Facing Forward

of a tree falling in a forest. You know, is anyone listening? Does it really exist? So here's the thing. This is the People's Voice Award, So you get to vote. It would mean so much if you'd go to vote dot Webby Awards dot com and cast your vote for Family Secrets. Thank you so much for hearing me out. I love you guys. Now on with today's episode. I had the America of my American father. He anointed our lawn but Scott's turf builder. He bought us frozen cokes

on the boardwalk at Rohoba Beach. He brought home a late model Ford Mustang, a stable name for our Ford fair Lane wagon. And lavished care on both. He flew the flag each Memorial Day in fourth of July, flaunting his citizenship so enthusiastically that I never believed he spoke

with an accent, even as friends insisted he did. The fifties gave Nico the perfect background in which to recede, to take on the protective coloring of red, white and blue, to get on with the anesthetizing business of dissolving into the lonely crowd. By the mid sixties, he was raising three kids in a world with a Russian front had become a laugh line on Hogan's heroes. I watched my father grow his shell hard and tuck his head in.

I'm not sure it's a word, but he turtled. That's Alexander Wolfe, longtime writer for Sports Illustrated, an author of the memoir and papers. Alex's story, as is true of so many stories we tell on family secrets, begins many years before he's born. This is a multi generational journey of both privilege, survival, investigation and reckoning. What is our legacy made of? How responsible are we for the lives

lived by generations before us? Alex's story begins with his grandfather Kurt Wolf, one of the most esteemed literary figures of his time. I'm Danny Shapiro, and this is family secrets, the secrets that are kept from us, the secrets we keep from others, and secrets we keep from ourselves. My grandfather was born in seven and Bonn, the Rhineland. His father was a musician, taught at the university. They're taught music,

choir master, composer, just completely assumed by music. And on his mother's side, my grandfather's mother's side, she was Jewish and came from a long line of very prosperous Rhineland Jews were great collectors of books and art. So between the music and the art and the books, he was just steeped in this build on, this cultivating theself through culture. And it was no real surprise. I suppose that as soon as he had twenty three he was founding a

publishing house. Um he'd begun collecting books as a teenager, really valuable books and incunabula, really early valuable ones, and had an interest in literature too. He had gone off to to study. It seemed to have been the custom of the time to migrate from campus to campus around Germany. He studied on four different campuses around the country stuttering literature. So books and literature were going to be his destiny.

However it came to be. Now, my dad was born in nine after World War One, and it's difficult to overstate how much Germany was convulsed by the war in the aftermath. So being born into ninety one not only did it DestinE him to be part of that cohort of males who would be sent off to war Hitler's War, but it also meant that his childhood would be colored

by the Weimar hyper inflation. Now, he did have the good fortune of being born into a family that was very prosperous, not just because of his father, Court's wealth, family wealth, but also because Court had married an heiress named Elizabeth Mark, the Mark Pharmaceutical and chemical company known in States as More but originally from Germany. Alex's father, Nico is raised along with his sister Maria in Munich

in a very comfortable life. They're taken care of by nanny's and really not a part of the life and social world of their parents. So fast forward light years later too, when Alex and his siblings are growing up in nineteen fifties post war suburban America. The whole scene is very Ausi and Harriet hands on parenting. Dad has a corporate job, Mom stays home, and the past, the past is solidly where it belongs in the past. But here's the thing, a lot of history went down in

those couple of decades before nineteen fifties America. For a German family with some Jewish roots, that history was fraught and complicated and not so easily erased. Kurt was Jewish to the extent that the Nazis would have declared him Jewish, but he wasn't strictly speaking Jewish, in that his mom and her parents had been baptized Christian and his father was Christian. Indeed, he was the choirmaster at a Luciman

church and bond. So there was a great deal, particularly among the upper classes, of this crawling to the cross, as Heinrich Kina derisively put it, if you were that invested in German culture, and there was this roadblock to being a full participant in it, it was very tempting in nineteenth century Germany to abandon Judaism and fully embrace Germany and Germanism and all these ways, and it was

the same way that Felix Mendelssohn had abandoned Judaism. The Nazis, of course regarded him as Jewish and always would, but he not only became a Protestant, but he wrote the famous Reformation Symphony celebrating it. So it was very tricky that the cultural inheritance I'd say that my grandfather had was very heavily inflected with Judaism. M His mother, I think had more than anything to do with his interest

in literature. His father was a musician, but because he composed and he conducted and played, in his head was always somewhere else. But the inculcation of literature and stories and so forth came from my grandfather's mother, and of course her being steeped in build on was the result

of these very prosperous Jewish ancestors of hers. I mean, one of the things that's so interesting to me, and I think that listeners will find really interesting, is this idea that there was this cultural choices and ultimately heritage that Nazis would not have looked at as oh, well, this is now someone who is Arian, who is one of us, because they've been baptized, or because they've made

the choice to fully adopt our culture. Yeah, that to the Nazis judaism of the racial construct, and there's no way one can simply convert one's away out of being Jewish. And the Nuremberg Laws in the mid thirties when they were enacted, were an attempt to somehow sort this out, and my father and his sister were very lucky to fall on the more favorable side of that verdict. While not considered part of the German race and nation, were

not targeted for elimination. By the time of the Nuremberg Laws, my grandfather had already left Germany. He had had seen the Tea Leaves, had read them, and was on the lamb in Italy and southern France with a German passport. He was ultimately unable to renew, but then was quite happy to just abandon Germany. But in abandoning Germany, he's

abandoning his his children. It should be mentioned too that by that point your grandfather was no longer married to your grandmother and was with another woman who he would later go on to Mary, who was also not Jewish. Is that correct? That's exactly what Yes, By nineteen thirty, Kurt and his soon to be new wife are essentially on the run, ending up in southern France, Italy and North Africa, while his children, Nico and Maria remain with

their mother. Kurt had spent the nineteen twenties becoming a well known literary figure in Europe as a publisher of Franz Kafka, Einrich Mahnn, brother of Thomas Mann, and Karl Krauss of Viennese cultural critic. These were artists and thinkers who were pushing the envelope. The new and exciting is what animates Kurt, But by the early nineteen thirties, with the advent of Hitler in Germany, the new and exciting, the pushing of the envelope and any whiff of Jewishness

were all deeply dangerous. Kurt Wolf is restless, stymiede He grows tired of life in exile and decides to attempt a return to Berlin. He's been in this funk. He's

desperate for something to engage him. He wants it to be in the cultural sphere, and he understands that there's an opening in the Foreign ministry of some cultural attach shape position so he heads to Berlin in late nineteen hoping to interview for this job, and he checks in with friends and some writers and ultimately interviews for it.

But then by January and February of ninety three, it's clear that Hitler is getting enough of a told that there's no way he, with his record of having published all these degenerate writers, um to say nothing of his being half Jewish, he would not be a candidate for

this job. And it was literally within the forty eight hours after the Reichstag burns that he and Helen Fleet they go first to London, where they get married, and then launched into this will be six or seven or eight years of exile before they finally land in the US. In your book, you have this really lovely meditation about I could sort of an inquiry really a question of what makes one know when it's time, you know, like

when it's time to get out. In Holocaust literature in particular, I'm thinking about the people who just simply didn't believe that it could happen there, or it could happen to them, or that their privilege or their position would protect them. And it's just interesting that your grandfather who had, you know, so much privilege and protection in so many ways, read the tea leaves and got out, like really just in

the nick of time. I believe it's very rare anybody who has read about or studied that period of the thirties in Europe hasn't given some thought as to what I would do if I were in those shoes and

had to make that decision. And I think for people who are vulnerable under threat, but were of that upper educated class who really loved and new the culture that had been created in Germany, the German jew who adored Good for instance, or Mendelssohn, and just could not conceive that the people who had created this that I love

so much could then turn and embrace this barbarity. And the quote from Bear told Break nails it so beautifully that the ability to figure out whether you have to get out now or you have another day or two requires that kind of imagination with which you could create an immortal masterpiece. And I think that Breath quote nailed it for me and got me thinking about this thing that it, as you point out, is really a kind

of universal sing wondering. We ask ourselves questions, you know, would what would I do if if I were forced to defend my neighbor down the street. But also what would I do to protect myself in my family if it meant forsaking this world that had found my place in and contributed so much too. And I can hear that, particularly in my grandfather, who was so wedded to the German language, and never, even as he published bestsellers in the English language, never mastered English. That must have been

just a just a horrifying break to make. And he did it because he knew he had We'll be right back. Kurt and Helen do see the writing on the law, and once again they flee Germany. Nico continues to see his father for visits during school breaks, spending stretches of time as a family, while Helen and Kurt are living a stable existence in southern France, so their separation is more of a gliding path then a harsh break. When finally his father and stepmother leave for New York, Nico

is still in boarding school his final year. Where it really gets harsh is indeed forty the war begins. Nico is finishing up his final year in boarding school after the invasion of Poland and it's in nineteen forty that

he's inducted. In ninety is the year that Curt and Helen or are leaving Paris and heading for what's become Vichy Fraus, And it's in forty one that they actually make their way via Lisbon to New York, which, as it happens, is precisely when my dad is inducted and conscripted into the Luftwaffe and as part of the invasion of the Soviet Union. Could you define the word mich Ling. Yeah, Mischling is a Nazi word for someone who has descended

from Jewish descent. It's always so tricky, and I tried to distance myself from words like this by using quotation marks religiously around them whenever they appear in the text. But it's basically, if you're a first degree Mischling in Nazi terms, you would be what we might call half Jewish,

that is, having one Jewish parent. And if you're a second degree Mischling, you would be like my father as opposed to my grandfather, which is to say, one of your four grandparents is considered by the Normberg laws to be Jewish. The irony here, of course, is is that rabbinical law also considers people are descended of Jews to be Jewish and that there's no converting out of it in the same way that the Nazis felt that way.

But be that as it may, that that was the nomenclature, the terminology, and my dad, as a second degree Michelin, was eligible to serve in the armed forces of the Third Reich. There were about a hundred and fifty thousand of these Jewish soldiers and who served in one capacity or another, and they were under threat. They were constantly changing definitions of who would be eliminated, who would be

discriminated against. And there are academic studies that predicted, had Hitler won the war, that even these partly Jewish Germans who served in the enforces of the Reich would have been targeted for elimination afterwards. Imagine being part Jewish in a world dominated by Nazi ideology, a second degree quote unquote mischling and serving the Third Reich. What parts of yourself would you have to bury to put on hold to decimate during the war. Just after he graduates high school,

Niko is drafted into the Luftwaffe. He participates in the invasion of the Soviet Union, driving a jeep with target maps and reconnaissance photos for a fighter's squadron. For a while he holds up in the Ukraine, but then it begins again and he's sent into active duty, and in n he's assigned to anti aircraft battery in the Battle of the Bulge. The following year, he's taken prisoner by American forces and sent to a US POW camp in France.

When it's all over, he returns to his mother's home, so estranged from himself that he doesn't simply walk in, he rings the doorbell. This is the history he brings with him to America when Kurt is finally able to send for him, And this is the history he carries as he starts his family and embarks on the American dream. What did you know growing up in Princeton, New Jersey

of your father's history. I knew as a boy that my father had fought in World War Two, just as so many fathers of so many of my playing eight friends had fought in World War Two. And I knew all along that he had been on the other side, and very quickly knew that he had been on the wrong side. And he never trimmed or concealed that in

any way from me. If you were a boy of nine, ten eleven years old growing up in central New Jersey in the late sixties, you would play army sometimes, and I would sometimes play army on the wrong side I was. I was acutely aware of it. The moral implications of all that would be a long time in setting in with any kind of nuance. But no, I didn't know that. But I also knew that my mother had planted a

victory garden growing up in Connecticut. And I knew too that my grandfather had been essentially chased over to the US. So there was this vague sense that there had been these two very divergent paths. But for some reason, when I considered my father and grandfather, I never entertained the idea that my grandfather had in any way abandoned my father.

And then when I happened upon particularly my aunt Maria's letters and just some of the resentments that she nurtured for the rest of her life, I get a sense that it was real, that that sense of abandonment was very real for her. I think in my dad's case there was so much redumption there was such a sense of a fresh start that he was able to embrace

by emigrating. And when he emigrated, and it was just as the fifties, We're gonna launch that generation of Americans and immigrants on this this great path of success, and that allowed him to put everything behind, so he wasn't rehearsing these resentments. For me, Maria and Nico had very different paths. Many siblings do, but there is diverge in stark ways, perhaps the starkest of which is that Maria

remains in Germany whereas Nico emigrates to the States. That's so interesting, the way that two people, you know, two siblings, coming from the same parents and the same environment, you know, the same childhood, can end up with such different narratives for different reasons. It's always the case with siblings. It's as if they have had different parents in some way.

But there's a moment where you write, I never felt like a child raised post traumatically, and that struck me so hard, because there's so much trauma in both your grandfather's story and your father's story. It seems something of a triumph to not have had that trauma extend to you.

But it was the turn of phrase, you know, raised post traumatically, which to me really means that your father and your mother didn't raise you with that being a specter, and that you know, it's funny because I mean, this is this is a podcast called Family Secrets, but this is actually a case where it makes me wonder if Nico had kept that a secret, if he had been deeply ashamed of his service, and that shame had caused him to tuck it away, you know, to put it

somewhere where his children wouldn't know about it, that then you would have been raised post traumatically. If that makes

any sense. It makes all sorts of sense. And one of the things that I came to realize in a very profound way was the more I thought about it and rooted around my dad's letters, is that he was so forward looking, and I think to a fault in some ways, but being forward looking meant that, Okay, what can I do now as I go forth with my life to a tone in some ways for this chapter, which for for no fault of my own, I was caught up in, and I I'm struck a new at

how much he was devoted to the cause of peace, between the Soviet Union in the US during a time when that wasn't to be take and for granted. And he was obsessively interested in in the Russian people. He loved reading a Bukov, He participated in exchange programs with Soviet citizens. Um, it was almost as if he needed to get on the ground, you know. Here he had been supplying maps and photographs for Aloft Boffe Squadron during

the invasion of the Soviet Union. And as he hit his late middle age, he was engaging himself with the descendants of these very people. And that's a way of spinning it forward, really, I think, um, rather than wallowing or being shackled by the past. Now, I think part of it was he was dropped into a United States was putting the war behind it. I mean, the economy

and everybody's orientation was entirely spun forward. And here he's living in suburbia and he has an American wife and three kids, and me being the eldest and the only male. I mean, it was based forward, boy, and embrace this country and all these opportunities they are here as he was doing, you know, that's what he modeled for me.

And then there's the imposition of our next door neighbor who works for the Boy Scouts of America and is slipping me copies of Boys Life, and all I want to do is become a member of the Boy Scouts. And my dad has to explain to me that he's not a big fan of the idea of me becoming a member of the Boy Scouts wearing a uniform and pledging some oath and insignia and secret handshakes or whatever

it might be. And he did. I do remember this, him explaining that I was Sinn Hitler and there's a downside to this, And there was a real sense of Oh, I have a second I've been given the grace of a second chance, and I'm going to try to get it right, not just for myself, but for my kids too. We'll be back in a moment with more family secrets. Niko is able, for the most part, to put his experience is in the war behind him, in part because of the time and place of postwar America and in

part because of his own temperament. I think many of us have a natural set point as either forward looking or backward looking. Nico is definitely forward looking. He isn't forgetting or sloughing off the past as much as he is learning and moving forward from it. In a beautiful passage in Alex's book, he writes, we are raised to regard shame as something to avoid or bury, not to speak about. But shame can be a great animating, activating

force if we let it. All of this is encapsulated in a German word I wouldn't dare try to pronounce because it's about nine thousand syllables long, but I'll ask Alex to share it with us. The word is for gundenheights, also our bit believe I've had a chance to to pronounce it with a little bit of grace. Fraganenheit is the past, and alfy tongue is literally working something off, so working off the past. And I have to credit Susan Neeman and her remarkable book Learning from the Germans

for introducing me to a lot of these concepts. There's somebody that Susan's worked closely with them, a German named Joan Choi Minzma, who really came up with this idea that we can take shame and kind of mold it and repurpose it. And I think This is where I tipped my hat to the Germans into modern Germany, because when you look at the ways and the public sphere that the Nazi catastrophe has been repurposed so it can

be a lesson of never forget and never again. There are these memorials of these get denshtet, which are the German word for a place of reflection, the ways that the German people engage with their past on the daily basis, and perhaps nothing more found in these stumbling stones, the Schlodpersteiner that are embedded in the sidewalks of Berlin and many other German cities to memorialize individuals who were targeted by the Nazis and eliminated by the Naxis. And I

think what shame does. And I watched the Germans over this year spend in Berlin do this is it? Um? Okay, this is the past that's been handed down to me. These are things that I'm willing to accept and embrace and and improve upon. We're big on that in the States, certainly taking our past and trying to perfect the American story.

You know, then that arc toward justice. But then there's things that that I'm going to reject and and Susan Eman in her book makes such a great case of that part of growing up is taking those things from your parents and sifting through them and then deciding what you're going to accept and what you're going to reject. And the Germans have done this, I think, in a civic way on a large scale, in this extremely admirable fashion.

And I think and Brian Stevenson has done such good work with this down in Alabama, with this project on lynching, and um, we really if there were a way that we could build a civic culture in the US that allows us to grapple with slavery and Jim Crow in that scene wait where there's no debate over whether this is shameful. We accept that. And unfortunately where we are in the States right now is there seems to be some lingering debate over what's shameful. And that's a great lesson,

I think. In Susan's book, Learning from the Germans, she's braided these two national shames and tried to instruct Americans about it. And the proof of how successful she is, I think, and how successful the Germans are is it the German people are appalled when they learned the title of this book that Susan has chosen. But there's something that we Germans have can teach others that's outrageous. You know, we're still humbling ourselves from the way we betrayed humanity

during the middle of the twenty century. Yeah, it strikes me almost as our shame is actually the thing that makes us debate whether there is any reason to be ashamed. Yeah, yeah, no, we're because we're not accustomed to a basing ourselves before anybody as a nation. We're not we're not into that. We ride high and tride a stride the rest of

the world. And one of the things I took away from your in Germany and talking to Germans, including my my relatives, was that there's great grace and power and to be embraced in the humility of acknowledging that you have something to be ashamed about. You picked up, you know, with your family, and you moved to Germany for a

year to do the research into your father's past. Was there a moment that you knew this was something that you needed to do and or a series of moments, or was it something that you knew for a long time that you would eventually want to really excavate. It was probably a confluence three things. Um I watched the magazine i'd worked for for thirty six years of Bleeds staff and became part of that exodus, which was Inhich.

Of course, is the same year that Donald Trump was elected, which I think brought into very sharp focus for me that maybe America isn't so exceptional, that maybe there are these parallels to what happened in Germany. But then also, you know, to be perfectly honest, that the fact that these ancestors of mine were dead I think liberated me

in a way. And I still had a cousin and an uncle who are still very invested in that generation, and I knew if I could get them on board to share archival stuff that they controlled, that I could really do some important work. And they both have been so supportive and incredibly grateful to them both. The cousin isn't in Munich and the uncle is over a mountain rage here in Vermont. And there's a real simple truth

in in archives. I have dealt with archives a great deal in my journalistic career and get more and more comfortable and burying myself in them. But I knew that this had to do more than that, that I had to find living, breathing people too, and I was so grateful to find them in my cousin John and another cousin, Nico, who was exactly my agent. Has wrestled with some of

these things. You know, he's had enormous privilege as a as a mark in Germany, but he's also has a real conscience and has tried to change the world in his own way. And long conversations with him in Berlin. Berlin is a great town for for law conversations, and it all came together. And I also knew that I had been kind of running from stuff for thirty six years that being a staff writer for Sports Illustrated during that period I worked there was it was really a

joy ride. I mean, there were so many exciting things, and I knew that there was something in the past to turn back to and take the measure of. And I've got to say there was one thing, and I heard it in Arian Annoyment's episode with you two. There was this this moment where she felt she had been given permission by father to go back and tell his

family story. And when my father and I took this Danube River cruise, which was really the most we dug into his past, and I asked him the toughest questions. At one point, in a lull on our conversations, he said, maybe he'll write about this. This is a huge, this idea of permission, not just for writers, but for all of us, we the survivors, the ancestors, the ones left to tell the story. We long for that elusive permission, that sense that it's really okay, and it's so rare

for that permission to literally be granted. This was also true with my guests in season three of this podcast, Arianna Noyman, whose father left her a box after his f an actual box filled with his story, essentially bequeathing it to her. If you haven't listened to Ariana's episode, I hope you'll go back and find it later. Mm hmm. Permission. I took it as that. I took it as permission.

And of course the fact that all these letters and my father's denocification questionnaire and is certificate of Varian ancestry, all this stuff is still sitting around. What is a denazification questionnaire? So in the immediate post war um, every German citizen above a certain age was asked to fill out of a questionnaire was undred and thirty plus questions on it about you were past and political and otherwise, as my dad called it. And the important thing was

to determine who had actually been a Nazi. And they had five different classifications of how implicated you were, and simply by dat of having been in the armed services. My dad had to fill out the questionnaire and he had been in the Hitler Youth because everyone at his boarding school had been in the Hitler Youth. And when he studied at the university, there was a German students

union that was a Nazi Party organization. He had to be a part of two in order to study, but he had never been a member of the party, and this allowed him to apply for a student visa, and the intercession of my grandfather, who by then was an American citizen in allowed him to come over to the States to do graduate work in chemistry. But yeah, all these documents were still they're moldering away, and they called

to me the photographs. My dad was, you know, he loved technology, is like it was his favorite little gadget, and his mom would send him film. When he was deployed around Europe. We take pictures and send them back and she saved every letter, every photo, and my dad this is further permission. My dad translated all his letters for my sisters in me before he died, and I

think he wanted us to know. One of the most difficult things for Alex to process had to do with Niko's letters home, describing in detail how well he was eating during his early days in Hitler's army when the Nazis were in power. The idea was to eat everything in sight. When the Nazis were riding high and they were taking everything they could out of the Ukraine, He and his fellow soldiers not to say that also civilians

back in Germany were eating just scandalously well. And it was only after I got to Berlin and started to read that I realized that this was all part of

a genocidal plant to starve the native population. It wasn't just to feed German soldiers, it was also to eliminate Slavs who were subhuman, and Jews who were subhuman, and and just decolonized basically the swath of eastern Europe which would become eventually resettled by German farmers and annex to the right, and to read the history alongside my dad's letters is to just, you know, just to start to cry. Then later food became scarce, particularly during Niko's time in

the American pow Camp. I think the enduring part of my dad's wartime experience that we would see was around the dinner table, when his appetite would be on display. So when I say I was raised post traumatically, I suppose that might have been the one exception, because he did have a relationship with food that made it clear to anyone who really thought about it that there was a time in his life that he didn't have enough.

Do you feel that you got to know your father better through the reading of I mean, you know, sort of this extraordinary body of personal writing that he left behind. Did you feel like you were adding another layer to your understanding of him? Yeah. I think his letters home they're very practical. I recognize his personality and every single

one of them. So I didn't really learn anything new about who he was, but I was able to see, Okay, he went through all this, and he kept my sisters in me protected from it throughout his life as a father and a husband. And I think that was the revelation to me, was just the length that he went to to make sure that we wouldn't be troubled by

his own trauma. And he knew how lucky he was to have landed in the US that a father he may have resented for having abandoned him then worked really hard to bring him over and help set him up, which I think squared accounts between him and his father in a way that my aunt Maria never entirely squared accounts with her father. So yes, I did gain a real appreciation for his the way he ran interference for us,

and he was really scrupulous about sharing with us. I say this in the book, sharing with us really only the beauty and now, whether it was books or art or music. And I I do caricature him a little bit as a as a child and an adolescent, as this techie who didn't really care the way his sister did or his father certainly about art and find things. But he came around to all that and love music

and loved art and loved the well written novel. So he had plenty to live for an embrace and know that even as he was in these horrific places that there was something back in Munich that was it was being kind of preserved behind the walls of the house where he had had grown up in. And I think that's the next point between my dad's experience and the experienced of so many German Jews for me, because they were every bit as invested in this German culture and

helped create it. And this was this was the world that my dad had grown up been first destroyed by the Nazis on a cultural level, and then was destroyed from the air by the Allies because there really didn't seem to be any other way to bring the Third Rch to heal than to just destroy Germany full stop. In Alex's treasure trove of letters, there is one Nico wrote to Kurt after visiting Darmstadt, a town where his mother had grown up, shortly after the war had ended.

Nico uses a resting language to describe Darmstadt oozing rubble like thick porridge ruinous. In the summer, Nico takes Alex's youngest sister on a cruise through the Mediterranean, where they stop at the scattered ruins of Ephesus. Nico separates himself from the group, takes a seat along this ancient plaza, and begins to weep. It seems that the markers of a civilization laid bare, that rubble undoes a seam inside

of him and opens up his own history. I don't think there's any question that my father's reaction at Ephesus was a flashback. You know, the trip was a kind of taking stock of aledictory tour with daughter, and you know, his mortality very much on his mind, and and Cathy didn't discuss explicitly the reason for his breakdown and him revealing all that emotion. But I don't think there's any

question that it was tying into the Darmstadt. And indeed, the omen which his mother had grown up was was a ruin, and he describes it in this letter to his father in great detail, and the pipes clanking on the outside, and a bathtub just exposed to the world, and his great uncle stooped and ruined and living in a garden shed, and these things just don't leave you. And he had concealed them all so so well. And the last thing I ever said to him before he died,

where I knew that he was conscious and processing. It was I just told him that your life has been a miracle, and it was yes. He talked about how he had escaped death in number of times, and it was that, of course, But really, I think the miracle that I was referring to. He nodded his assent. I think he understood was the way he had re constituted a life for himself as an immigrant. Family Secrets is a production of I Heart Media. Dylan Fagin and Bethan

Macaluso are the executive producers. Andrew Howard is our audio editor. If you have a secret you'd like to share, leave us a voicemail and your story could appear on an upcoming bonus episode. Our number is one secret zero. That's secret and then the number zero. You can also find us on Instagram at Danny Writer, Facebook at facebook dot com slash Family Secrets Pod, and Twitter at fami Secret Spot.

And if you want to know about my family secret that inspired this podcast, check out my New York Times bestselling memoir Inheritance. Yeah. For more podcasts for my Heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.