Through a glass darkly By Heidi Neumark
For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known (1 Corinthians 13:12).
J
ust aſter midnight, the ringing cellphone beside my bed woke me up with a rush of adrenalin. I
wondered who had died. Did I need to put on my clerics and head to a hospital? But no, this was our daugh- ter, Ana, calling with news that I am still trying to absorb. Did I know that I was Jewish? Did I know that my grandfather died in a concentration camp? Did I know that my grand- mother was a death-camp survivor? What I knew is that my grand-
father Moritz died of a heart attack before I was born. Tis is what my father told me when I asked what had happened to Opa. I knew my parents were lifelong Lutherans, and I’d served as a Lutheran pastor for nearly 30 years. When Ana said her information came from Wikipedia, I almost laughed. Tis was clearly a case of mistaken identity. Sunday morning and multiple
church services were fast approach- ing. I needed to sleep, but instead I went downstairs to find Ana sitting in bed with the computer propped on her lap. She had been up late Googling family names. When she hit on Moritz Neumark, a page opened the door into an alternate reality where Moritz had morphed into a child named Moses Lazarus. I was sucked into a dizzying
whirl of revelations as one website pulled me into another and then another. Hours later, while it was still dark, I fell back into bed and lay
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www.thelutheran.org
Did I know that I was Jewish? Did I know that my grandfather died in a concentration camp?
wide-eyed on the sheets, disoriented and wrapped in sadness. How was it possible that I was never told the truth? I believed that I was espe- cially close to my parents, their only child. I believed that they had passed on the faith they had inherited from their parents and their parents before them. My maternal
grandparents met and fell in love as teenagers in a Lutheran youth group at their Brook- lyn church. Admit- tedly, I was less clear about the court- ship of my father’s parents, but they had raised my father and his two sisters as German Lutherans, or so I thought.
Bound for New York I knew my father came to the U.S. from Germany in 1938. He had a doctorate in chemical engineering and his parents put him on a boat headed for New York to give him a better, more stable future than seemed possible in Germany at the time.
Tis made sense and was true, as
far as it went, which turns out not to have been very far at all. What I hadn’t known was that
soon aſter my father landed here, my Jewish grandparents were deported to Teresienstadt, a con-
centration camp in what is now the Czech Republic. Tere my grandfa- ther was murdered within a month and my grandmother slowly starved until her near miraculous rescue. What does it mean that my faith
has come to me not as I imagined— a cherished inheritance handed down from generation to genera- tion—but through a trail of terror? Within months of my discovery,
I began a journey that took me to Germany, the Czech Republic, Poland, Brazil and a Passover table in Los Angeles with some newfound second cousins. As I sat at that can-
PHOTOS COURTESY OF HEIDI NEUMARK
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