Facing a German past from a home in America
Dr. Ernestine Bradley, left, was the guest speaker at an April 26 reception
for Jaffa Gate, Pomegranate, and Lion of Judah donors to the Women's
Philanthropy of the Jewish Federation of Greater Monmouth County.
The event took place at the home of Sheri Tarrab, right. Photo by Jill Huber
Ernestine Bradley's life was shaped by two countries. The first was Germany, where she was born in 1935 and witnessed the onset of World War II from her childhood home near the Austrian border.
The second is America, where she moved in 1957 at age 21 and eventually became both an acclaimed literature professor and wife of Bill Bradley, the ex-basketball star who would become a senator from New Jersey from 1979 to 1997.
"I've had a life that is full of excitement, challenges, learning, and love," Bradley told NJ Jewish News. "But in my search for structure and substance, I've learned some hard lessons and faced some difficult realities. But I've never shied away from any of them."
Bradley talked about growing up in wartime Germany and her move to the United States at a reception for donors to the Women's Philanthropy of the Jewish Federation of Greater Monmouth County. The event, for Jaffa Gate, Pomegranate, and Lion of Judah honorees, took place April 26 at the home of Sheri and David Tarrab in Holmdel.
As she does in her memoir, The Way Home: A German Childhood, an American Life, she spoke of growing up in Bavaria. Her father, who was not a member of the Nazi Party, 
served in the German air force. Bradley recalled the food shortages, the badly wounded German soldiers who were treated at a nearby facility, and the Allied planes that strafed the area. She also recalled the disappearance of Jewish residents who had once coexisted with the general community.
But after the war ended in 1945, an "absolute silence" about the fate of the missing Jews descended upon Germany, Bradley said.
It wasn't until the 1960s, while she was living in Atlanta with Dr. Robert Schlant, her first husband, that she began to absorb what had happened in Nazi Germany.
Bradley was studying for a doctoral degree in comparative literature at Atlanta's Emory University when she met Walter Strauss, a language professor at the school. Strauss and his family had escaped from their native Germany shortly before the outbreak of the war.
"When I met Walter Strauss, it was the early 1960s, and I was still oblivious about the extent of the atrocities committed by Germans during the Holocaust," Bradley said. "Walter Strauss would gently but insistently tell me about what our native country had done to some of its citizens."
She began to feel the burden of German history and the Nazi period.
"It descended upon me slowly and in a piecemeal fashion," Bradley said. "But it descended and never left me again. I don't believe that there are Germans of any generation, in Germany or anyplace else, who are not affected by knowledge of the Holocaust, regardless of whether they deny it or repress it or think that it's simply time to move on and play down the past."
Act of silence
Expecting the birth of her first child when she and Strauss had many of their extensive conversations, the knowledge she gathered about the Shoa triggered a different kind of birth: one of "monstrous knowledge," Bradley said.
"In his quiet way, Walter Strauss sheltered me from the devastation of the impact of that knowledge, but not from hard confrontation," she said. "I tried to imagine the terror, betrayal, and defeat you must feel when your country, to which you had always shown loyalty and given your best, does not want you anymore – when it vilifies you, harasses you, humiliates you, and takes everything from you, including life itself."
Bradley continued to absorb the painful realization that much historical information had been omitted from her German childhood. There were railroad tracks near her hometown that led to strange work camps from which the local German populace was barred. Whenever she had asked her mother about Germany's role in the war, the questions were always met with a stern look and silence.
It wasn't until her mother came to the United States to visit her daughter, by then married to Bradley, that the shield began to disintegrate, Bradley recalled.
"We were talking about politics, and my mother started to cry," she said. "I had never seen her so upset, but now she began to express feelings of shame that she had never talked to me about. She said how terrible it was to come from a country that you could not be proud of. She said that once Hitler was in power, there was no legal recourse if someone did not want to follow a madman."
In 1992, Bradley received a breast cancer diagnosis. After the success of surgery and subsequent treatments, she began to grapple with the "breast cancer survivor" label.
"Probably because of my German background, the word 'survivor' has a more singular meaning for me," said Bradley. "Cancer is a dreadful disease, but the threat of death does not compare to the horror of the camps. The sufferings of cancer are human sufferings and even the most horrible treatments are still trying to preserve life. But the Holocaust took away all vestiges of humanity, and death, not life, was the ultimate goal."
As both teacher and student, Bradley has never stopped examining the substance of her life in Germany and in the United States. She feels at home among her extended "American family," although some have been reluctant to embrace her because of her heritage, she said.
Her students at Montclair State University and at the New School in New York City sometimes ask her about her past, and Bradley never dodges the questions.
"I love academics and I've always encouraged my students to be inquisitive and ask questions," she said. "Some of the answers aren't easy, but you can't run away from your past. There is no way to really forget, and I can't perpetuate a 'language of silence.' My parents' generation perpetuated the Holocaust, and many members of my generation compartmentalized what they knew as a way to avoid dealing with the truth."
She sometimes tells her students a story that is both revealing and harrowing.
"After the war, I asked my father about the Holocaust," Bradley said. "He said he never knew any Jews personally, but once gave his ration card to a Jewish family. I asked him how he knew they didn't have anything to eat. I told him people were starving and nobody seemed to care. I think members of my father's generation saw his gift of the ration card as an act of kindness. I saw it as an act of silence."
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