And what did you do in the Nazi party, Opa?”
Géraldine Schwarz’s grandfather died before she could ask him that question. But her need to know drives “Those Who Forget: My Family’s Story in Nazi Europe,” her riveting exploration of Germany’s post-World War II reckoning with guilt and responsibility.
Ms. Schwarz, a journalist and documentary filmmaker who was raised in France and now lives in Germany, had long wondered why and how so many “ordinary” Germans—and in particular her father’s parents, Karl and Lydia—came to embrace Hitler starting in the 1930s. How could they claim they had no inkling of the fate that befell the six million Jews who were deported, imprisoned and ultimately slaughtered by the Nazi regime? These musings took on new urgency with the rise, especially in Europe, of far-right political leaders; their xenophobic rallying cries prompted Ms. Schwarz to chart the lapses in memory she believes allow the past to reassert itself today.
She begins by delving into the pre- and post-World War II lives of her paternal grandparents, whose hometown of Mannheim, Germany, was heavily bombed during the war. Her Opa and Oma had been no worse—and no better—than most German citizens, Ms. Schwarz writes, being “neither on the victims’ nor the executioners’ side. . . . They were simply Mitläufer, people who ‘followed the current.’ ”
