Jedem das Seine: A Love Story

We are two—a couple, a double—but also a whole, a unit, one.
We are sometimes opposites and sometimes parallels.
Parallels that make it so easy, opposites that make it so exciting.
We are opposites, but ones that complete each other.
We are parallels, so close they are almost a line.
We are from places far apart, yet each one seems familiar to the other.
Our love is the road from one place to the other.
A road that we will travel on together. 

I vow to build our life together with trust and honesty,
to build a home filled with love and peace and support.

Together we are more than two—we are one.
Ich liebe dich (I love you)

–Wedding vow written by Alex Kohnke, pledged to Hillary Sunenshine, October 7, 2001

*
Jedem das Seine (To Each What He Deserves), A Love Story

By Hillary Kohnke-Sunenshine

 

ELFIN FOREST, California-The vibration of the train wheels echoed my heart’s uneasy beat. A timeless rhythm became one with my own, moving toward an uncertain destination My ancestors’ fate engulfed me and held my future in its grasp.

In that moment, 18 years ago, I was 24 years old, a native of Los Angeles, visiting Germany with my boyfriend, who was born in Bonn and raised in Hamburg. The calendar read 1997, but it felt like 1943. I sat on a train, its metallic pulse in unison with my own. When the train stopped, would my heart stop, too?

I had the sense that I was outside of myself, looking at a scene on a movie screen. Here I was on a train, going to a death camp, like my Jewish brothers and sisters who’d come before me.

I certainly couldn’t disguise my appearance—dark hair, ethnic features— which told just about anyone who looked my way that I was Jewish. There was no denying my heritage, nor did I wish to do so. My heart ached with a sorrow so profound that I thought I would crumble in anguish. But I kept silent, hypnotized by the rhythm of that train.

I am one of them! I screamed inwardly. I knew that if I’d lived back then, in the Germany I was traveling through, I too would be headed to my death. I had a vivid memory of my Grandma Sara speaking softly to me when I was a child, as she gazed at me through her gentle, light-blue eyes. “Hillary, we should never hate. Hate separates us from love. We can only remember so that it doesn’t happen again.”

And I heard Bubbe Adele speaking to me only a year ago. I’d just graduated from design school and had moved to New York for my first job. I was spending the Sabbath with my Orthodox uncle’s family when his wife’s mother sat me down quietly and looked at me as though I was a mirror to her youth. I gazed at the tattooed numbers on her arm in wonderment as she said, “My child, how lucky you are to be a woman at this time. To be free to work as you want, and love whom you wish.”

As the train sped along, images of Adele as a young, frightened woman, with other men, women, and children who’d been crammed into cattle cars along this very route, terrified me. Adele was a reflection of myself. My body shook uncontrollably as I thought of her, of all them, yet my eyes were dry; not a single tear fell. It was September, and some of the trees were already bare, as lifeless as the deceased human beings who’d been stacked up like cordwood.

So here I was, on this train, accompanied by my new boyfriend, Alex. I’d met him three years prior while studying abroad at Art Center Europe, in Montreux, Switzerland. Our romantic relationship was in the early stages after being friends for a while, but then I’d fallen in love with this young German man—handsome and kind, talented and inspiring. His brother was getting married in Dresden, and Alex had invited me to attend the wedding.

I would be the first person in my family to visit Germany since World War II had ended. My parents had requested that I visit one of the camps to honor all those who’d died . . . and to remember. Hesitantly, I asked Alex if he’d accompany me to the concentration camp that was closest to Dresden. He said yes, but there was trepidation in his response. Alex knew he had a responsibility to accompany me, almost feeling guilty for not having been to a camp already. The Holocaust is taught to German children, but they don’t necessarily visit the camps; the history remains abstract and impersonal. The Jewish tale is told, but the cultural identity of the Jewish people is all but lost.

Disquiet filled Alex’s being, but he nonetheless agreed to accompany me, so we made our way to Weimar, a town less than ten miles from the Buchenwald concentration camp.

My immediate family wasn’t particularly religious, but we were ethnically traditional. Although the Holocaust wasn’t my personal story—the Germans had not directly affected my closest family members—it was my cultural one. It challenges our Jewish tradition and identity and is impossible to separate from or ignore. The devastation of bondage, discrimination, exclusion, and extinction is very much alive in every prayer for compassion and every remembrance of suffering.

My parents accepted our relationship, for they loved Alex, even though he was not only German but also Catholic. At the tender age of eight, foreseeing the future, I’d asked my mother, “Would you and Daddy be okay if I didn’t marry a Jewish man?” My mother answered, “We would prefer if you did, but all we care about is that your husband respects and loves you.” I would be the first person in my family to marry outside our religion and therefore break the bloodline my relatives considered pure.

When I disembarked from the train at Weimar station, with the memories of the past weighing heavily on my mind, I virtually sleepwalked through the city, in a daze, unable to process thoughts coherently. The next day Alex and I boarded a bus, and were driven—not forced to march—to the gates of Buchenwald.

Ever since I’d been a little girl, I’d had some mystical knowing—some might say I was intuitive or clairvoyant—so it didn’t surprise me when upon arriving at the gates, I heard a whisper in my ear: “The time you spend here will either make you or break you. You will come out together, or be separated forever.” I wondered if Alex heard it, too.

As we walked through the entrance, I looked behind me to see the wrought-iron words on the inside of the gate (so that the prisoners could read them, I found out later): JEDEM DAS SEINE. I did not know what those words meant, but I was sure those who’d come before me did. Alex and I walked in respectful silence. I felt alone with the ghosts, the past, the horror. Time stood still, yet the earth shook with its many secrets aching to erupt through its cracks. I was overcome by emotion, but I still could not cry. Tears were too paltry a representation of the despair that I felt around me.

“To each his own” or “To each what he deserves,” Alex later translated JEDEM DAS SEINE to mean. This camp was not dead; it held truths and messages that were longing to be heard.

Alex and I walked side-by-side, not making a sound. There were people in front of us, laughing; their laughter irritated my skin—the skin that I could barely feel, for I was no longer walking in a world I knew. Then, as we passed near the barracks that were once filled with tortured human beings, I heard the whisper again. It was the voice of one, yet it held the vibration of many. It declared to me: “This is your time to love each other, together. If you do not choose love, then the sacrifice we made will be in vain. All the lives left in memory are coming forward to remind you to choose love. If not, the hatred will only live on, gain power, and destroy continuously. Hitler would still win. With love you will live, as shall we all.”

At that instant, I took Alex’s hands, and he clasped mine. In silent recognition, I felt the embrace of the words “To each his own.” We were choosing to unify our love. We virtually fell into each other’s tear-filled eyes. In that moment, we simply knew—in the profound way that souls know things that our everyday consciousness cannot—that our fates were intertwined. Time stood still, hours and minutes were equal in the space we held, where past and future became present. Our cultural histories, our labels of “Jew, German, Catholic,” would not serve as symbols of separation and isolation for us. We were now bound together, for we would “get what we deserved”—a life filled with love, respect, and acceptance of one another.

Alex and I knew we were not alone as we processed this heart-wrenching experience; our memories were now shared. Since we could remember, we could now feel. We felt the life present in the echo of silence that surrounded us. With our combined strength, we were able to confront and honor the horror on our path.

Without a word, we entered the museum on the premises and saw pictures of those beyond, whose voices I heard urging us to love. They were images of those still living—yet moments from their death—and we saw their shoes that had no soles left. We walked through the suffocating room where the ovens still stood. The intense sense of death was so overwhelming that without Alex by my side, I might have fainted. Death, I could only hope, was a faithful and honest companion to those who confronted it.

As we exited the camp, my heart was heavy, yet beating calmly in peace. My dark eyes aligned with Alex’s blue ones as he whispered: “Ich liebe dich.” I mouthed back: “I love you, too.”

I believe those are the only words we spoke that day.

*

To this day, Buchenwald offers its wisdom, and messages of hope and love. I discovered just recently that when I heard the poignant whispers, we were very close to the Goethe Oak, a tree that sat in the center of the camp. When the Germans flattened the beech-tree forest surrounding the camp in 1937 in order to build Buchenwald, they spared this oak due to its cultural significance. Goethe was said to have sat under it when he wrote the Walpurgisnacht (Wanderer’s Nightsong), passages from his famous tragedy Faust.

In that work, he wrote that he would rather die than live without his beloved. As such, Goethe Oak took on greater meaning for both the Germans and the Jews in the camp. The Germans saw the tree as a symbol of their cultural achievements, strength, and loyalty. But among the Jewish prisoners of Buchenwald, there was a legend that proclaimed that with each year, the tree would get weaker and weaker, and when it died, the war would come to an end.

The tree did die. It stood lifeless until an Allied bomb destroyed it completely in August of 1944 prior to the camp’s liberation in 1945. All that was left was the stump, which I didn’t even notice when we walked by it that day. However, when I look back at photos of the area, I realize that it was just by the Goethe Oak where I heard the quiet whispers of the souls urging Alex and me to live in love, not separation. It was as if the tree handed us the seeds of possibility, promise, and forgiveness.

*

As the wise women in my life shared with, and taught, me, Alex and I were free to make the choice to live a life of love with integrity, with respect for our differences and similarities. We were from places far apart, yet our love was the bridge from one place to the other.

“To Life,” we toasted on our wedding day as Alex pledged his vows to me under a flourishing weeping-willow tree at sundown in Southern California. “Together we are more than two—we are one.” That night everyone at the wedding came together to celebrate love . . . in joy. Surrounded by majestic oaks, the Germans and the Jews danced freely together. They embraced each other willingly in an infinite circle to dance the Hora as the infectious Jewish folksong “Hava Nagila” (“Let Us Rejoice”) rang in their ears and through their bodies.

Our love, like our wedding, was not just ours. It was a microcosmic story that lives within the universal story of all souls. One that is still being told. That pivotal, unforgettable moment when we joined hands at Buchenwald is indelibly etched into our minds and hearts. It is a memory full of life. Our three children, whose bloodline is pure with true love, understand their roots, who we are, who they are, and what we can all be when we stand together.

The past will never be forgotten, but the future can be filled with peace . . . when we choose to remember, and live the love that we all deserve.

*

Hillary Kohnke-Sunenshine is the author of the poetry book The Echo of the Swan. Her lifelong interest in the mysteries of the sacred symbols and religion led her to the study of spiritual philosophy, in which she earned her master’s degree in 2014. Hillary applies her knowledge to spiritual pursuits by guiding, teaching, and writing in the Elfin Forest in San Diego County, California, where she lives with her husband, Alexander, and three children. To contact her, please visit: www.theEchooftheSwan.com or email: info@theEchooftheSwan.com