A vist to the F's (LF2021).

Now back in 1989, my German grandparents went to go visit the F's.

I was maybe about 10, but I was immediately close to Mrs. F.

They lived along Hout Bay, one of the most scenic suburbs in the Cape.

Both their sons were in the army, which is where I was headed, although nobody recognized it at the time.

And the poodle wanted to bite me, and then she showed us a round rock with a hole in it.

Where did you find that?

That's a Khoisan digging-stick weight, we found it in the "cave".

So I went into the "cave".

Just a hole in their backyard, with some cigarette packs and bottles strewn around.

Next thing the entire entourage comes to the cave.

"Peter ... come out now".

More sternly, Mr. F: "You come out of that cave now boy, you hear"!

And on the car ride home granny says: "Such nice people, and to think, they gassed her entire family".

And I was thinking, the leaves are changing color.

Is this more of a true story or is it a fictional mash-up?

Got to say that this threw me for a bit of loop: "Such nice people, and to think, they gassed her entire family".

That was totally unexpected!


Good Luck in the Contest,
Johnny

Change some words, it's 99 percent true.

Oh at that time (1980's) there were still many holocaust survivors in SA.

We saw each other two more times.
And Mrs. F (Ok Feits, or Feitz) became more and more obsessive with my He-Man figurines.

Last time I saw her she said, give Peter R10.
He must buy himself another action figure.

And that was goodbye.

a reply to: halfoldman

Your story chilled me to the bone. So casual how people talk about things in the past in which others were marginalized and also killed. It's really a very good work, I must tell you that. Your style is so visceral (something I've observed before) that I am forever hesitant to plunge into one of your stories again, and yet I know I will. I can't not look.

I just asked mom about this again, and the surname was "V....", although the "h" wasn't pronounced, perhaps from Yiddish (ironically, basically a dialect of German, which the couple both spoke fluently).

Both them and my German grandparents were already pensioners at the time, so they're all deceased now.

It's too long here to go into what people did during World War II, except to say we were immigrants from the Saarland (itself a constant historical football between Prussia, Germany and France), and my parents came to South Africa around 1981. My German grandparents (although my other grandma was actually French) suffered immensely during the war, and my grandpa was a Russian prisoner for 5 years after the war ended. They claimed they never knew any Jewish people before or after the war, and in that part of Germany the Jews were less than one percent of the population. When the war started, my grandpa was a mine foreman who had already done his national service, and his position should have been secure, since miners were exempt from conscription as crucial to the war effort. But then the Nazis wanted him to go to Dachau to write a report on how well the Russian prisoners were treated. His report was too honest and damning however, and the Nazis sent him straight to the Russian front as an ambulance driver as a punishment for disloyalty.

The F's (or V's, as it turns out) fled to SA just before the war and the holocaust.
Obviously their families, as most European Jewry, did not survive.

So, I thought about that encounter very often, because here we have this encounter between two European peoples, both sitting on land expropriated from the indigenous Khoisan people at the tip of Africa.
And mom recalls Mr. F didn't even want to drive a Mercedes, because it was a "German" car!
I don't know what the adults spoke about, but my granny for the first time admitted something about the holocaust (the leaves changing color).
Ooh, don't say that, the weather's going to change!
But some army still wants all our sons, but here the blinkers were still on.
The Angolan War (which lasted 23 years), and then the political violence which followed the Cold War in South Africa until 1994.

They couldn't see the postcolonial issue yet, or their sons still in the army, or issues we have to grapple with today still.
But it was a change, or a start.

A triage of past, present and futurity at the same time.

Perhaps as Mohammed Ali (the boxer) once noted on the Vietnam War: It was the white man sending the black man to fight a war against the yellow man, to defend the land they stole from the red man.

A bit simplistic, but people drinking tea and coolers, while ignoring another reality staring them in the face.

(Not to blame any of these people for the forces and realities of history. They all worked hard and paid for everything they had. They weren't responsible for colonialism or the holocaust, and whether Khoisan descendants are better off now under the ANC than apartheid is a debatable political issue - not for me to say. And I know, Mrs F missed her sons terribly, hence her interest in my action figures. Well, at least the sons I hear are running very successful electronic businesses today.)

Or, when I got into pop music not much later, I often thought to myself.
Here you are now, both coming from pasts of horror, war and oppression.
Glasses of bubbly in hand watching the navy conscripts running along the beach (I still thought, go to the infantry, these elderly ladies are having way too much fun watching the navy dudes being drilled every morning and evening, how embarrassing).
How can you sleep while your beds are burning?



(I know Midnight Oil is an Australian band, but thinking more of how their global hit coincided with my growing conscience and political awareness in the late 1980's.)

Oh, by the way, now mom reminds me, Mrs. F was going blind at the time.

Although she wasn't completely blind yet, she liked to feel things, like the table cloth, or maybe Castle Grayskull.

Yeah now I remember, I once wanted to write to her, and they told me she went totally blind and passed-away a widow in a (good) care home.

But now I remember, she said: "I'll show you my son's collection".
No funny business or anything implied.
And we went round the corner in their house, and she opened a door.
And here was this semi-dark room, one sliver of light through the curtains.
And she went down on her knees, looking at the ray of light.
And there I could see her son's action figure collection.
The way he left it when the army took him.
Although it was more D&D; very different to mine.
Then she explained that she could only see it from a specific angle.

Double post, sorry.