The following is excerpted with Sondra Perl’s permission from Chapter 2, “History Becomes Real”, of her memoir, On Austrian Soil: Teaching Those I Was Taught to Hate, published in 2005 by State University of New York Press, Albany, NY. Writing It Real reviewed Sondra’s first book about writing, Felt Sense: Writing With The Body, December 8th, 2005. In that book, Perl imparts her process for helping authors come to their writing for “embodied knowing” and to “make new sense.” Using the philosophy of Eugene Gendlin, Perl advises, there is a space inside of us that “holds within it all that is not yet said, what waits implicitly before words come.” We must learn to allow it to open up, and from that place in the body new ideas and fresh ways of writing come. The blank is not filled in when we sit down to write. We must pause and wait patiently as we are writing.

A Jewish woman teaching Austrian teachers of English at the University of Innsbruck through a program from The City University of New York, Sondra had ample experiences, journal entries, letters and essay and poetry material from her students to process what it meant to her to be on the soil of a country she was taught to hate because of its Nazism during WWII and what it meant for both her and her students to address their parents’ activities and beliefs and how it affected them.

As you read these words which appear early in the book on pages 22-32, look for the ways in which the author enters what she calls in Felt Sense, the “fruitful murkiness” of the “not knowing space.” Look for the ways that not knowing becomes “embodied knowing” and where the knowing makes itself felt as you read. Pay attention, too, to how Sondra Perl melds into her storytelling the various forms of writing her experience in Austria generated. You’ll derive inspiration for working with the gifts of words you’ve received–letters written by a deceased relative, another’s journals and, of course, the collection of your own jottings, letters and journals about significant issues that arose in your life. As Sondra Perl introduces her readers to the deep discomfort she experiences when face-to-face as a teacher with the offspring of a generation responsible for killing the generations of her grandparents and parents, we her readers must face our own values, our own appreciation for community building in a world increasingly experiencing genocide. Writing does make a difference. It does this because it demands taking a hard look at what we are not saying and then finding the words and craft to say it. Writing builds intimacy because it addresses the thoughts and questions that make us most vulnerable.

****

From On Austrian Soil: Teaching Those I Was Taught to Hate
By Sondra Perl

On July 11, when we return from the break, everyone seems relaxed. Munching on peanuts and chocolate, we recount recent happenings. I describe my struggle to reach the top of the Zillertal. My legs still ache, but I am proud, I admit, to have made it and eager, I confess to hike again.

A beaming Ingrid bursts into the room. “I read that article you assigned about the move from product to process in the teaching of writing,” she exclaims. “The one about the paradigm shift. You know,” she says excitedly, “I think I’ve had one.”

We all start to laugh. Her enthusiasm is contagious.

 The rhythm of the course is now carrying us along. Drafts are piling up; readings are being completed. There is a purposeful hum.

There is also much less fear. The teachers seem more wiling to encounter the uncomfortable experience of not knowing what they will say or write. They are, in addition, forming their own answers to the question, “Why write?” But only two are willing to discuss the questions I’d raised earlier. [The author is referring to expressing a block she is having as a writer writing along with her students. “For the past few days,” she tells them, “I have been plagued by questions about your history. I have felt I cannot ask them, that I cannot write about them, that it is not my place. But I also realize that I am not morally neural and if I pretend I am–if I act as if these questions are not important to me–then I am contradicting myself, denying theories I have asked you to consider, subverting my own values.”–Ed.]

Back in our writing group, Martina, who has not yet written a word, confides that my questions leave her feeling helpless. Then she adds, “My family lived in the country. My mother had nine children. The Nazis gave her Hitler’s medal of honor for mothers who produce children for the Third Reich. She refused to wear it. All my parents ever said is that it was a terrible time.”

It is Margret who responds most fully. In her mid-forties, outspoken and opinionated, Margret chafes at the characteristic silence of Austrian culture. My questions seem, finally, to have given her permission to speak.

“My in-laws,” she begins, “were enthusiastic supporters of the Nazis. My father-in-law joined the Nazi party before it was legal to do so. He served in Hitler’s army, fighting for six years.”

Christa, Martina, and I sit silently, waiting for Margret to continue. But I am instantly on guard.

“My mother-in-law was the leader of a Hitler youth group of Tyrolean girls. She was proud,” Margret pauses, “proud that her framed picture hung n the wall of the Reich Chancellery in Berlin.”

So it’s true, I think. Their parents were Nazis.

“We, my husband and I and our daughter, share a house with them. We have done so for years. Most of the time I cannot bear to look at them, to look into their eyes. It pains me,” she says, searching my eyes now, “just to see them in the garden, knowing their history.”

I nod. It pains me too.

“And your husband?” prompts Christa.

“He is angry about it as I am. But he cannot talk to them. He has never been able to. In the sixties, he and his brother rejected everything their parents stood for. They became radicals, joined the Maoists.”

The sons of fascists become communists, I think.

“How did you meet?” I ask.

“At a protest against nuclear power. Over twenty years ago. Gert is ten years older than I am. I was so impressed with him. But as soon as I met her, I could tell his mother didn’t like me. She wanted him to marry someone else, someone prettier, and less opinionated.” Margaret laughs but the sound that emerges is harsh.

“How do you relate to her now?” I ask.

“I rarely talk to her. We all used to argue all the time. But we have learned that it is pointless to condemn them. We get nowhere.

“Now we all live separate lives,” she continues. “In our garden there is a tree with a bench around it. We all sit with our backs to the tree, facing out, not looking at each other. We all exist in our own separate worlds. With this immense silence in the middle. It is such a perfect metaphor for my life.

“Only our daughter goes back and forth with ease. This is the hardest part,” Margret says, her voice breaking. “How can I teach her to hate her own grandparents? How can she ever understand?” A tear rolls down her cheek. Brushing it away, she becomes quiet.

The four of us sit in silence for a moment, then agree to take a break.

****

It is a clear day, the sun shining over the Inn River, the snowy peaks glistening in the distance. I decide to go outside, to get a breath of fresh air. As I stand on the bank of the river, looking out over the water and then up at the surrounding mountains, I see my father. Wounded in a freak accident just before his unit was shipped overseas, my father never fought against the Nazis. While his buddies battled on the beaches of Normandy, he remained in America, organizing shows and sports extravaganzas for stateside soldiers, a prelude to the business conventions, replete with company songs and company cheers, he would stage later in life.

As I walk along the riverbank, I see his mother, my Grandma Rae, and our large, extended family in the basement of the shul in Irvington, New Jersey, where at least eighty of us would gather to celebrate Passover. I recall how my cousins and I would run wild, hiding under tables, giggling, happy to ignore our grandparents bent over prayer books. My father would laugh, holding a video camera, happily taping the songs, the comic skits, the kids’ antics. Oblivious to any religious significance, he viewed family Seders as another great spectacle.

Settling myself on a bench, watching people stroll along the riverbank, I notice a woman with blond hair. She reminds me of my mother whose light hair and blue eyes distinguished her from everyone else in the family. Characteristically sunny, my mother, Ruth, Rivka, Rivkele, greet each day with a smile. She sang Broadway s how tunes in the car and the kitchen. She still does. I see her today, sitting in an Italian restaurant singing along as a piano player croons. Soon he’ll ask her to join in. She’ll agree, get up, take the microphone in her hand. When she’s finished, people will applaud, will think she’s a professional, that she’s had voice lessons. She hasn’t. She was born with a voice so resonant it makes people cry.

Growing up at her side, I learned the world was good place, that one must be kind and understanding. That tomorrow will be better than today. That it is good to have hope. Rarely angry, never spiteful, my mother is not temperamentally a hater. But when it came to the Germans, her warmth would turn to ice, her face would freeze, her eyes narrow in disgust. As a child, I knew something had to be radically wrong. These people must be evil to turn my mother to stone.

Her condemnation was confirmed for me as I grew older and discovered photographs of the Holocaust. I pored over them–pictures of wooden barracks, of electrified barbed wire, of starved bodies with shaved heads thrown carelessly into large pits–until I felt sick. At thirteen, I could not grasp how one group of people, Christians no less, could march another group it the gas chambers; could not make sense of a world that reviled Jews, that either rejoiced or looked away when the Jews were gassed. But one thing I knew for sure: Had I been born in the land my grandparents had left, such a fate would likely have been mine.

Imperceptibly, my shock turned to fear, the fear turned to hate, and the hate began to harden. I began to hate the perpetrators–the Germans, the Austrians, the Poles–anyone who participated in the destruction. I began to hate God for allowing it to happen. And, I think, I also began to hate myself.

For I yearned to be like the girls in my junior high school, quiet and cultured, worldly and well-traveled. I understood why the families of my Gentile friends did not like Jews. I didn’t like them either, or at least what I took to be Jews–those upwardly mobile, financially successful men and women w ho wore their wealth too visibly for me.

I recall our dinner conversations in the big house. My father would need to travel to Germany on Business. My mother would refuse to accompany him, and I would side with her. How could a Jew willingly walk into that Nazi hell? But then his work would take him to Miami Beach. He would fly us all d own and put us up in the penthouse of the Fontainebleau Hotel, a sprawling resort on the ocean with outdoor restaurants and an indoor skating rink. As a teenager, I’d look askance at manicured women who never swam and overweight men sporting gold chains.

Walking along the Inn River, letting my eyes rest on the pastel-colored houses that line its far side, I realize that years ago a complicated dynamic entered my inner life: revulsion for the Jew-haters alternated with revulsion for the Jews.

My father has been dead for twenty years, but his twinkling eyes, his boundless enthusiasm, his love of America are still vivid to me. What would he say now if he saw his daughter struggling with ghosts in an Austrian town?

If he were alive, could I explain to him that I loved the world of immigrant Jews he wished to escape? That his financial success, however well deserved, was also a cause of conflict for me? That in order to be accepted in the Short Hills of my youth, I felt I needed to blend in? That like Eva, the protagonist of my childhood fears and dreams, I, too, felt compelled to remake myself in the image of my Christian schoolmates?

*

Back in class, it is writing time. People are working quietly on their drafts. I sit down at a table in the corner and look out at the group. I no longer see Austrians. I see individuals who are becoming my friends. I start another poem:

For protection, I have hated you.
All of you. There was
no distinction to make.

Germans? They’re all Nazis
I said. Austrians. The same.

But now, I have come among you.
You have given me room
to speak. Now
I see you with your passion
and your pain.

Your humanity
becomes visible to me.

In our final small group meeting of the day, we take a break from responding to drafts to talk about our families. Margret, Martina, and I discover that all three of us have adolescent daughters.

I ask Margret when her daughter was born.

“In 1984,” she responds. “She just turned twelve.”

“Mine, too,” I smile. “What month?”

“April.”

“Mine too. What day?”

“The 24th,” Margret answers.

“The 24th?” I ask, incredulous.

She nods.

“But that’s my daughter’s birthday, too!” I respond.

We both grin.

“What’s your daughter’s name?” she asks.

“Sara,” I respond. “What’s yours?”

“Cara.”

We start to giggle. We barely know each other, may never see one an other again, but right now, we feel a closeness beyond anything we can put into words.

“Amazing,” I say.

“Amazing,” she nods, looking back, her eyes smiling.

****

On July 13, our final day, expectations are high; the mood is light. We need to add another table for the array of food: wine, cheese, homemade soufflés, tomatoes from Ursula’s garden, basil from Hilde’s.

We have reached the end of many hours of hard work. Much of our time this night will be spent in celebration: reading finished work aloud; appreciating what it took for each of us to get to this point; planning for the future; and reflecting together, one last time, on what we have all learned.

Tonight, too, we will see the presentations by the reading groups. In addition to working on our writing, we have also been reading and responding to “young adult” novels. I have asked each small group to create a presentation that brings the book to life. This light-hearted but serious assignment is designed to show that writing s not the only way to demonstrate an understanding of a text and to experience how other forms of expression–music, art, drama–bring other kinds of intelligence into play.

The presentations are at once silly, serious, and wonderful. Ursula, Hilde, and Astrid are touchingly sweet as cats from Beverly Cleary’s Socks. Hans and Thomas as American toughs with switchblades, slicked-back hair, and cigarettes dangling from their kips make the violence of S. E. Hinton’s The Outsiders palpable. Christa, Andrea, Ingrid and Martina enter in checked lumberjack shirts and baseball caps worn backwards and perform a rap song with the words from Judy Blume’s Then Again, Maybe I Won’t, made even funnier by their accents: “Maybe I vill, maybe I von’t.”

Margret and Tanja enact a scene from Roald Dahl’s Matilda. Tanja in schoolgirl garb plays the irrepressible Matilda; Margret, wearing a black leather jacket and shiny black boots, her hair pulled tightly into a bun, plays the vicious headmistress, “the Trunchbull.” When she enters, brandishing a whip and berating Matilda for her stupidity, I blanch. Her voice is chilling. My friend resembles a guard in a concentration camp. It is all I can do to contain myself.

Marget succeeds in capturing the wanton cruelty of a certain kind of teacher, dramatizes the abuse of power prevalent in so many classrooms. At the end, when she puts down her whip, we go wild with applause.

The final event of the evening is the “readaround,” a more serious time when each person is given an opportunity to read a piece of writing to the group. Rather than discuss each piece after each reading, we listen attentively, clap, and move on.

Hilde has written about a woman who wakes up to find herself in a hospital bed, partially paralyzed after a car accident. Thomas gives a science fiction rendering of a woman intent on destroying the lives of the men she loves. Ursula describes a trip through France. Tanja reads a story of adoption. Ingrid has us in stitches as she reads her piece on the pleasures of organic gardening, punctuated by the pain of dealing with proliferating slugs.

When Margret reads her work, we become quiet. I can hear the tension in her voice. It is reflected in our faces, mirrored in the postures of our bodies. We sit spellbound as she evokes, in a poem entitled “Innocence,” the remorse her unrepentant Nazi father-in-law has never expressed:

We didn’t mean to
brand your arms

We didn’t mean to
rip off your clothes

We didn’t mean to
make you crawl on your knees

We didn’t mean to
select you on the ramp

We didn’t mean to
send you to the gas

We didn’t mean to
hurt anyone in our march on Norway

We didn’t mean to
load a cross on our offspring’s shoulders

We didn’t mean to
cut off the human bond

We don’t mean to
say, “Forgive us.”

We were wrong the same!

When she finishes reading, I let out a long, deep breath. I catch her eye and nod. She smiles back. It looks like a smile of relief.

Then Martina clears her throat. She has something she’d like to read. It is a letter to Louise Rosenblatt, a rewrite of an earlier assignment. She begins slowly, her voice shaking:

Dear Mrs. Rosenblatt,

You originally wrote your book Literature as Exploration in 1938, one of the darkest years of Austrian history. While you were writing, enlightened by cultural pluralism, terrible things happened here from the “occupation” to Reichskristallnacht. And so many Austrians–Jewish Austrians–who wrote the best literature, were in danger, not allowed to publish, and had to leave the country. Or worse. Please, Mrs. Rosenblatt, may I express to you my deepest regret for all of the atrocities?

Yours Sincerely,

Martina

I am astonished. For the past two weeks, Martina has been unable to write, has offered excuse after excuse. And now this. I knew Rosenblatt’s book was first published in 1938. But I hadn’t thought about that because I was eager to focus on the relevance of her message to our lives today.

Nineteen thirty-eight was the year of the Anschluss, when Austrians welcomed Hitler with open arms, when those Jews who were luck or had the means were still able to flee. It took Martina’s observation and her imaginative reaching out across time and space to remind me again how the land we inhabit alters the way we read and write.

Sitting there, impressed with all that these teachers have done, grateful to have come among them, I sense once again how much I have changed. I have brought another poem with me, not sure whether I will read it aloud:

What pain has lain
dormant
inside me?

This is not my
history.
I was not born
here. But the souls
of six million
still haunt,
still call.

What is this hatred
born here,
nurtured here,
turned hysterical?
So overwhelming,
so encompassing,
it annihilates the other?

Can I find this hatred
In myself?
Or is the higher ground
of victim
preferable?

I decide not to read it. It is too raw; it raises too many unsettling questions, questions I’m not ready to face. Instead I read a piece I have written to my daughter who is homesick during her first experience at sleep-away camp. I try to reassure her, explaining that each of us comes up against our own fears, our own demons, whenever we venture into the unknown. As I read I wonder: To whom am I really writing, Sara or myself?

When the readaround is over, we take a break and chat quietly for a few minutes. I feel the pride in the room. We are amazed by what we have just heard, by the sheer power of writing, the talent we have witnessed, the courage our colleagues have displayed–most in a second language.

With one hour remaining, I announce that there is still enough time to write final reflections. Then as we move around the room to read, it is clear that the question, “Why write?” has been answered. Now for most, the question is, “How can I offer this experience to my students?”

No one is more adamant about the value of a learner-centered classroom than Margret, who reads to us her reflection on teaching:

I want to support my students in resisting all those leaders who seek to turn their minds into copies of their own, unquestioningly taking what they are offered. A mind that asks questions, reflects, and dares to speak out for all the values once acknowledged to be worthy. . . will be the goal I set for the students in my classroom. Is this utopian?. . . I don’t know. But considering our tradition, I have come to ask the following question: Are there any mistakes a teacher could make that are worse than teaching young people to march joyfully into an atrocious war?

I feel tears welling up, sense within me a mix of relief, gratitude, even joy. This time, when everyone raps knuckles, [an expression of satisfaction among Austrian classroom audiences–ed.] I do the same.

****

On July 16, on the plane home, I think about the courses, the teachers, the little bit of German I now understand, the exhilarating and exhausting hikes up to the snow peaks, my family waiting for me in New York. I recall the scene at the airport that morning. As Tanja and I arrived, we were surprised by Martina, Hans and Margret, who had formed an impromptu goodbye party. Just before I entered passport control, Margret handed me a package with a letter inside:

I was so eager to bring to words what had been brooding in my heart for such a long time. . . This experience of reading each other’s words and of responding to each other had its climax in a feeling of revelation. If you, Sondra, hadn’t been so courageous to ask our careful questions, I would never have been able to answer them. When I eventually realized you were Jewish, it hit me right in my heart and my brain: you are kin to all those people who suffered inconceivably by atrocities committed by my people. History became real and present. I could hardly bear it. I had nothing to offer. An apology would just have been a token weighing so little that the scales of justice would not have moved an inch. Yet with you I have learned that some people are willing to look closer even if it seems impossible to bear doing so. Thus others get the chance to learn.

As I relax into my seat and follow the westward progress of the plane on the screen in front of me, I think about all that has happened. I came here just to teach. It was such a simple invitation.