Hello, Radio Readers; this is Kim Perez, and I am coming to you from Hays with a Book Byte for HPPR. I am here to discuss Nora Krug’s 2018 graphic novel, “Belonging: A German Reckons with History and Home.” This book is about Krug’s journey to come to terms with the fact that she is German and the guilt that she feels because her family witnessed some of the atrocities leading up to the Second World War and the Holocaust. It is microhistory, rich in details about the experiences of her grandparents, aunts, and uncles during these tumultuous years. But it is also a deeply personal story where Krug tries to discover who her family members were and who she is in relation to them. This is the part of the story that touched me the most. I am deeply moved by her quest because it reminded me of my own.
I have always thought that it was unfortunate that time is linear, and we cannot go back and meet our grandparents as adults. If we overlap with our grandparents, it is typically when we are young and more interested in playing with cousins than listening to family stories. And when we become adults and want to know who our distant relatives are as people, and not just faces in a photo album, it is often too late. There are countless questions that we don’t get to ask and answers that we will never know. Krug faced this same reality. But luckily for her, there were some relatives still alive that could provide some answers, and there were documents in archives that could provide others. She may not have all the answers that she sought, but she does get some relief from her feelings of guilt through this knowledge.
By the time I was born, three of my four grandparents had already passed away. My maternal grandma, Mabel, was my only grandparent, and in her final years, while I was in college, I worked hard to get to know her. Through her, I learned of my grandfather and my maternal great-grandparents. I had at least an outline of who they were. But my paternal grandparents died when my father was young. My dad was four when his father Pablo died in 1925 and sixteen when his mother Maria died in 1937. My father was not a source of information because he barely remembered them. I have two photos of my grandmother, probably taken shortly after my grandfather died. I treasure these photos because they give me insight into who she was: she was a petite woman with dark skin and dark eyes, dressed modestly, and looked exhausted and sad. At this point, she was widowed, raising three young children by herself and likely without a steady income. Again, I felt like I had a faint outline of who Maria was. Unfortunately, there are no known pictures of my grandfather, although I am told that he had brown hair and green eyes, like me. The fact that I could not look at a photo and glean information about him or search his eyes for any resemblance made me sad, but it led me on my own quest to find him.
My best hope for finding information was through an Ancestry DNA test. This test led me to a distant cousin who shared with me that she had been working with a DNA detective filling out her family tree and gave me her contact information. I was dubious at first, and a little nervous because I was trusting my family story to a stranger, but within a day, she had filled in some details on my family tree.
Have you seen that movie Coco? In the film, Coco goes on a quest to find his grandfather, and he loses the only photo of him. When the photo is retrieved, the memory of his grandfather is saved. This is how I felt with each detail she found about my grandfather, Pablo. Little by little, the memory of him was being restored.
Here is what I know: His name was Pablo, and he was born in Zacatecas, Mexico, in 1895. He was baptized just a couple of days before his first birthday. He had two sisters and a brother, but he was the oldest child. He came to the US on a temporary work visa in 1917, at the age of 22 years old, and the US Border Crossing record states that he was in good health, seeking work, had brown hair and gray eyes. Not green, like mine, but the pieces were starting to fit together. He crossed with my grandmother, and records indicate that they settled around Denver, and he may have worked at Colorado Steelworks. My aunt was born in 1918, and my father was born in 1921. Through my father’s baptismal records, I found out that Pablo and Maria were not legally married because my father is listed as an “Hijo natural” which the DNA detective assured me was quite common. A third child, a daughter, was born in May 1925. But in March 1925, just eight days after his thirtieth birthday and almost two months before my aunt was born, my grandfather Pablo died. I didn’t realize that he never met his third child.
I don’t know how Pablo died. My father said he thought he heard that he died of pneumonia. And I didn’t know where he was buried, but a random Find-a-Grave search revealed he was buried in Riverside Cemetery, one of the oldest cemeteries in Denver. I googled it. It's right off the highway, and I have passed by it countless times. How could someone who felt so far away have been so close at times?
The next time we are in Colorado, we pull off the highway into Riverside Cemetery. It is old and unkempt and in need of a lot of care. I go into the cemetery office, which is run by volunteers--a couple and their dog--and ask them for any information about my grandfather, Pablo. They pull out the interment record and locate where he is buried, and then pull out the map to show me how to find the site. I can’t believe I am seeing the documentation that cemetery officials made on the date they buried him. There is his name and date of death on the square where he is buried. I am filled with nervous excitement.
When we pull up to the section of the cemetery where he is buried, all I can see is an open field. There are maybe four markers in the whole section and most of the plots are unmarked.
All I can do is approximate where he is buried. This sight fills me with sadness. Not only was he lost for almost a hundred years to his family, he also is buried in an unmarked grave, in a field full of people who have also been lost to their families and history. I realize like Krug does when she sits in her aunt Annemarie’s house and talks about her uncle Franz-Karl, this is the closest that I have ever been to my grandfather and the closest I will ever be. But I feel some relief that my grandfather has not been completely forgotten.
Thank you for listening to my story. This is Kim Perez, and you are listening to the High Plains Public Radio Reader’s Book Club.
