The horrors of the Holocaust were terrible enough. What Stalin did in his purges was mind-boggling. The deaths of innocent men, women and children, perpetrated by Nazi monsters or Soviet butchers makes us recoil in disgust.
But imagine if you are the son or daughter of these people. Imagine that one of your own family was slaughtered by them. How would you feel? How could you live your life? What would be your legacy?
Then think about Svetlana Alliluyeva. Think about Monika Hertwig. Think about Pope Benedict XVI and you may have an inkling of how much the sins of the fathers affected these sons and daughters for their entire lives.
Svetlana was the daughter of Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin. By any accounts, Stalin was a brutal man who, while he ruled the USSR either as premier or as the first general secretary of the Communist Party starting in 1922, conducted a series of purges of Russian people that rivaled the catastrophe of the Holocaust.
During Stalin’s reign millions of people were sent to penal labor camps, famine raged from 1932 to 1933 because he drastically changed the way agriculture was done in the Soviet Union, and in order to rid himself of any rivals and opposition, he conducted a campaign that came to be called the Great Purge, during which hundreds of thousands of people were executed.
How did his daughter cope? It appears on the surface that she may have had no knowledge of what her father did. For years she was told that her mother, Nadezhda Alliluyeva, Stalin’s second wife, had died of peritonitis caused by a burst appendix in 1932. It wasn’t until Khrushchev came to power in the 1950s that Svetlana learned her mother had committed suicide.
For the rest of her life, Svetlana was left to fend for herself. When she lived in the U.S. she denounced the USSR; when she lived in the USSR, she thoroughly denounced the West. It wasn’t until 1967 that she asked for political asylum in the West and came to New York City in April of that year. Later, she returned to live in the Soviet Union in 1984. She returned to America in 1986.
Svetlana, who became known as Lana Peters, died Nov. 22, 2011, from colon cancer, in Wisconsin, at the age of 85. She ended up living a life of obscurity, wandering and poverty. She died unable to forgive her father for his personal cruelty to her. “He broke my life,” she once said.
Now in her 60s, Monika Hertwig was 11 years old when she learned her father, Amon Goeth, commander of the Plaszow concentration camp in Poland, was not killed during World War II but was hanged in 1946 for his murder of tens of thousands of people, 500 of them by his own hands. Goeth was portrayed by actor Ralph Feinnes in the 1993 movie, “Schindler’s List.”
Hertwig said, “He liked to shoot women with babies in their arms from the balcony of his house, to see if one bullet could kill two.”
In 1958, she met a man employed in a cafe as a dishwasher who had a number tattooed on his arm. She asked him about them. He told her he had been in the Plaszow camp and had been branded with the number by Hitler’s SS. She said her father ran the camp there. The man froze, and then ordered her to leave the cafe and never come back.
She recounts her story in the 2008 documentary, “Inheritance,” when she meets with Helen Jonas, who had been enslaved in Amon Goeth’s camp. Hertwig learned from Jonas about many of her father’s unspeakable acts. At the age of 11 she learned for the first time that her father routinely slaughtered Jews. From that point on Hertwig struggled with painful, gut-wrenching knowledge of what her father was — a virulent anti-Semite who made no excuses for his monstrous behavior.
She says today, “I am tormented by how much of him is in me.”
Maybe it was only one man who was able to rise above the devastation he saw and even took part in. Pope Benedict XVI was born Joseph Ratzinger in Bavaria, Germany. Shortly after he turned 14 he was drafted into the Hitler Youth movement, which required by law all youths to become members. At this time one of his cousins, also 14, who had Down syndrome, was taken away by the Nazis and killed during the campaign of Nazi eugenics.
In 1943, the Pope was drafted into the German army but in 1945, as the Allies closed in, he deserted to his family’s home just as the American troops established their headquarters in the Ratzinger household. He spent a short time in an Allied POW camp, but was released in the summer of 1945, and rejoined the seminary in November that year along with his brother, Georg.
Perhaps the Pope became a priest in the Catholic Church because of what he was forced to do in his youth, because of what he witnessed. It is testament to him that when he was elected Pope after the death of Pope John Paul II, that the Jewish Anti-Defamation League welcomed him because of “his great sensitivity to Jewish history and the Holocaust.”
So far, during his papacy, he has made considerable effort to welcome leaders of other religions, including meeting with the Dalai Lama in 2006 at the Vatican.
In 2007, Pope Benedict XVI has said of the sufferings of the indigenous Americans that it is “not possible to forget the suffering and the injustices inflicted by colonizers against the indigenous population, whose fundamental human rights were often trampled.”
Truth is, for these three people, and maybe for many of us, history, however horrific, never leaves us. We carry it in our genes, we relive it in our behaviors, we often refuse to learn its lessons. We rarely overcome it.
It is as if we remain doomed by our own legacies.
Jodeane Albright is the community editor of the Idaho State Journal.
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Tags: amon goeth, burst appendix, dalai lama, down syndrome, great purge, holocaust, inheritance, innocent men women, jewish, joseph stalin, khrushchev, lana peters, legacy, monika hertwig, Nazi, plaszow, poland, political asylum, pope benedict, pope benedict xvi, pope bewnedict xvi, ratzinger, shcindler's list, stalin, svetlana alliluyeva, ussr, vatican
