Gloria Wisher has an imaginary Nazi lover. I had an imaginary Nazi
lover.
Like my heroine in Holy Days, Gloria, I was born in 1951. Though WWII had ended six
years before, my parents and grandparents talked a lot about the Nazis. I heard
fearful stories about the Nazis in the same way I heard fairy tales or nursery
rhymes. I was just as afraid of the wolf in “The Three Little Pigs,” and
constantly asked my mother, “What’s our house made of?” “Wood.” “Is that the
same as sticks?” “I guess so, why?” “Because the wolf can blow down sticks.” I
asked the same kind of questions about the Nazis. My mother went around the
house saying, “The Nazis fixed everything, they fixed everything.” By that she
meant they had taught us how to kill and how to be cruel on a global level.
Usually this outburst was sparked by an atrocity on the news. The adults frequently made remarks such as “The Italians would have been next because they changed
sides during the war.” “But Grandma’s Italian!” I had heard tales of what could
happen if you had a Jewish grandmother and I was worried. “Oh, don’t worry, the
Germans lost the war.” Or when my mother would answer my queries with, “Oh, the
Nazis would have loved you! You got
the blonde hair and the green eyes!” Daddy said, “They would’ve come after
people with freckles next.” “Do I have freckles?” “A few.” “Don’t worry, the
Nazis lost the war.”
But, I worried. I could hear a certain tone of stunned admiration in the
adult’s voices. I knew in my child’s heart that they secretly admired certain
qualities of their Nazi enemy. Power. Control. Cunning. Relentlessness. The
singular awe that the Nazi terror and the Holocaust had actually occurred. That
awe would remain hanging in the air in the inevitable silence that followed
every discussion.
And, the movies. As a shy child, I watched a lot of television by myself
rather than going out to play, where I was constantly bullied by kids who beat
me up for getting As. I stayed in and watched many, many black and white movies
about the Nazis: Nazi experiments, Nazi concentration camps, the French
Underground, weeping men and women as the Nazis marched into Paris, people
living in bombed out shells of buildings, people pulling hidden bottles of wine,
sausages and loaves of bread out from their tattered coats to share with Jews
hidden in their walls. I saw “The Diary of Anne Frank,” I saw “The Pawnbroker.”
When the pawnbroker said, “I didn’t die. Everything I loved was taken from me
and I did not die.” I was oddly comforted. At the time, I was a devout Catholic
child who believed in the trials of the Catholic saints. Like the Catholic
saints, the lesson learned was: if it’s not the boiling oil, if it’s not the
concentration camp, then you are going to be okay. You can take it. I had been
abused and I was already wondering what had happened to me, wondering why such
a thing had been done by the very person who was supposed to be protecting me, but
I knew that it was not as bad as what had happened to the pawnbroker, or the
saints, and, if I had anything to say about it, I was going to be okay.
I was eleven. I had no conscious knowledge of the fact that I had
already been abused when I was three years old. But that wouldn't have changed my determination.
I wrote Holy Days for the children. I know children can’t read the book
because of its sexual content, but I also know that children are out there ironically
enduring and suffering from the very acts they cannot read about and really
should read about because they would know if they read Holy Days that they’re
going to be okay, that they can be okay. I hope adults will read it and start treating children like cognizant
beings who know something’s going on about which they need to be told the truth and
comforted.
I created a Nazi lover and I gave this Nazi to Gloria to help her gain
some power and control over what was happening to her. Here is her first
encounter with the Nazi, which she uses to try to explain a sexual assault by
“the boy next door,” her mother’s best friend’s son, who did everything the
Nazi does to Gloria in this scene:
THE
NAZI
The
Nazi officer came into the room. He looked at me where I was, on the bed. There
was nothing in the room but a bed, lamp and table. No curtains on the window,
which looked out on a bleak, winter field.
The Nazi was handsome. He was always
handsome. I wasn’t afraid of him. I loved him because he kept me safe in this
room and he was never cruel to me; he was always kind.
Never was there any question of my
family or my friends, never any betrayal, or any politics, only this handsome
man slowly removing his uniform, coming over to me where I was on the bed.
I was naked, under the covers. Warm
and naked. I was giving him something he could not get outside this room.
He lay on top of me, but, suddenly,
he was wearing his full uniform again! He pushed himself hard against me, and
again, hard.
Then, he was naked again, and he
held me. His warm, wet lips brushed against my cheek, which was cold, exposed as
it was to the chill in the room.
We see two more encounters with
Gloria and this Nazi, but Gloria makes it clear that she has created many such
encounters, scenarios in which she controls the action. I don’t think people
are aware of how many times beautiful women are sexually assaulted in their
lives. Beautiful women are treated as objects of desire for the entitlement of
men. They are presented this way in the media and in life. Like Gloria, men
stopped their cars for me as I walked to the library, to school or to church from
the time I was about twelve years old and could go places alone. Many, many times I could have
been killed if I had been a different sort of girl, an adventurous girl who
might have thought a car ride was preferable to walking alone. Luckily, God
made me shy. My life was saved over and over by the fact that I preferred to
walk by myself. After a while, beautiful women begin to value men who do not
try to have sex with them, men who actually like them for conversation,
friendship, and dare I say it, their minds. But, I digress. My point in
digressing is that Gloria had many, many incidents she needed to explain to
herself, many times when she needed the Nazi to protect her. Why she didn’t
choose the Allies, I cannot say, except that by conquering the Nazi (who also finds respite from the war in that room), she had
conquered the worst enemy of all.
During her many lonely hours of reflection and observation watching
television, Gloria also sees the resemblance of our culture to the Nazi ideal. Over and over she sees the physical
perfection of advertising models, TV personalities and Hollywood actors. “Perfection,”
Gloria decides, “is the minimum daily requirement.”
And when President Kennedy is assassinated in 1963, Gloria is twelve.
NOVEMBER
22, 1963
THE MOMENT
What
difference does it make to history or anything else where any of us were at the
precise moment we heard?
The difference is this: that was the
moment we all, collectively, stopped believing.
We stopped believing in goodness.
Mama used to click her tongue,
whenever she thought about it, in her vague, muddled way: “The Nazis fixed
everything, they fixed everything, they fixed!” She was right. The Nazis made
it so we could get used to anything. Someone, a man who had survived the death
camps, talked once about being forced to shovel graves for the Nazis. He talked
about how enormous the hole was and how cold he and the other shovellers were,
how very cold. He talked about seeing a weed blowing in the cold wind and
thinking how happy he was to be alive, just to see that weed, to know the weed
was alive under the freezing snow and how grateful he was to feel the terrible
cold because he was alive - and he knew, then, that human beings could get used
to anything.
For a long time, the Nazis were very
far away. First, they were in Europe, then, they were in the past. The Nazis
were not us, but we became them. We invited them in.
From
the moment the shot rang out, the Nazis, like the devil himself, rose up from
hell and rushed to our side. From that moment on, we learned to turn our heads
and check our backs; we learned suspicion and fear. At first we were horrified
at ourselves and then, we got used to our fear. And then, we got used to our
horror. And, then, we became proud of our horror and began to wear it ahead of
us, not as a shield, as a medal.
We were so frightened by the Nazis,
that we became the Nazis in order to keep it from happening to us again. We had
the comfort of knowing, no matter what we did, no matter how evil, we could
never be as bad as the Nazis.
In Revere, bad had become a virtue.
Bad was it. I heard of kids who wouldn’t come to Revere. That struck me as
funny, because there were other cities, like Dorchester and Roxbury, where I
was afraid to go, even in the car with my parents. Sometimes, bad is all there
is. It starts to look good after a while. Bad makes you tough. It makes you
ready.
I still think of Gloria’s
assessment when I watch the news. When I watch cops beating people in the
streets, when I watch race riots, when I see women’s rights being taken away,
when I read stories about children being sexually abused or sexually
trafficked, when I see old people being disrespected, when I see LGBTs being mistreated, when I see the sacred lands of indigenous peoples
being fracked, when I see our veterans neglected, homeless, jobless, and suffering
from their wounds, when I see the earth melting, and the DNA of everything God
created being arrogantly altered for money, I think of what the Nazis taught
us: how to be ruthless, how to take from others, how to hurt and maim and tear
apart – but not destroy – no, because ultimately, like Gloria I believe in the
triumph of good over evil. I need to quote a hero (who shall remain anonymous,
unless you recognize her) from a sci-fi thriller, a line that has helped me
survive: “God never lets the devil win.” Ultimately, whether we become Nazis or
not is our choice. Ultimately, no matter what we suffer, we get to choose
whether to be good or evil. Evil cannot kill us. But good can help us live. As
my dear Gloria said: “They tried to kill me in this place of love and horror.
They tried to kill me but they couldn’t because I loved too much.”
©Patricia Goodwin, 2015
Patricia Goodwin is the author of When Two Women Die, about Marblehead legends and true crime and its sequel, Dreamwater, about the Salem witch trials and the vicious 11-year-old pirate Ned Low. Holy Days is her third novel, about the sexual, psychological seduction of Gloria Wisher and her subsequent transformation.
