I recently spent a lovely long weekend in Krakow. On a tour of the Jewish area, I was told this story.
During the Nazi occupation when all Jews were moved to the ghetto, a 9-year-old girl, insisted on taking her most loved possession, her pet dog. Move on two years, to October 1943, when the remaining Jews were to be sent to Auschwitz or similar and the little girl, I’ll call her Christine, is lining up in the square.
Christine’s dog has died but has left her with two puppies, which she holds, wrapped, in her arms. When she reaches the front of the queue, the head of Nazi forces in Krakow chooses who will go to a death camp and who will live. He asks Christine what she is holding, and she unwraps the puppies to show him. ‘What are you going to do with those?’ he asks. In a moment of inspiration Christine holds out the puppies, ‘They are a gift for you,’ she answers. The Commandant has a soft spot for dogs so decides that Christine will live.
Many years later, as an old lady she hears of a book written by a half Nigerian woman, called My Grandfather Would Have Shot Me. The author is a young woman who has just found out that her grandfather was the Nazi who had decided that Christine would live in October 1943. Christine writes to the author and tells her of the incident so that she will know that at least once her grandfather performed a loving and humane action.
I hear this story and I wonder about the grace that Christine showed to the Commandant who would have taken her life; about the grace of the Commandant who gave her a chance of life; and the grace of the adult Christine, showing a young woman that her ancestor was not completely inhumane. And I wonder above all, how the offspring of the racist Commandant could have had the courage to produce and rear a child of dual heritage in the second half of the twentieth century.
I wonder at the grace of God.
Wendy Quill
