My great-grandmother was a Nazi. [View all]

[Pab Sungenis]

Something for you to think about today: my great-grandmother Katherine was a Nazi.

I don't mean that in today's watered-down overblown rhetorical sense, either. My great-grandmother was an actual Nazi. She immigrated from Germany with her family in the 1880's but always stayed in touch with other family members in the Fatherland and kept up on issues.

She was an anti-Semite. She supported Hitler. She was a member of the German-American Bund. Even though she was loyal to America after we entered World War II, she never changed her underlying beliefs and until she died in the 1970's she insisted that Hitler was right.

Now let's move on to my grandmother, her daughter Elizabeth.

My grandmother went to work as a secretary for a Jewish egg farmer who went on to win a seat in Congress. She planted trees in Israel shortly after that country came into being. After her father died in the 1960's she built a small bungalow for her mother on a part of the property she owned with her husband and arranged the sale of the old family farm to an Austrian Jew who had been in the Camps.

She was the kindest, gentlest, person you could ever imagine. And she was the person who had the least trouble accepting my homosexuality or the fact that I'd partnered up with a Jew. (She only disliked him because, like her, he talked too much.)

The lesson is that the sins of the father are not the sins of the sons. What matters most is not how you are raised, but what happens to you when you go out into the world yourself and start to think for yourself.