© 2024
Play Live Radio
Next Up:
0:00
0:00
0:00 0:00
Available On Air Stations
An update has been released for the Android version of the WAMC App that addresses performance issues. Please check the Google Play Store to download and update to the latest version.

Listener Essay - Tongue-Tied

The Statue of Liberty
Sarah LaDuke

Sandra Capellaro wrote this story five years ago recently became an American citizen. She lives in New Paltz and works as a translator, administrator and writer.  

Tongue-Tied

When I am in elementary school we read a book called “When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit”. It's about a Jewish girl in Germany, her non-Jewish friend and the painful truth they learn about the pre-war reality around them. And it's about the pink plush rabbit that one day disappears just as will the little Jewish girl.

About 45 minutes north of Hannover where I grew up, is Bergen-Belsen, the former concentration camp. It's here that Anne Frank perished. We read her diary in school, and one day my class goes on a field trip to Bergen-Belsen. My daughter goes on trips to the Bardavon Opera and the Mohonk Preserve, but growing up in Germany I'm on a bus to the grounds of a former concentration camp. The drive there leads through small towns and countryside. Birch trees and heather, lots of wild heather are the features I remember.

The grounds of the memorial site are extensive but since the buildings were destroyed after liberation, beyond a few stone ruins there’s nothing to help your imagination. It’s the emptiness that serves as a commemorative marker, like the absence of the Jews I grew up with.

The small exhibit in the visitor’s center is graphic and overwhelms me. I wish I could understand where I am, but I don’t. I look at the trees and heather and feel quiet, peace. But the photos on the wall are the most frightening thing I can imagine. It's not a monster out of a horror movie that you would run away from. No, it is a human thing that I haven’t yet met. Horror perpetrated by German men and women. For what reason?

How is this possible? How could people go this far and no one stop them? And: why did it have to be my country that perpetrated these crimes? That question comes later, when I would give a lot not to be blond and blue-eyed and want to pretend I’m from Sweden, when asked where I am from.

At 22 I leave Germany to make my life in a new language that isn’t burdened by shame. American English comforts me. Its sounds roll self-assuredly, leisurely, and promise freedom, humor, peace of mind. I move to Amherst, MA, where I study representations of the Holocaust with a Jewish professor. His letter of acceptance is my entry ticket to the land of my dreams. He is entirely too handsome – and Jewish – for me to feel comfortable around him. My need to impress hinders my ability to participate, and while I had great plans of bringing Jews and Germans together across the rupture created by the Holocaust my shame is too great.

While at UMass I befriend a lively Israeli woman who runs the Jewish community center. She tells me about devouring Nietzsche while training for the Army in the mountains of Israel. We share a love of poetry and nature. And for the first time I feel the warmth of truly being seen and accepted for who I am – by someone whose verdict matters most to me, a Jew.

I later move to NYC where, without vacation time, savings or even health insurance, my favorite thing becomes riding the ferry to Staten Island. After I get there I turn right around and ride back. It's the trip that matters, right past my favorite statue, Lady Liberty, Mother of Exiles. I stand on the North side of the boat and gaze at her, just her and me, like mother and daughter. I whisper Emma Lazarus' poem, "give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,” and feel the reality of my own dream.

I don't feel German anymore. I don't feel American either. After my daughter is born, I am unable to speak German to her. It's as if I'm learning English all over again with her. The nursery rhymes I didn't grow up with, the new and deeper meaning of "I love you". People remind me of how children who grow up bi-lingual have such an advantage, yet I can't do it. The language of my own childhood doesn't want to come out. I try to say "I love you" in German, ich liebe dich, but it feels strange. Not to mention my self-consciousness on the playground. So she and I stick to English and babbling. I'm a mother who speaks English and a daughter who speaks German.

I relish crossing the street when the light is red. Occasionally I need to be late to work or meetings because Germans are always on time. I forge expiration dates on student ID's and hiking passes just for the thrill of being a rebel. There are so many German stereotypes I'm trying to shed, although some of them - aloofness, lack of tact - stick like burrs even in my intimate relationships.

But there's one thing that I'll never shed, the fact that I don't like uniforms, flags or any display of patriotism. When my daughter has to recite the pledge of allegiance in school before she can even read, I bristle. It makes me uneasy to see people rise when the national anthem is played. I feel like I know where it can lead, feel the potential for danger, also in this country. Especially after 9/11 the jingoist rhetoric in the news is sickening. I think of how quickly virtue can become vice and pride become arrogance. In a powerful nation such as this one, with its halo of innocence...it can all happen again, can't it?