Born in 1957, and raised in a divided Germany, I was fortunate to have lived in West Germany where the historic processing of what had happened under the Nazi regime was part of my high school curriculum. We were taught about the war, what led up to it, and the atrocities that were committed. One of the things I remember vividly to this day were the films taken by Allied soldiers during the liberation of the concentration camps. We were shown this original footage in school.
During a couple of trips to other European countries as a teenager, I ran into people who wanted nothing to do with me because I was German. While I recognized as a teenager the inhumaneness of what the Nazis had engaged in, it took me many years and conversations with my American husband to come to grips with my homeland’s history and not feel ashamed of being German.
