The Weight of Blood: Growing Up Half-German in the Shadow of History
I have always carried a strange, quiet guilt for being half-German.
It’s not a guilt that was ever forced upon me—no one sat me down and told me I should feel ashamed of my ancestry. But I grew up with the knowledge of what had been done, the horror of it, the sheer magnitude of suffering caused by the country my father’s family came from. And no matter how much I personally had nothing to do with it, that weight clung to me.
My Oma and Opa were good people, immigrants who built a new life and who spoke openly about the horrors of the war. My Opa built a home for his family in Sudbury, Ontario, with his own hands, with the help of other German immigrants. My Oma told me Hitler was a horrible man, and how it was a slow process until it wasn’t. What happened was horrific. The Germans have still not recovered, and the Jewish community is still dealing with what happened to them. She and my Opa carried their guilt, the generational kind—the guilt of survival, the guilt of being from a country that allowed such evil to rise. They knew that it must never happen again.
And I believed that, too. As a child, I thought it was impossible for history to repeat itself. I thought we had learned.
But being German, even half, meant I was always aware of that history in a way others weren’t. At school, when we learned about World War II, I felt myself shrinking. I was the only one in the room who had direct German lineage, and I wondered if the others saw me differently. I never said anything, but I felt the weight of it in my chest. I imagined my last name carried an unspoken stain.
And when I learned about the true extent of what had happened—the camps, the experiments, the sheer numbers—I felt sick. I felt complicit, even though I hadn’t even been born. I looked at my father and wondered if he felt the same way. He was very serious (A German serious? I know, shocking), but He never spoke about it. Silence was his way of coping. I can only imagine what he must have felt. I still feel the effects of generational trauma because of WW2.
That guilt followed me into adulthood, shaping my view of the world, making me hyper-aware of injustice, oppression, and the dangers of blind nationalism. It made me sensitive to rhetoric, propaganda, and the way history twists itself into new, more palatable shapes. It made me recognize that no country, no people, are immune to falling into the same darkness.
And now, I look at the world, at what is happening right in front of us. I see people throwing up Nazi salutes without shame. I see hate growing, louder and bolder. I see history repeating itself, and the very people who once swore never again are either silent or complicit.
I wish my family were still here. I wish I could talk to them, hear their voices, see their horror. But they are gone. And I am left here, carrying the weight of history, trying to make sense of a world that seems to have forgotten its own lessons.
Maybe this is the purpose of my guilt—not to punish me for something I didn’t do, but to remind me to never look away. To speak up. To hold onto the truth when so many others try to rewrite it. Because I know what happens when people fall for the lie.
