Bruised by Denial

Nearly every year, I run into the basement, scrambling for some pretty sheets of construction paper and crayons to make a reasonably acceptable Christmas card for my grandparents. Winter 2010 was no different, except this year I decided to spice up the cards a bit. I had drawn nearly the same Christmas tree on green or red paper every year, and I wanted to do something new. I was an angsty thirteen, didn’t believe in God, and was in a hurry for some inspiration. So this year, I used yellow paper instead, I drew a candle, and I wrote “Merry Christmas and Happy Hanukkah”. I scribbled words of love to Farmor inside, and I ran back upstairs to prepare for festivities. I didn’t think much of my card after that, until it landed in Farmor’s hands. 

The look on Farmor’s face when my mom handed her the card was one of disgust. She looked horrified, confused, and insulted. I didn’t understand, and seemingly, neither did she. It was just a simple card. I hadn’t put too much work in, but it got the job done, communicated gratitude, did what it had to, right? 

“Why did you write ‘Happy Hanukkah’?” she asked pointedly, her Norwegian accent piercing the air as she threw the question at me. I stammered, not quite sure how to reply. My aunt and mom gazed on, eyes wide in shock. “I am not Jewish,” she finished decisively, anger steaming from her face. I tried to mutter an apology, to make it seem smaller, and quell the explosion I was afraid I’d set ticking. But inside, I was alarmed. Was Farmor really so anti-semetic? Her son had married a Jewish woman, and she was right there at the table! Of course I knew farmor wasn’t Jewish, but ‘tis the season! Couldn’t she hold back from seeming so offensive? She was disgusted by my card, and I was disgusted by her reaction.

My mom tried to comfort my aunt, after Farmor walked away, and my mom looked at me as if to say, why did you have to do that?

. . .

Over the years, Farmor had told me very few stories about when the Nazi’s occupied Norway in 1940. She was only eight years old. Even before the Nazi’s arrived, food was rationed across the country. When her mom went out, Farmor would melt down the rationed sugar in the kitchen to make caramel candy and share it with the neighbors. Her mother would return home, fuming at finding the rations depleted. But, Farmor was happy, and all of the neighborhood tasted her sweetness. When I was around eight, Farmor taught me to melt sugar down into a caramel puddle, let it harden, and then crack it out of the pan with a knife. She’d call it sprekk, which means crack. What a sweet story to tell the next generation of a time of fear, occupation, and loss. 

She always looked for ways to find joys in a cracked and splintered world, and she looked to only share those parts of her history with me. When Farmor erupted at the holiday card I made her in 2010, I realized maybe Farmor carried some stories from 1940 that needed to be spilled. They hardened up in her like cooling caramel, and no one would taste the truth till she let it crack. But she wouldn’t. She was cold, and she did not want to look back. She would not be the one to tell me why her reaction was so intense. I had to learn it for myself, and I learned something about myself along the way.

I’m going to tell you a story about Farmor that I learned from her mother, who I never met. In my family we call her Mormor, and she died before I was born. Some time following the strange Christmas card incident, my tante made a  shoddy translation of scraps on my great grandmother’s journals. Her tales were out of order, and the grammar was off, but I poured over those pages to learn about my family’s history before they emigrated from Norway to the United States. 

Here is the story that made my eyes go wide, and shed light from seventy years in the past on the present. In this story, I will call my youthful Farmor Gisela, and I will call her young mother Ester. Come along, explore with me my family tree:

Gisela was a regular riding trolley cars around Oslo by herself, even at eight. One day, on her way home from dance class, Gisela leaned against a straphanger, tapping her feet about as if to practice the dance they had been working on. At the next stop, a Nazi soldier boarded. Gisela could tell a Nazi, even in plain clothes, from his haircut. Her mother had pointed out to her how they all looked so sharp even when they wanted to blend in. All the other Norwegians on the trolley could surely tell too, even when they averted their gaze.

This day, the Nazi came and stood beside little Gisela. She kept looking at her feet, tapping away, feeling angry at this man. Norway’s occupation by the Nazi’s was relatively new. She had grown up in a free country, but now tanks and swastikas took over what used to be a peaceful city. 

“You want a smoke?” the Nazi offered. Gisela may not have even noticed he was talking to her, had he not swept his hand right under her nose, cigarette poised nearly to her lips. The audacity!, she thought. Without a word, she slapped his offering hand away with a huff, and hurried to turn away. But, he was quick to react. He grabbed her shoulder with his open hand, and slapped her across the face with the other. Tears boiled up in her eyes but she did not let them spill, as her cheek changed colors like a sunset. 

No one on the train could do anything, but look at Gisela as if to say, Girl, don’t get yourself killed! As the trolley lurked to its next stop, she wiggled from his grip, and darted out onto the cobblestone street. She kept running for a few blocks, till she reached a calm park where she could catch her breath beside a fountain. Oh my god. Oh my god. I stood up to a Nazi! I showed him!, she exclaimed to herself, running her small fingers over her red tender cheek. She scanned the area for any more Nazis, and then nearly skipped home, energized by her hurried heartbeat and the adrenaline coursing through her.

When she got home, she showed her cheek proudly to her mother, Ester. Ester sucked her breath in, and did not know how to exhale. The thought of her daughter being slapped by a Nazi sent her spiraling into flashbacks. She had seen a man bludgeoned to death on the sidewalk by a Nazi not long ago, and she did not have the childish naivety of her daughter. She also knew a family truth Gisela did not. She had to tell her. She had to.

The next day, Gisela wore her bruise proudly to school. She felt like a true Norwegian, and an honorable person. She thought everyone, especially her mother would understand. However, that day when she came home from school, she found her mother waiting for her solemnly. 

“Gisela, please will you come here so I can talk to you,” Ester called from where she sat at the table, hands clasped together. It was as if she still had not exhaled since yesterday when Gisela first walked into the door filled with pride. How can a mother tell her daughter what Ester needed to say on this day?

“Gisela, I am proud that you stood up to the Nazi, but you can never do that again,” she began. Gisela pouted, feeling like if she didn’t stand up against the Nazis, no one would. Gisela began whining, too young to know what danger she was up against. 

That was when Ester shushed her daughter, and told her, “Gisela, your father is Jewish. So you are Jewish too. And you can not slap a Nazi ever again.”

Gisela went off. I can’t imagine the mixture of pain, fear, relief, anxiety, betrayal, disgust, hate, anguish, despair, confusion, loss, shrinking, terror, oh just so much fear, she must have felt as she reoriented to the truth of her reality. She cried inconsolably. She was a child realizing she was threatened, and that her identity needed to be secret and covert. It had even been kept that way from herself. 

Ester wrote that Gisela was never the same after that day. When I saw her reaction to the 2010 card, I think I saw her slide back to that moment. I saw her pummeled by the reality of being Jewish, and eager to hide it, deny it, be safe far from it. This story makes me wish we’d had a dozen more years together. I never got to ask her what it was like after that day, how it changed her. I never got to ask her what it was like in an occupied land, separated from her sister for fear of being swooped up by Nazis, or to sail across the ocean to a new land. I don’t know if she ever would have stopped denying, and instead sunk into vulnerability. That is something I never got to see in her. I do know, though, that I saw that raw hurt child in her, even seventy years later, hiding from herself. She was still bruised by denial, even as she withered away.