Bitburg: Personal Reaction

This column was written scores of times in my head and resulted always in a jumbled torrent of anguished thoughts. I never intended to write about the flap over President Reagan's laying of a wreath at the Bitburg cemetery containing some SS graves. "Enough reams of analysis and dissection of the incident," I thought, as newspapers and individual commentators had a field day with the event.

But apparently 40 years is not long enough.

Inwardly, I became increasingly agitated as the Bitburg story continued to fill the airwaves and newspapers. Feelings and emotions welled up within me that had long lain dormant. Painful memories die hard, even though buried deep.

I lost my brother, my only brother, not far from Bitburg in the Battle of the Bulge. Bitburg was a staging area for Nazi SS troops involved in that Battle. For me, it is an accursed place.

My brother was barely 19 when he was killed, and had been drafted only 10 months previously. During that short period he had been wounded and, after recuperation, been sent back into battle. So his body was returned to us with two Purple Hearts.

He had been a company clerk and was not trained for warfare; in fact, he had never held a gun in his hands until a few short months before his death. Like the 77,000 other American casualties in the Battle of the Bulge, he was literally served up as cannon fodder in that final thrust by German forces in the cold winter of 1944-1945. I know not the final circumstances, nor do I want to know.

For 35 years I could not even mention his name, and many of my closest friends were not aware that I had ever had a brother. The pain was intolerable and I could not talk about him. Whenever I tried, I broke down in tears.

It took until 1980 (and then only at the gentle, caring behest of my son Kevin, a psychologist) before I could bear to open a packet of my brother's letters from the period preceding his death. For the first time in 35 years I began to mention his name.

It is now over 40 years that Seymour is gone, and I thought I had learned to live with it. Then along came the Bitburg incident and I discovered otherwise.

I found out that the pain of bereavement has no statute of limitations. My wound was still raw despite the protective covering of four decades. Time, that Great Healer, had applied an ineffective poultice.

All I could think of was that one of the Germans who killed my brother may be buried beneath that wreath Reagan was going to lay at Bitburg. The thought filled me with anguish and revulsion.

Rational and abstract discourse about the fallacy of "collective guilt" and innocence of this generation of "democratic Germans" left me cold. I was no longer the cerebral one swayed by profound and practical considerations of the need to reconcile, after 40 years, with our now staunch ally in Europe. After all, who better to battle (our former staunch ally) the Soviets with!

The Bitburg episode revealed to me how deep the wound. Pain over the loss of a loved one is a most individual emotion. It is not subject to another's analysis or judgment. Only I, alone, will know when to stop grieving, when to stop crying, and when I am no longer embittered.

It does make a difference when the bleeding heart is your own and for real, not merely a figure of speech.

So let Reagan be Reagan. Let him lay his wreath at Bitburg and be done with it. I am not able to forgive. I will not forget. I can't.