My Ancestors were Nazis and now You Are a Zionist
a Poem for the Pro-Israel "Left", the delusional German politicians, the Antideutschen, and the Nazi descendants of this world
My ancestors were Nazis
and now you are a Zionist
- a poem
my ancestors are not well -
the shame of having done wrong
was passed onto me from birth,
and is woven deep
into the fabric of my body.
the other day,
I posted a half nude on my private Insta,
hoping the algorithm
would help people see my stories -
I deleted it quickly,
because the embarrassment for doing something ‘amoral’
for selling my nudity to Meta,
started creeping into my veins.
when I connected with that feeling,
a shame of having done something horrible
began to flood every cell of my body.
exploring this shame further,
I was led to a deeper, unexpected place -
an ancestor appeared in my mind space
carrying an immense weight of self reproach.
he seemed to be from my father’s father’s line,
my grandfather's dad, who worked at the city council
for the Nazis during Hitler’s regime.
my grandfather was a newborn when, after the war,
his father was tricked into attending a city council meeting,
to be kidnapped and forced to march
to a Polish concentration camp
to be punished for his Nazi crimes.
He died on the way there.
and I don't know if the ancestor who appeared in my mind, was him,
but whom I connected with, carried an ocean of shame, of self-reproach -
the same feeling that somehow got activated
when I posted that half-nude,
had exposed an ANCESTRAL WOUND.
I asked my ancestor if he wanted to grieve through me,
and accepting my invitation,
we started sobbing uncontrollably
until some of his pain had flown through the tissues of my body.
hauntedly aware of the horrors he complicited,
we allowed the pain of his shame
flow through my body
and even as I write this,
his grief surfaces again.
I sense his presence,
asking me to grieve further,
needing to use my body
as a vessel for his mourning.
he also asked
if I could do better
if I could break the generational cycle
of horror, shame, wrongdoing
in our blood line
of colonizing and killing,
and I promised him I would.
this made him cry out
in pain of knowing how much he didn’t do better, though he could have; and
in relief for knowing that I’m determined
to not repeat his mistakes.
This shame, the shame of our history, the shame of our ancestors,
is something many Germans,
particularly if descendants of Nazis,
fail to confront, fail to grieve, fail to integrate into their existence.
the horror of having done something terrible mutates into a fear
of doing wrong again,
unprocessed grief becomes weaponized,
turning into Zionism -
another face of the same evil.
the fear of repeating the past
turns into reproducing it
turns into supporting and funding
a genocide
in Palestine
because as Nazi descendants
we never came to terms with
the ancestral shame and pain our bodies carry.
As we bear the legacy of Nazism,
we have the duty
to grieve our shame,
to confront our pain,
and the weight of the past.
because ignoring it, pushing it aside,
and transforming it into the coping mechanism of Zionism,
has killed, continues to kill
thousands of Palestinians,
thousands of Lebanese,
thousands of others.
So I wish every descendant of Nazis
and everyone else burdened by
the unprocessed disgrace of German history,
the courage to grieve their shame,
to reckon with the blame,
to finally face the horrors of the past -
so we can do better.
Free Palestine, free Lebanon, and fuck Israhell forever.
