Zella and Helga are best friends, middle-aged women, traveling together, talking about children and grandchildren, very normal. But some have difficulty accepting their friendship. Zella Brown is daughter of Holocaust survivors Wolf and Barbara Kaplansky. Seventy five members of her family died… Helga’s father was a Gestapo chief responsible for the deaths of 40,000 people.

I asked my old friend Michael Henderson to send me a true story from his latest book, No Enemy To Conquer: Forgiveness in an Unforgiving World. I had no idea he would have one so central to Tikkun‘s mission. This is a shortened version of the one that appears in the book.

So let’s start again, from the top:

Zella and Helga are best friends, middle-aged women, traveling together, talking about children and grandchildren, very normal. But some have difficulty accepting their friendship.

Zella Brown is daughter of Holocaust survivors Wolf and Barbara Kaplansky. Seventy five members of her family died. Zella grew up listening to her father’s “relentless stories that defy description”. His daily reprimand, “Don’t ever forget what Hitler did to the Jews.”

Jewish children would tell her how lucky she was to have parents who spoke to her about their experiences. At times she wanted to blurt out: “You call this ‘lucky’ when every waking hour you try desperately to erase the image of that yellowed photo of the naked dead bodies piled high like cords of wood. Kikh, dos is vos zey ongemakht tsu di Yidden.”

It took years of therapy, 12-step recovery programs, and Buddhist practice to unburden the load. She and sister Judy joined a survivor group called “One Generation After.” An ad in its newsletter caught their attention: “‘Descendants of Holocaust survivors wanted for meeting with descendants of Nazis.” Her sister responded to the ad.

So in September 1992, Zella found herself sitting with 11 “monsters of my dreams.” Suddenly facing the enemy, she was shocked to find that they, too, suffered from Hitler’s legacy.

Meanwhile Helga Mueller faced a different challenge. She had been born in 1943. Her father had been “a good man,” an ordinary foot soldier of the Reich “who had saved lives.” That was the family lore.

Later in life, dogged by serious problems she went into psychoanalysis. She was haunted by nightmares filled with images of corpses and skeletons, and her therapist asked about her father’s work in World War II. After a laborious search, she discovered he had been in the SS and then that he had been Gestapo chief in White Russia, responsible for the deaths of 40,000 people.

This discovery shattered her. “I sank into a deep hole.” Frightened of death, she locked herself into her room, feeling that descendants of her father’s victims were pursuing her. Her whole life she had feelings of guilt. Now she knew why. After her return to a “more normal” life, she needed to find out how to live with this awareness. “When you get divorced you can get a book on how to do it and when someone dies you can get a book on how to deal with it. But there’s no book to get on how to deal with a father who is a mass murderer.”

By fanatically immersing herself in the Holocaust she felt she was repenting for her father’s guilt. She even went to White Russia, now Belarus. She had a growing desire to meet descendants of the victims. “I hoped they would express their contempt. I wanted to reduce the pain which I as a daughter of this man deserved.”

She found out about a study project whereby children of survivors and of perpetrators would have an opportunity to encounter each other. Asked to be one of the German descendants, she travelled to Boston. As she got ready to encounter her “enemies” she developed an irrational fear.

A voice called out, “Honey can you help me cut some bagels.” An elegant middle-aged woman handed her a plastic knife. “It was my first meeting with a Jew: Zella Brown.” The twenty three participants each told their stories. Helga knew little English and had never heard the word Holocaust before. When her turn came, she was tongue-tied. Zella took her hand and she began.

Zella says, “With fear in her eyes she told us that she hoped she would be safe among us and that she suffered along with us. Bravely she shared how her relentless search for the truth had brought her to this conference. I suddenly felt an opening of my heart which Helga’s display of honesty and raw emotions triggered. I had to tell her, ‘Helga, I’m here to say to Hitler, “You failed. You’re not going to succeed in getting me to hate Helga any more.”‘ In my wildest dreams I could never have anticipated her response, ‘You mean more to me than my mother – and she is still alive – because you said that.’”

Zella told me. “The only word that genuinely describes what transpired is healing. Years of therapy were not able to accomplish what this experience was able to do for me and others.”

Since 1993 hundreds of Jewish and German members of One by One, which they founded, have met annually for retreats to face the legacy they share. They do not equate dialogue with forgiveness or understanding with excusing. As Zella emailed me: “I don’t need to forgive Helga her for something she didn’t commit. It was a dialogue process that brought us to a place of healing, friendship and love.”

They would never compare the suffering of the survivors’ side with that of the perpetrators. But listening to descendants of survivors is an attempt to repair the threads of their common humanity that Nazi Germany sought to break, and the dialogues are held in Germany because it is important to reclaim their right to be there. It gives a chance for many Germans who have never met a Jew to meet one. All suddenly realize that they could easily have experienced what he or she did if they were born in the other’s place.

Helga says that talking about her father’s crimes to those whose families suffered under the Nazis helped her to deal with the guilt she thought she could never escape. Today she is not guilty but would be if she were to push away history. “I will never forget the way my Jewish friend has helped me survive this horror. Discovering my father was a mass murderer has produced so much that is positive in the people I have met.” Zella finds it “especially heart-warming that at least for our families the cycle of hate will end with our children.”