Forgiving My Father

I have never written about my father or the sperm donor who gave me life. That’s how I liked to call him long before I was able to make peace with my parent’s shortcomings, and the part of my childhood that makes people uncomfortable.

He was born in March 1929 and had a normal childhood. He got drafted right out of school to serve Hitler in his army when he was just 13 years old. He was sent straight to the front in Russia, like so many of them. After a few days of training, they gave him a ‘Panzerfaust’ a German anti-tank weapon, used to blow up Russian tanks and for two years he tried to destroy as many as possible.

My father was part of the Hitler Youth. An organization that physically trained youth to be ready for war. Their training looked like normal sports activity, perhaps even like a boy scout group. Huge numbers of young men were removed from school and were sent to a war -child soldiers, throwing grenades’ and digging trenches.

Children 10-16 years old who were forced to grow up very fast.

My father didn’t know much about Hitler and politics. He didn’t know about the Concentration Camps or the hunt for the Jews in Germany. He was a child fighting a war he did not ask for. After two years he got promoted and became a sniper. He carried a little notebook in his pocket. First, he wrote down the number of tanks he destroyed, then he counted the number of soldiers he killed.

My Grandmother told me a story about him that I remember because I had been worried I would have FUNNY hair too. He and his partner had been hiding out in the rumbles of a building, waiting for the Russian soldiers on the other side to make the first move. The building collapsed and my father and his partner were buried underneath for three days. Buried alive, until they were able to get out. My father’s hair was black, but from this moment on a small area in the front would grow snow-white for the rest of his life. Traumatic stress can do that to a person.

I don’t know much about the young man my father was. Surely my heart goes out to him, and all the other young men who were forced to act like adults, at an age where they should have worried about when they would kiss the first girl, or dreamed about their first car, wondering what the future would hold for them.

Surely I could use the war and everything he had to endure, to excuse him and his actions. Does it excuse my early childhood too?

Close to the end of World War II my father got captured by the Russians and became a Prisoner of War in Siberia, one of the worst places to be. They found his little booklet and he -and others- got sentenced to death without a trial.

He was still a child, so they put him in prison first. According to my Grandmother, he misbehaved badly when the Red Cross came to inspect the prison of war camp. He wanted their attention and he succeeded, one of the inspectors asked for his name. He told him his name and the fact that he was sentenced to death. The inspector turned around and yelled at the Russian soldiers, “He better still be here the next time we come by.”

He was kept alive and in 1948, nineteen years old, he was released and sent back home, walking through parts of Russia by foot.

At 27 he met my mother, they got married and lived….not happily ever after.

They both had a tough childhood and they made it their goal to drown the ghosts of the past in alcohol. I am not sure why they decided to have a child, but they did, and so I came along in 1963. They had already been married for seven years and according to my Grandmother, had given up hope to have any children.

My father, the man who fought in World War II, who survived a prison-of-war camp in Russia, seemed to have lost his backbone in Russia. My Mother, the crueler one, the one who was a violent drunk, could do whatever she wanted. He never spoke up, he never intervened, he never stopped her. He never protected me.

They fought like cats and dogs, they yelled and screamed as drunks do. They kissed and make up, just to repeat the same thing a few hours later. It was terrifying to watch, and frightening to listen to.

I often wondered if things would have been different if he would have spoken up. He was so much stronger, how could he have been afraid of my mother, but he was.

I remember one incident when I was five of six. An after-hours emergency doctor came into our home in the night. My father was resting on the couch. I was standing at the door, scared to death, and then I saw him winking at me. Later, after the doctor had left, he told me he faked chest pain so SHE would shut up. I didn’t understand what he was trying to say, and the significance of his statement was lost on me for many years.

Later, far away from my parents, when I enjoyed a happy childhood with my Grandmother, I started to understand. My father, the man who could have been a superhero in my eyes, was deep down a coward and his cowardice enabled my mother to have her way with me and it was painful. Not just physically, but also mentally. I remember some of the things she said in her rage, and it took me years to overcome the pain and confusion.

I saw my father three more times after the age of seven. Once he came by our farm and we never found out why, because we didn’t welcome him. My Grandma, the kind and warm-hearted woman didn’t ask him in, and I stood right by her side. “Beware of you father,” she said quietly when he left. A sentence she repeated on her deathbed.

The second time I saw him was one day after my Grandmother had passed away. According to her wishes, I informed him that he wasn’t welcomed at her funeral. It was a very short meeting in his office. He didn’t say a word.

He was dead the last time I saw him, and I had to identify it. I felt nothing, maybe the first feeling there is.

My father, the enabler, the coward, the child soldier, the prisoner-of-war. So many facets to a life not well lived. In my eyes he was lucky. He survived a war and capture, so many of his friends didn’t. Just like me, he had no control of the early years of his life. He made it out of the war alive, he came back home after years in prison. Millions had the same faith. Did they all become monsters?

Forgiving him was harder than forgiving my mother. I felt betrayed by my mother, my father was just her husband. I never felt a connection to him. A handsome man, who drunk too much, who was afraid of his wife’s outburst. A man who had a child but decided not to be a father.

I forgave him years ago!

If we don’t forgive the people who hurt us, we remain chained to them with the shackles of bitterness. Perhaps forgiveness is the best form of self-love. I think we don’t forgive to help the ones who hurt us, we forgive for our own shake.

Father’s Day, a celebration of all the fathers who deserve it, but there are many (too many) who don’t deserve to be celebrated. A fact that we try not to mention.