It’s been a long month (year, decade, century) for Jews. A recent brand of Jew-hating was antisemitism, but make it fashion, as Kanye West decided to sell Nazi apparel (and only Nazi apparel) on his website and promote said website to 127.7 million viewers during the Super Bowl. Never one to subscribe to fashion trends, I didn’t feel compelled to buy the shirt. After all, I have my own Nazi apparel at home (two armbands to be exact) and it is vintage.
Some might wonder how I, a Jewish woman, have my own line of Nazi apparel. The story starts in a small town in Germany called Burgsinn, my grandfather’s hometown.
My family had lived in Burgsinn since the late 1700s, helping to found the tight-knit Jewish community there. However, as hostility towards Jews grew in Germany in the 1930s, my family began to consider immigration plans. A savvy uncle who had emigrated from Germany to New Jersey several years earlier arranged for my grandfather, who was 11 at the time, and two cousins to escape, traveling by boat alone from Hamburg to Ellis Island. The rest of my grandfather’s family was more reluctant to leave everything they had worked for in Germany (a thriving business, a house, a car) and somewhat incredulous that the country many of them fought for just a few years earlier was turning on them.
But at some point, they could no longer escape the reality before them. The turning point was Kristallnacht. On that night, the Nazis destroyed the synagogue in Burgsinn and took everything from my great-grandfather, who was then arrested with his brother and sent to a prison in Lohr for two days.
Upon their release the family attempted to emigrate and reunite with my grandfather. Some were successful.
Despite, or in spite of, the trauma, my grandfather decided to join the U.S Army after high school, his German fluency in high demand. On May 31, 1944 he landed in Italy with “the boys” (as he called them) of Section 3, Battalion 361st Infantry, 91st “Powder River” division, ready to defend his new country.
I like to think of my grandfather as “Walter Hamburger: Nazi Hunter” but I am not sure reality was so extreme. In his scrapbook he collected photos of his friends, doodles, commendations and letters he sent back home.
One such letter from October 1944 tells the heroic tale of how he went on a bathroom break and returned to find a Nazi sauntering out of a church. Despite being unarmed himself (I guess you don’t need a pistol in the potty), he bravely captured the Nazi, arrested him and took his pistols. My grandfather describes how scared he was and how very glad he was to have “relieved himself” before the incident. He also told his parents he would be sending them $85, remarking they might be wondering how he got the money. “If you think poker, you’d be mistaken,” he writes. It was actually from selling the Nazi’s pistols he confiscated.
Perhaps the Nazi armbands I have were from the “Jerry” he captured or other German prisoners my grandfather encountered in Italy. In the same letter he tells his parents that he took razor blades from the prisoners because they weren’t allowed to have anything sharp, and subsequently, “had the best shave of my life.”
As a child, I remember looking at my grandfather’s scrapbook and seeing the armbands with the swastikas. I didn’t really understand at the time why he would have them and I felt it was best to quickly turn the page and not ask. Only as an adult, and a new German citizen, do I have the context to put together the whole story. Sometimes I find myself telling guests in my home about the armbands, and I’ve been known to whip them out at parties, which is perhaps the worst party trick that has ever existed. Somehow when I show them to other people, it helps make it all real. This actually happened. These items touched an actual Nazi. A plea to the public. We need to stay vigilant. I have the receipts!
When I see this latest antisemitic stunt by Kanye West, I can’t help but feel a little smug. He’s hocking his second-rate imposter Nazi schmattes while cowering behind his computer, while I have the real thing in my possession, procured by an immigrant defending the country that welcomed him from persecution. The armbands, which once filled me with fear, have come to represent courage and the “good bones” of America. They are a representation of the true bravery it takes to return the face of hate and injustice and fight it, in the name of a country and all that was lost.
