My friend Ron Vossler, in Wishek, says some of his neighbors consider him a Judas. I think he is, rather, what is known historically as a remembrancer.
“Remembrancer” was a formal title conferred on certain figures in British legal and political affairs, someone designated to remind officials of their debts and obligations. Remembrancers were not popular.
In common usage a remembrancer is anyone who keeps a chronicle and reminds us of unpleasant facts we might prefer to forget. Historians use the term in reference to scholars who dig up evidence that has been buried and forgotten, but should be remembered.
So Ronnie Vossler, the remembrancer, a self-conscious German from Russia with a powerful talent for research and writing, already had a bit of a checkered reputation. People loved it when he explicated German-Russian foodways and humor or authored stories with an ingratiating element of ethnic self-deprecation.
Trouble is, Ron is a really thoughtful guy, and eventually his thoughts turned to the folks left in the old country, the Germans who did not leave Russia for America. They suffered horribly during the chaotic days following the Bolshevik Revolution, and even more horribly during the terrible regime of Joseph Stalin. They were the object of genocidal measures in the USSR, as Soviet officials abused their persons, seized their properties, broke up their communities, and exiled survivors to Siberia or Kazakhstan.
This remembrance, which Ron chronicled through the writings of the displaced Germans, generated a crisis in German-Russian collective memory. There was a surge of survivor guilt, as people here, while counting their blessings as Americans, were saddled with the knowledge of their kinsmen’s sufferings.
The narrative crisis has worked itself out as German-Russians continue to tell their stories. They now emphasize how fortunate, and perhaps prescient, it was for their forebears to make the hard decision to emigrate and make new lives in America. This is about as close to triumphalism as you can go in German-Russian collective memory.
Now comes Ron’s most recent book, Hitler’s Basement: My Search for Truth, Light, and the Forgotten Executioners of Ukraine’s Kingdom of Death. Oh, this is indeed a hard teaching.
The memory journey began when Ron experienced encounters with Germans in North America whose stories made him uncomfortable. You see, during the Second World War, as German divisions rolled across Russia, the remnant German settlements there found themselves German-occupied. This was an awkward liberation, but many local officials and residents collaborated with the invaders, some serving in the SS. When the Germans retreated, the collaborators went along to Germany. After the war, some of them obtained sponsors and came to the US or Canada.
During the occupation, tens of thousands of Jews were shot and incinerated in the German settlements of the Black Sea region. Ron came to suspect the German-Russian collaborators were involved in this--and some were. During a Fulbright fellowship to the Ukraine, he unearthed the documentation and travelled, methodically and dismally, to the execution sites.
Some of the war criminals, Ron learned, managed to make their way to America. Indeed, he learned that at one time, the Wishek sponsor of one of these “stone-cold killers” rented a basement apartment to his mother. Hence the title of the book, Hitler’s Basement. And hence another challenge for collective memory.
~Tom Isern
