitudes had changed since my previous experience 30 years ago.
Even in the light of all this, though, I feel that Germans are generally acting oblivious to their past when traveling to France for their holidays. There are many German tour buses going to Paris for the weekend.
But to this day I still look out for tour buses from France coming to Frankfurt, Germany. I have not seen one yet.
With the French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, announcing that beginning next fall, French fifth-graders should each study the life of one of the 11,000 French children killed during the Holocaust, the French are taking a step back in time in order to move ahead another step once more.

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