While I didn’t know what exactly a Nazi was in 1974, I knew about our family’s dark secret by at least five years old. I overheard Mom yelling at Dad in loud whispers — trying to keep their argument out of earshot, but the yell-whispers ended up being louder than a regular indoor talking voice. Like those cell phone vibrations that are louder than actual ringtones.
I’m not spending an entire weekend with that Nazi monster, I recall Mom saying.
We were scheduled to drive two hours of country roads to Portsmouth, Ohio, for Thanksgiving to spend with Dad’s parents, Eloise and Jerry.
We saw Dad’s parents three times a year, and Grandpa always seemed perfectly fine to me. He was loving, charming, and always put me on top of his shoulders to carry around the room, tickling me along the way.
Grandpa was the main dentist in the small town of Portsmouth. Everyone knew him. Everywhere we went. Kids, most of whom had been to his dental practice, always smiled when Grandpa said hello, almost as if they were showing off their white teeth.
“Good morning, Dr. Kos,” you’d hear dozens of people say when I ran errands with him.
You can imagine how hard it was to square laughing on his shoulders with Mom’s oft repeated “monster” comments, although she never shared her admonishments with anyone but Dad.
The turmoil surrounding Grandpa stopped when he passed away when I was a sophomore in high school, and I seldom heard family members speak of him again. Not positively. Not negatively. It was almost like he never existed. But by age fifteen, I knew better, and I certainly knew what a Nazi was by then. Our high school did an entire semester on the Holocaust that year, so it was fresh in my mind.
Still, I never had the courage to ask Mom or Dad about him. Maybe I didn’t want to know. I chalked it up to Mom using the word Nazi as an insult but not meaning it literally. Comedians regularly joked about in-laws, so maybe this was just typical in-law tension. Rush Limbaugh would call feminists “Femi-Nazis,” so maybe that’s how Mom was using the word.
The internet wouldn’t come out for another eight years after I graduated high school, so there was no way for me to inquire further if I wasn’t going to ask Mom.
When Grandma passed away six months later, Dad, my aunt Denise and I went to their then–eerily quiet house to pack up their belongings, divvy up their few possessions among my dad and his two siblings, and figure out what to donate. Most of their stuff consisted of fancy dinner China, some candlesticks, clothing and a few pieces of art.
Grandpa had smoked cigars his entire life, so we had found a dozen or so boxes of Swisher Sweets cigar boxes filled with random junk. That was the only interesting part of the sad trip to the house where I had spent so many Thanksgiving holidays.
Grandpa had saved swimming medals from his youth, pictures of Grandma in a bikini, which I could’ve passed on, random coins from the many countries he visited, and political buttons of Eisenhower, Nixon and Ford. We never talked about politics in his house, so I hadn’t realized he was a Republican since Mom and Dad were union Democrats.
As I opened the fourth cigar box, I about fell over when I discovered its contents.
There it was. A picture of Grandpa in an SS uniform holding a gun, smiling. Another picture of Adolph Hitler giving a speech. And another with Grandpa pictured shaking hands with someone else in Nazi garb. The box had dozens of swastika buttons. And some ID card in German with Grandpa’s picture, adorned with another swastika. And his decades-old expired German passport, also with a swastika. There were dozens of letters he saved, all in German, which I took with me to get translated. In one letter, I later discovered, Grandpa bragged to his family about how many Jews were being gassed, as if it was a competition. In another, he boasted about how the world was about to be completely rid of the rodent Jews and homosexuals.
It took a month or so before it really hit me, but Grandpa was a full-on anti-Semitic, racist, hateful monster Nazi. Mom wasn’t using the term as an insult after all. Not even the monster part.
I now had to face the ugly fact that I descended from a brutal genocidal killer. I had Nazi in my DNA, racism in my blood. I finally understood for the first time why my family had kept this a secret. Embarrassment, shame and self-hate swirled in my mind. I didn’t want this to be part of my life story. Grandpa’s behavior was all I could think about. I felt dirty from having sat on his lap. From having hugged him. Or even played with him. It was the kind of filth you couldn’t even wash off. Like a blood-stained shirt.
For years I continued the family tradition of keeping the secret, carrying with me the heavy load of shame. It paralyzed me in friendships, always feeling like I wasn’t being as authentic as I could be. It made my relationships with women feel dishonest. “Tell me about your family,” always seemed like judgment day. I felt ugly and worthless for many years until, when I couldn’t even sleep a full night, I finally sought help to unravel Grandpa’s past.
When I discovered that the Biblical wisdom from Ezekiel, “The son shall not bear the iniquity of the father,” was true, the heaviness slowly started to lift. When I was reassured 100 times over that my friends wouldn’t punish me for Grandpa, I finally began to share my trauma. Not one person in my life assigned shame to me. “That’s on your grandpa,” one close friend of many years reminded me over and over.
Confession. The truth is my family is Jewish and we don’t have any Nazis in our family tree. My grandfather wasn’t a Nazi, although he was a dentist. This story didn’t happen.
But so many of us have aunts, uncles, parents, grandparents or others in our family who have done things that cause so much family trauma and shame. Whether severe domestic abuse in a country where one in three women have experienced some form of physical violence from their partner with one in seven being injured in those incidents. Maybe you actually had a great-great grandparent who owned slaves, like Mitch McConnell’s did in Alabama. Or maybe you had a father who spent years in prison for corruption for swindling the elderly out of money, like Stieve Fernandez. Or imagine what it would feel like if your own father paid off a porn star he had sex with while your mom was pregnant.
How many of us carry around that trauma and shame from these sins? How many of us are afraid to even speak to our closest friends and confidants about the shame for fear that others will judge us for these sins?
What an uncomfortable talk it would be. “My father is in prison for rape.” Or “My uncle got busted for running a meth ring.” Or “My great grandfather killed Jews in World War II.”
Who among us unintentionally passes on the shame and trauma of our family trees in our parenting styles?
The thing is we have a choice. Not in who our family is, but certainly in how we react to and reject the shame. The sins of our family members aren’t ours to carry. Their shame is not our shame. The people who know us and love us won’t assign that shame to us. They know who we are. They know who you are. We get to raise our kids the way we choose. With joy, and happiness, and ethics. We get to walk through life with our own sense of right and wrong. Our own sense of morality. Our own acts of kindness.
It’s a tough battle to win, no doubt, but you are not the sins of your father.
This post originally appeared on Medium and is edited and republished with author's permission. Read more of Jeffrey Kass' work on Medium.