Few Americans have spoken out as forcefully against the Nazis and their legacy as Ernestine Schlant Bradley, Ph.D., a leading scholar on European literature and a professor at Montclair State University in New Jersey. But Bradley the private person has spent most of her adult life trying to sort through the complicated emotions about her family and her native land. She wonders, still, how her parents could not have known what was happening to the Jews. “It has taken me years,” she says, “to face it directly.”
But she has. In a cathartic book published last year, “The Language of Silence,” Bradley condemns contemporary German writers for ignoring the crimes of the Holocaust. After all these years, she says, she has not found all the answers about her past, but she has finally found a way to give voice to the pain and anger that accompany her German roots. She found it partly through longstanding friendships with several Holocaust victims, like Hertzberg. Bradley has affected their views of history as much as they have hers. “I used to think, ‘Germans have moral problems about what happened to the Jews? Let them hang themselves’,” Hertzberg says. “But now I have come to the conclusion that I have to build bridges to them. That is what she taught me, without ever giving a speech.”
Even by wartime standards, Bradley’s childhood was tumultuous. Her mother had become pregnant at 18 by her lover, Sepp Misslbeck, but didn’t tell him for fear it would ruin his ambition to see the world. Instead, she married the owner of a hair salon in Passau, her hometown straddling three rivers by the Austrian border. Born in 1935, Ernestine knew this man as her father right up until the time he went away to war. While he was away, Ernestine’s mother ran into Misslbeck, a pilot on the western front, at a memorial service and confessed that Ernestine was in fact his daughter. Still in love with Misslbeck, she divorced her husband and they reunited. Ernestine never saw her previous “father” again, although he survived the war and remarried.
Among Ernestine’s earliest memories, at about 8, is going with her grammar-school classmates to a makeshift war hospital, where they held teacups to the lips of wounded soldiers. When local men were killed–as two of Ernestine’s uncles were–the Nazis would print announcements saying that the parents were “in proud mourning.” Her mother raged: “Proud? What is there to be proud about?” Bradley tells the story of her mother remarking to a friend in a movie theater that Hitler was mad. Someone overheard and she was arrested, and would likely have suffered a worse fate had she not been pregnant with one of Ernestine’s two siblings.
After finishing college in Germany, she used her fluency in three languages to land a coveted job as a flight attendant with Pan Am in 1957. Then Ernestine married an American doctor, Robert Schlant, and moved with him to Atlanta. (They had a daughter in 1959 and divorced several years later.) By then, stories of death camps were well known. At Emory University, she studied under Walter Strauss, her literary mentor. It was not until the two became close that the German-born Strauss revealed that he himself had fled the Nazis and had seen the devastated survivors when he returned with the U.S. Army.
They shared their stories, and in her visits with her parents, still in Germany, Bradley began to press harder for answers. She wondered why there had been no Jews in Passau. “Oh, yeah, there were Jews, and they had department stores,” her mother told her. “Well, where did they go?” Bradley asked. Her mother replied: “I don’t know, but they left.”
Bradley’s conversations with her father, who died in 1974, were more heated. Although he had flown Nazi planes, she says, he was not a member of the party. He admitted to her that he had seen a Jewish couple forced to wear a Star of David, and said he gave them his food-ration card. “He thought that was very nice,” Bradley recalls with a trace of bitterness. “And I said, ‘So you knew that they didn’t get enough food.’ ‘Well, yeah,’ he said. He knew that they were being harassed and all that.”
When her father insisted he never knew of the concentration camps, Bradley would counter, “I cannot believe you didn’t know.” He never relented. Strauss recalls spending time with Bradley’s father some 40 years ago. “He was a jolly Bavarian type who would have gone along with the leadership,” Strauss says. “I think he probably had things he preferred not to talk about.” Bradley seems to take comfort in the stories of other Germans who say they never knew of the camps just miles away. Does she now believe her father didn’t know about them, either? “I don’t know,” she says quietly. “I think there were ways of not wanting to know.”
It is a strange twist that Bradley seems most comfortable sharing her own thoughts about Nazi Germany with those who suffered its horrors. She says those friends have helped her confront the past because they, too, are absorbed in it. Rita Jacobs, a fellow professor and close friend whose mother’s family was killed in the camps, remembers being nervous when she first discussed it with Bradley after they met in 1971. Later she traveled with Bradley to Germany and met her mother. “I know what your family went through,” Bradley’s mother told her. “I can’t believe my country could do such a thing.”
Rabbi Hertzberg, an authority on Jewish history, met Bradley when she was, in his words, “royally bored” at a fund-raiser during her husband’s first campaign. They immediately began discussing European literature, and before long Hertzberg and his wife were sharing deep discussions with Ernestine over dinner while Bill was in Washington. As Ernestine struggled successfully to overcome breast cancer in the early 1990s, Hertzberg prayed for her at the Western Wall in Jerusalem. “She still doesn’t know about that,” he says.
Around that same time, Hertzberg introduced the Bradleys to Henry Kissinger over Sabbath dinner at his home. Wearing yarmulkes, or Jewish skullcaps, the senator and Kissinger chatted about Cambodia and other issues, and afterward Hertzberg and Ernestine huddled to talk. “We’ll just have to wait them out,” the senator told Kissinger. “Everyone knows Arthur and Ernestine have a special relationship.” A few years ago, Hertzberg considered returning to Germany for the first time in 55 years to give a lecture. “Don’t go,” she told him. “The time is not right yet to make them look good.” He didn’t, but he will return this year, with her blessing.
Now Ernestine Bradley is parading through Iowa farms and New Hampshire meeting halls, finding time along the way to reconnect by phone with friends. In interviews, the issue of the Holocaust is always there, but she knows now that she cannot account for what her parents did or did not know. “If there are people who don’t want to vote for Bill because of my background, that’s what it is,” she says. After decades of searching for peace, she is confident that she can handle the questions, even if she’ll never have all the answers to give.
