Inheriting the Holocaust
April 2008 - Wanda Lynne Young

In Four Girls From Berlin: A True Story of a Friendship That Defied the Holocaust, author Marianne Meyerhoff writes a stirring memoir of her mother, Charlotte Lotte, and her three friends growing up in Nazi-ruled Berlin. Lotte is Jewish and her friends Ursula, Ilonka and Erica, are Christian.

Meyerhoff was born in America and grew up in Los Angeles with her mother as her sole family connection because Lotte was virtually the only person in her family to escape Hitler's grasp. Meyerhoff's father did survive but remarried after the war and wasn't a significant presence in her life. Lotte was a proud American who maintained that she never wished to return to the homeland that rejected her. Traumatized by her past, Lotte was silent about the details of her early life in Berlin. Meyerhoff writes, The lips of people whom war afflicts so often remained silent...

Meyerhoff has always had an insatiable drive and determination to connect with her past. She wanted answers and details. She was compelled to fill in the gaps of her family history and strove to collect every bit of knowledge about her Jewish heritage. Meyerhoff muses, What sort of future could I have with no sense of the past? She managed to draw out some names from her mother but none of their stories. Then there was a break in the silence. There was an awakening for Lotte and Meyerhoff when a box arrived from Berlin. The box contained a cache of family treasures. Lotte's friends had risked their lives to collect and hide her family keepsakes. The box of mementoes fuelled Meyerhoff's curiosity. As a young woman, she eventually travels to Berlin and re-connects with her mother's friends and their families. She gains insight about her own family history and finds herself adopting her mother's friends and their families as her own extended family.

The book is presented like a journal and a scrapbook all in one. It includes photos of family, friends and scenic locations like the Black Forest, along with documents, letters and heirlooms. The author's detailed dialogue screams out for a movie script,which is no surprise since Meyerhoff also dons hats as both a director and producer for television and cinema; she was an interviewer for Steven Spielberg's Holocaust oral history project Survivors of the Shoah.

The author's family history is a story of persistent human spirit and enduring friendship triumphing in the wake of tragedy. The friendship between the four heroines withstood the tests of time, distance and the horrors of humanity. Meyerhoff writes her story as a plea for the victims of the Holocaust. She sounds off about dwelling on guilt, giving forgiveness and the need for catharsis but stresses more the importance of acknowledgement and remembrance. Her point of view is that all of humanity is responsible for the Holocaust and it's a world of shame indeed. The children of Holocaust survivors have inherited both the history of the Holocaust atrocities and the legacy of silence. Meyerhoff exclaims that we need to break the silence with which history cloaks its violence. If we fail to speak, teach and learn about this epochal dark period of humanity then the silence will continue from generation to generation. This reminds me of the popular quote from the philosopher George Santayana: Those who cannot remember history are condemned to repeat it.

Something to think about.