Christmas Season was a special time at Grandmas.

Often I would stop by after school, throw my bicycle against her rosebushes, run to her upstairs apartment anticipating being welcome in her strange dialect and by a host of aromas that were unmistakably Grandmas.

There were many heirlooms that she had brought with her from back east; Grandpas paintings fascinated me the most, and I definitely had my sights and hopes set on one of his quaint pocket watches, alas, never to be realized. Grandpa’s paintings were all of landscapes and buildings that once had been their “Heimat”, their homeland Schlesia, now fallen in the hands of the “damn Bolsheviks”, as Grandma would put it.

The aroma of fresh cut parsley for soup, soon intermingled with the scent of her pine tree branch, not a tree, just a branch which she had decorated sparingly for the season. A variety of nuts, some chocolate and a few strings of glitter around a couple of oranges and apples sat between a handful of candles; more than anything else she had brought from Schlesia this branch spoke volumes about her upbringing.

I sat and watched her in the kitchen, enjoying the smell of the parsley that she used in ample quantities in her cooking; this scent often takes me back to these happier days when ignorance of a great many things was indeed bliss.

After mealtime, we would sit in her living room by the window and play any number of board and card games; Grandma was the only one in the family that had the time to do so.

In the winter it could get gloomy indoors by early afternoon, often Grandma would light a single desk lamp, and if she was in a generous mood the candles too.
I do not know where she acquired this lamp; while I would wait for Grandma to make a move on the board, I would stare long and intensely at the golden light emanating through the lampshade. Strange markings that stood out in dark amber glow fascinated me. It was almost as if the Sun was behind leaves revealing their fine veins and arteries channeling life to the membranes between them.

On these occasions when I sat and marveled at the lamp and the old paintings, I would often ask her about the last great war. Stories I had heard from my parents and Grandma captivated my imagination, it sounded all so adventurous and heroic that I felt sorry to have missed it. My mother and father were less forthcoming with stories from their youth, they seemed strangely embarrassed by it; Grandma on the other hand could be a fountain of information, especially stories that concerned Schlesia the loss of which she blamed largely on “those Jews”.

I did not know who the Jews were, I found that people in general seemed to know very little of them for disliking them so much. Still they had to have done something to earn disparaging terms that were used in everyday language, and as the Sunday class teacher pointed out repeatedly, they were after all the ones who crucified Jesus Christ.

When I inquired about them my questions were met with the same embarrassed evasiveness as questions about that big war; Grandma told me once that most Jews had been locked up in prison labor camps during the war and that Grandpa nearly was locked up with them on account of his name, which sounded Jewish to the police.

I thought that was rather strange, to be locked up for your name?
Lucky for him, he had a relative who was high ranking in the Army and fixed the mistake. When asked where the Jews went after the war, for clearly they no longer lived among us, I was told that they had simply gone away, or people also told me that I asked too many questions.

In later years, I learned where the Jews had gone to and with every year, that my intellect grew the shocking truth sank in deeper. Eventually I even dwelt in the land where the damned of the World congregate. Those who had survived when their kin had “simply gone away” were now my neighbors; only numbers tattooed on their forearms, heavy accents and memories as deep as the furrows of their skin, were all that remained of a heritage that they had once called their own.

Sharing life in the ancestral home of the Jew, I learned the truth at last in all its horrible detail and the stain it left on my own heritage. All too brief, my tormented conscience found ephemeral solace in the friendship to a Jewish maiden, daughter to survivors of the hell called Auschwitz who had refused to “just go away”.
Her Polish parents never knew that their daughter had taken to befriend a “damned German” who found atonement in her gentle amity for what his hands had no part in, but his heart bore the burden of nonetheless. Our friendship appeared to be as impossible and yet as hopeful as an insignificant beacon of light, amidst a ravaged dark ocean. No longer did I long to have experienced this war, and its tale had lost the luster of heroism.

One more horrid aspect of our common past was still awaiting my discovery; in a darkened room of the Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem.

I stood dumbfounded for there behind glass against a black backdrop I beheld my grandmother’s lamp, or rather one that looked just like it. The same turned wooden base and the exact same lampshade glowing in amber and gold. Why ever would it be here, it had to be manufactured by Jews in a death-camp like so many other commodities for the third Reich, and that would prove true enough. My heart pounded in my throat as I stepped closer to read the panel of the exhibit: “Lampshade made of human skin…” Was all I managed to read before I fled the room for fresh air and the light of day.

I sat long in the park outside gazing at the hills surrounding Jerusalem, watching busloads of school kids and tourists arrive and depart. Before my minds eye they became train wagons that vomited their human content at dozens of Concentration camps, always leaving empty…

I can never be certain whether my worst fear is justified and I cannot bring myself to believe that my grandmother knew, in spite of her dislike for Jews.
However, the lamp disappeared after her passing, and I am left to wonder if all those years of my childhood, we sang Silent Night bathed in the golden glow of a Jew.