Knowledge of aunt’s difficult journey sends author on his ownPage 2 of 3 -- The psychiatrist he consulted confirmed Gumpert was experiencing stress and said it was rooted in the guilt Gumpert felt for not having tried to learn about Inge's experience while she was alive. "The guilt I felt was the awful feeling that if I had known, then perhaps I could have helped her and she wouldn't have committed suicide," he says. Thanks to yoga and meditation, by the summer of 1994, Gumpert had come to grips with the emotional crisis. His hair grew back, and he embarked on an odyssey of his own, a 10-year undertaking in which he used Inge's manuscript, hundreds of letters, and his own interviews with people in Europe and the United States to write a compelling account of her saga: "Inge: A Girl's Journey Through Nazi Europe" (Wm. B. Eerdmans).
Dramatic passages Married with two children, Gumpert, 57, is a former editor of the Harvard Business Review, a former reporter for The Wall Street Journal, and the author of textbooks on business. Even now, 21 years after the death of Inge, he is sometimes overcome by the sense of security she gave him as a boy and then by her degeneration. Without that persecution by the Nazis, would Inge have lived a longer and happier life? "No doubt about it," says Gumpert. Then, in the end, the Nazis got her after all? "I would take issue with that," he says. "Yes, literally, they did get her, but spiritually she had stood up to them in the strongest way she could. Plus, she had survived to become educated, to contribute to society, and to raise a family. So, in a larger sense, she had made a statement via her survival." Gumpert marvels that her story was kept secret by the family. "In a Holocaust survivor family, there are things that went on and didn't go on that, in retrospect, are hard to comprehend. I remember asking about Inge, but then the subject would be cut off. My father would say, `Well, the bastard' -- referring to Hitler -- `killed 6 million people,' and that was it. If I asked about Inge, they'd say she was hidden by nuns in France, and I just envisioned her in a monastery or something." Not every member of Gumpert's family is pleased with the book. Some have told him the Holocaust is an experience better forgotten. "But I wrote it to clear Inge's name, because in those last years she acted bizarre. Second, there's something larger here. The Holocaust" -- he hesitates, and for a moment the only sounds are made by gulls riding the wind over the water -- "we're still close enough to the Holocaust so that we can't appreciate where it fits in historically. But when I think of Inge and the other children running from Nazis, it's a story of biblical proportions, of right and wrong, and of strangers risking their lives to help strangers who are kids who were, really, a wandering tribe of Jews, thrown together in flight from their homeland and from evil." Continued... |
