In one instance, she learns of a torched synagogue located across the street from her grandfather’s office. She is a tenacious investigator, ferreting out stories from the wispiest hints - a rumor or a mysterious photograph. Krug slashes through a fog of shame, amnesia, determined oblivion and misdirection to trace the lives of two men: her father’s brother, an SS soldier killed in his teens, and her maternal grandfather, who worked as a chauffeur to a Jewish linen salesman and later joined the Nazi party. They seemed distant like a long extinct species.”
As a very young child, Krug assumed that Jewish people “didn’t exist outside of the Bible. She was never taught about the tens of thousands of Germans killed for resisting the Nazis, possibly “because it would have made our grandparents who didn’t resist look guiltier in comparison.” Nor was modern Jewish life or culture mentioned in schools. Growing up, she listened to talks given by American survivors, but would never have thought to discuss the concentration camps with her relatives.
Even then, she could not bear to wave it.įor all her shame and self-scrutiny, Krug becomes aware that Germans confront their history selectively. Hitler’s speeches were analyzed in schools - “alliteration by alliteration, tautology by tautology, neologism by neologism,” Krug writes - to unpack how the German language was “potentially dangerous.” Krug grew up without knowing the words of her home country’s national anthem, and first touched a German flag as an adult living in America. After twelve years in the US, Krug realizes that living abroad has only intensified her need to ask the questions she didn?t dare to as a child.Some Germans adopted the same habit of vigilance. Yet she knew little about her own family?s involvement though all four grandparents lived through the war, they never spoke of it. * Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award * Silver Medal Society of Illustrators * * Named a Best Book of the Year by The New York Times, The Boston Globe, San Francisco Chronicle, NPR, Comics Beat, The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, Kirkus Reviews, and Library Journal This ?ingenious reckoning with the past? (The New York Times), by award-winning artist Nora Krug investigates the hidden truths of her family?s wartime history in Nazi Germany.Nora Krug was born decades after the fall of the Nazi regime, but the Second World War cast a long shadow over her childhood and youth in the city of Karlsruhe, Germany. Read Or Download Belonging: A German Reckons with History and Home By Nora Krug Full Pages.
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