Fathers Don't Just Protect—They Prepare

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My grandfather was born in 1882 in the small Ukrainian town of Zawale, which was part of the vast, multiethnic Austro-Hungarian empire. In 1914, this mega-state, like so many European nations, threw itself into a world war with frenzied enthusiasm. My grandfather later told my father how puzzled he had been to watch thousands of happy young men—really still just boys—boarding trains in Vienna, cheering as they went off to what was almost certainly their death. He did not volunteer, he avoided conscription, and he survived.
His son, my father, was born in Vienna in 1927. He was 6 years old when Adolf Hitler became the chancellor of Germany. Austria still had a few years of freedom left, and my grandfather used them well: Because an archive had burned down, several of his family documents had to be reissued. Through skillful manipulation, he managed to turn himself from a Jew into what the Nazis would later classify as a 'half Jew.' And as Germany's annexation of Austria became inevitable, he came up with an especially daring idea: In a court proceeding, he had his wife, my grandmother, declared the illegitimate daughter of the janitor in her parents' building. He bribed witnesses who testified that her mother had had an affair with that janitor. It worked: My grandmother was officially declared the daughter of an Aryan. And as a result, my family survived.
This Father's Day, I find myself reflecting not only on paternal love but on paternal foresight—the clarity and focus it takes to see what others might not, to act before the danger has a name. Raising children is always a challenge, but never more so than in times of deep insecurity about what the future will look like. To meet that challenge, it can help to look at the generations that came before.
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Despite my grandfather's efforts, life for my father quickly changed under the Nazis. In swimming school, two boys nearly drowned him while the lifeguard looked on, grinning. When my father finally emerged, gasping for breath, the lifeguard laughed and said, 'Can't swim, Jew?' Around the same time, the man who lived in the neighboring house began watching my father and his sister with dark, brooding looks. But only after Hitler's army had entered Austria did he begin shouting, each and every time they passed: 'Jewwws!'
My father would recount these events with amused detachment. He had already learned as a teenager to recognize the profound absurdity of Nazism—the deep, grotesque nonsense of what Charlie Chaplin and Ernst Lubitsch were turning into dark political comedies at the same time in Hollywood. A few months later, two men came to my grandparents and ordered them to leave their house with their children. They moved into a small apartment, and their home was 'bought'—at a tiny, symbolic price—by the 'Jewww'-shouting neighbor.
Corruption is the most corrosive force in a democracy, but in a dictatorship it can save you. Once a month, a Gestapo officer would appear at my grandparents' apartment and take something valuable—a piece of furniture, a porcelain plate, a painting. In return, the file on my grandparents would sink a little lower in the stack on his desk. At my father's school, the boys had to line up, and all those tall enough were asked—in fact, ordered—to volunteer for the SS. My father raised his hand and said, 'Requesting permission to report—I'm one-quarter Jewish!' To which the SS man shouted in disgust, 'Step back!' And so my father was spared from becoming a war criminal in Hitler's service. In almost every situation, having Jewish ancestry was a mortal danger. But in this one instance, it became his salvation.
In the final months of the war, my father was arrested after all and spent three months in a concentration camp close to Vienna, constantly at risk of death. But after the war had ended, there was still a striking atmosphere of leniency toward the perpetrators. When he went to the local police station to give a statement about his time in the camp, he was met with scornful dismissiveness. 'It wasn't really that bad, was it?' the officer asked. 'Aren't we exaggerating a little?' It was then that my father decided to move from Austria to Germany, paradoxically—because there, under pressure from the occupying powers, some reckoning with the past was taking place. Austria, meanwhile, had successfully cast itself as the war's first victim.
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I tell my son, who never met his grandfather (as I never met mine), that my father was obsessed throughout his life with the idea that what had happened once could happen again—not just to Jews, but to anyone. Of course, my son, raised in a seemingly stable world, feels profoundly safe. And that's a good thing. But we are currently living in the United States, a country that for my grandfather was a refuge impossible to reach, but that is currently in the throes of what some serious scholars now describe as an authoritarian power grab. And even in Germany, where we could easily return, a right-wing extremist party is now so strong that it might come in first in the next election. So I think about the responsibility of raising a child in a time when the future is impossible to predict. I think, more and more, of my grandfather, who in 1914 watched people plunge into war hysteria and decided to resist their excitement, and who would later take very unconventional steps—steps that would, after history took a turn for the worse, ensure his family's survival.
My grandfather understood the psychology of fanaticism very early; my father understood the stupidity and mediocrity of the people whom the dictatorship empowered, without mistaking them for harmless clowns. Now, as we watch society once again take a dangerous turn—as books are banned, people are sent to foreign prisons without even a court order, and soldiers are deployed against protesters—I wonder what stories my future grandchildren will one day need to remember. Memory is not a picture book; it's a tool. And fatherhood, especially in times like these, is not just about protection. It is about preparation.
Article originally published at The Atlantic