First PersonA daughter of a Jewish father and a German mother in search of her own identity
Mia Faye Kreindler with her parents, Dagmar Hesse and Richard Kreindler, at her graduation from the University of Amsterdam. Courtesy of Mia Faye Kreindler
Although I was only 10 years old at the time, I vividly remember when I first learned about the Holocaust. The experience has been etched in my mind and heart ever since. On a hazy day in Washington, D.C., on one of our father-daughter trips, my father took my hand in his and told me that he believed I was mature and old enough to learn that the country I grew up in had been the architect of one of the darkest periods of humankind.
Inside the Holocaust Museum, the gentleman at the ticket counter peered down at me, asked me how old I was and suggested to my father that viewing the children’s exhibition would be more appropriate for someone my age. My father, who always treated me as a little adult, was a little taken aback at first, and told the man that I wasn’t a child.
Nevertheless, he agreed and we both embarked on a two-hour tour through the children’s exhibition. I was left traumatized and forever disturbed. The gentleman at the ticket counter was right; I cannot imagine what viewing the general exhibition would have done to me.
Throughout our tour of the exhibit and after we left, questions raced through my mind: I was born to a Jewish father and a non-Jewish German mother; does that make me Jewish? Well, to the Nazis, it did. Had I been alive 80 years ago, my Jewishness would have been non-negotiable and would have led to my death.
Was my mother’s side of the family evil? Were they Nazis and genocidal murderers? Was I inherently sinful because of my German heritage? Why had my father betrayed his people by marrying a German woman and moving to the very country that would have unquestionably murdered him and his entire family? Why did my father marry a German-Croatian non-Jewish woman, move to Germany, and build a life there?
For me, a 25-year-old journalism student who was born in Germany, and went to school in Europe and the U.S., the story of my parents’ journey has always been one of contradictions, and one I’ve often worried about. So I decided to interview my dad over Zoom, while he was in Germany and I was in his hometown, New York City.
A terrifying feeling
Born in 1959, my father, Richard Kreindler, grew up in Riverdale, New York. It was, he told me during a conversation over Zoom, “a heavily Jewish microcosm with a lot of Holocaust survivors.”
“I grew up with any interest in Germany not being appropriate at all,” he said. “Germany was of the forbidden fruit. There was a general anti-German sentiment, not just among Jews,” he explained.
One might expect a story of a Jewish person like my father moving to Germany to be riddled with stories of antisemitism. For my father, the opposite was the case. “Until Oct. 7, 2023” — my father sighed before continuing — “my experience in Germany had very largely been positive. Germany, for lack of a better phrase, had been good to me.”
A few days after Oct. 7, I was in Berlin visiting my friend when my father FaceTimed me.
“I’m worried about you” he sighed. “I would advise you not to wear your Star of David necklace on the street. It’s not safe.” His look was stern. It was the first time in my whole life that I had sensed fear from my father in relation to being Jewish. It was a terrifying feeling.
A Romeo and Juliet story
My father, a very dedicated student and driven young man, was awarded a scholarship to the Ludwig-Maximillian University in Munich for a master’s program, with the help of a professor who sparked his interest in the country in the first place. This is where he met Dagmar Hesse, the exotic German-Croatian woman whom he ended up marrying and having two children with. One of those children was me.
It was November 1980 and my mother was doing her master’s in political science and attending her first day of class. Coincidentally, my parents were both taking a Russian language class and were seated next to one another. “After class your mother asked me if I knew where there was a bookstore. My German was so miserable that I did not understand what she was asking me,” my father said with a laugh. “I didn’t want to admit that I didn’t understand, because I already instantly had a feeling that I liked her.”
When I asked my mother about meeting my dad for the first time, she smiled at me and told me the same story. “We immediately liked each other and I thought he was really interesting,” she said, laughing about his attempt at speaking in German.
“And the rest is history,” she said.
For my mother, who devoted much of her life to studying the Holocaust and the Nazis, meeting my father in the early 1980s was transformative. “As a German I felt absolutely horrible, and it deeply affected my life,” she told me with a shaky voice and furrowed brow.
My mother had distant Jewish relatives, but for her family, encountering my father was a novel experience.
One of the first things that my maternal grandfather did after he met my future father was to apologize — he had been a member of the Hitler Youth, when he was a young boy of 8 or 9.
“Had he been 20, or even 15, it might have been an issue for me,” my father recalled.
It didn’t take long for my father to overcome the antagonism towards Germany he had grown up with. “Any inhibitions I might have had about moving to Germany were overcome, overwritten, by the strength of the relationship,” he said, likening himself and my mother to Romeo and Juliet. “Two people from different sides of the tracks meet and they want to be in a relationship, they know that the relationship will cause severe strife because their families were at war with each other,” he said.
Though luckily that was not the case for my family, my father’s father, who had been a teenager during World War II, still felt a very strong antipathy toward Germany and refused to attend my parents’ wedding in Germany. “The fact that Dagmar wasn’t Jewish didn’t particularly concern him,” my father recalled, “but what he didn’t want to do was set foot on German soil.”
My mother said she felt “hurt on a personal level” by my grandfather’s decision, but she “accepted and understood it.”
My parents ended up having two weddings — a Jewish ceremony in New York and a Catholic ceremony in Germany. My mother’s father attended my parents’ wedding in New York and he and my Jewish grandmother ended up sparking an unlikely friendship, despite the barriers of language and history.
Questions that have no answers
For my father, the decision to move to Germany and marry a German woman was not difficult. My relationship with Germany has been more complicated. After that life-changing experience at the Holocaust Museum, I didn’t want to be German. I never wanted to return to Germany; for a split second, the thought of not wanting to talk to my mother again even crossed my mind.
When I was 14, my father took me to Auschwitz. My feelings toward Germany only intensified. I distinctly remember the feeling of utter disbelief. I couldn’t understand that this horrific place, a place that is the epitome of human cruelty and evil, was indeed a real place. 11 years later, I still cannot fully grasp that 80 years ago, the country I grew up in orchestrated such evil.
Now, where did all of this leave me? Looking back on it now, I see my development into the person I am today has been marred by a desperate journey of trying to figure out: Who am I, and what is my identity?
Were my mother and her family responsible for the Holocaust? No, my mother is not personally responsible. But, collectively, every German will always bear responsibility. Responsibility for the past and for the future. Does that include me? Yes, it does. But I am also Jewish and have a distant family that was murdered in the Holocaust. Am I responsible for the murder of my family? These are questions that I still ask myself every single day. Questions I still have not found satisfactory answers to and probably never will.
To make my yearning for an identity even more convoluted, I am half American, a quarter German, and a quarter Croatian. I grew up in Germany, but I was never accepted by my German friends as “German,” and I never particularly identified myself with German culture.
My mother was never big on German traditions and because her own mother was an immigrant from Croatia, she didn’t identify as fully German either. Most Germans couldn’t really understand what exactly I was, and treated me like I was an immigrant. Frankfurt, the city I grew up in, is incredibly international and I attended international schools all my life and most of my friends were not German.
Nevertheless, when interacting with Americans, I was “the German” and I often felt questioned about my American identity. At the age of 12, I attended summer camp in Maine for four weeks. I was the only one who didn’t know the American national anthem and couldn’t sing along. It was embarrassing and alienating. I couldn’t identify with the other kids and didn’t understand many cultural references and behaviors. The kids made fun of me, because even though I spoke fluent English, I had a slight accent from time to time. To them, I was the weird German kid.
Growing up, I was never part of any sort of larger community. While my friends were preparing for their b’nai mitzvah or communions, my parents taught me about the differences between Judaism and Christianity, but always from a historical and theoretical perspective.
My parents had decided early on that my older brother and I would be brought up without any religious foundation.
“We felt it was important for you to come to your own conclusions about which religious beliefs you wish to have or didn’t have,” my father said. “We were surrounded by people who were raising their children with a particular religious foundation, and were not interested in that in any manner.”
“We didn’t think we were authentic enough in our belief in God and the foundation of what it means to be religious,” he said. “We didn’t want to impose on you, but we still wanted to acquaint you with both religions so that you could find your own way once you were grown up.”
My mother, who had lived her life as an atheist and renounced the Catholic Church as soon as she turned 18, is a very passionate feminist, and I believe a lot of the decisions she makes in life are heavily based on feminist ideals. “All monotheistic religions are very misogynistic and oppressive of women,” she said to me. “That was never really attractive to me.”
My father identified with Jewish culture and traditions, but never the religion. That sentiment grew even stronger after the death of his mother — my grandmother — in 2022. “I keep coming back to the same rational thinking about my mother’s death,” my father said. “My mom died one month short of 90, when she was very ill and her body had given out. I don’t need religion to come to that conclusion or to feel less sad about my mother.”
As a result, my brother and I were never given a framework for explaining the world or answering the fundamental questions about life and death. I was never given any tools to explain the horrors that sometimes accompany life on earth. Christmas was just a family gathering involving a tree, presents, and many decorations. Hanukkah was lighting candles and eating latkes. Reading the Bible or the Torah was only ever an intellectual pursuit.
I remember longing to be a part of something when I saw how my Jewish friends grew up together; everyone knew one another. They believed in the same things. Shabbat dinner at each other’s houses every Friday. Together. They were all a family. I felt like I was missing out. I still do.
For years, I have held a grudge against my parents for raising me this way.
I became obsessed with learning everything I could about Judaism and my Jewish heritage. I became even more obsessed with learning about the Holocaust and educating everyone around me about antisemitism.
In some way, I think I was trying to make up for the fact that I had German blood, that I had grown up in Germany; I always felt like, somehow, I was a betrayal to the Jewish people, that I was a traitor.
Christianity had never interested me, and my parents supported my journey of connecting with my Jewish heritage because they knew that it was a choice I was making for myself and not one they were making for me.
“I had no misgivings or concerns whatsoever; you certainly seem to know what you are doing and why you are doing it,” my father told me. “I was a little surprised at the vigor with which you pursued it and continue to pursue it.”
What I truly believe
My attempt at finding myself inspired my father to reconnect with his own Jewish roots and slowly found him yearning for New York, realizing that it is his home. But it was my mother who started becoming more interested in Jewish culture, traditions, and the perseverance of the Jewish people.
While my mother always knew that she had distant Jewish relatives, a couple of years ago she traveled to Vienna to find out more about her mother’s side of the family. By going through old documents and records she found evidence that, in the 19th century, her mother’s ancestors were Jews living in the Habsburg Empire who were forced to convert.
My parents’ perspective on religion has never wavered. However, their appreciation and longing for the cultural and traditional aspect of the Jewish religion intensified.
Seeing heavy police presence in front of Jewish institutions is nothing new in Germany. However, after Oct. 7, the police presence became much more visible. Police officers with heavy machine guns patrolled the local synagogue and Chabad center day and night. After a rally for Israel, which was heavily guarded by police, the police made an announcement that we should hide all Israeli flags on our way home.
While I was extremely scared, the anger I felt was stronger. I decided that hiding my Jewishness and support for Israel would be the last thing I do. Even if it did put me in danger.
While it may have made life more complicated, I am thankful that my parents left it up to me to find out what I truly believe in and what I want to be a part of. It didn’t take long for me to start going to synagogue and Shabbat dinner with friends every Friday. While I still felt and probably will always feel like I don’t truly belong, I feel Jewish, and I know in my heart I am.
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