Nevertheless: “She was my grandmother and had always been good to me. Oma is a feisty old woman with, as Lindahl puts it, “convoluted” logic. In what appears to be self-protection, Oma not only insists her husband was simply a farmer in occupied Poland, but she also denies the Holocaust. She visits her grandmother, her Oma, in West Germany. The worst of these was that my nearest had not told the truth about something, the magnitude of which was so great and so serious, that it was hard not to feel the sting of deceit.

She writes:Īs I looked at the story that was forming, it was impossible not to arrive at certain damning conclusions. Opa died when Lindahl was nine years old, but other sources bring to light the splintering history of her grandfather’s life. The Pendulum: A Granddaughter’s Search for her Family’s Forbidden Nazi Past is Lindahl’s memoir of her findings and her search for understanding. She spent years traveling abroad seeking the truth about her mother’s German father, whom she called Opa. That’s exactly what happened to Julie Lindahl, a Brazilian-born American who now lives in Sweden. As Julie delves deeper into the abyss of her family’s secret, discovering history anew, one precarious step at a time, the compassion of strangers is a growing force that transforms her world and the way that she sees her family-and herself.Imagine discovering that the grandparents you adored as a young child were Nazis, and your grandfather was responsible for untold cruelties. The pendulum used by Julie’s grandmother to divine good from bad and true from false becomes a symbol for the elusiveness of truth and morality, but also for the false securities we cling to when we become unmoored from them. During World War II, he was responsible for enslavement and torture, and complicit in murder of the local population on the large estates that he oversaw in occupied Poland, before fleeing to South America to evade a new wave of war-crimes trials. In a remarkable six-year journey through Germany, Poland, Paraguay, and Brazil, Julie uncovers, among many other discoveries, that her grandfather had been a fanatic member of the SS since 1934. Out of the unbearable heart of the story-the unclaimed guilt that devours a family through the generations-emerges an unflinching will to learn the truth. This powerful memoir traces Brazilian-born American Julie Lindahl’s journey to uncover her grandparents’ role in the Third Reich as she is driven to understand how and why they became members of Hitler’s elite, the SS.

The pendulum julie lindahl