Lily, Oh Lily: Searching for a Nazi Ghost
by Jeffrey Paparoa Holman

The spectre of Nazism looms large in Lily, Oh Lily, poet Jeffrey Paparoa Holman’s fourth work of non-fiction and his attempt to understand the postwar world of his childhood. Holman – born in London in 1947, his family immigrants to New Zealand in 1950 – returns to family history as his subject: his previous work, The Lost Pilot, examined his father’s role in World War II and a connection to the Japanese.

In Lily, Holman seeks to reconcile family rumours and secrets about a Nazi aunt with facts, hoping to erase his ‘deep-seated, baby-boomer conditioning towards former enemies’ – and perhaps to ‘explain Germania’s presence from the shreds of evidence that written and spoken memories have left to me.’

Piecing together these shreds of family stories, both told and untold, with administrative records, old address books, death certificates, flags stolen from embassies, and myriad other tiny clues, Holman presents what Patrick Evans describes in the foreword as a ‘kind of confrontation with the nagging of our inherited silences, which meticulously places the author in the larger flows of history.’ Holman sometimes doubts that his research on these mysterious family members will lead to more answers than questions – do ‘they come closer? Or remain out of reach?’ – which draws readers in all the more closely.

Holman’s compulsive and moving hunt begins with a story told by his grandmother. Lily issued a ‘statement my grandmother never forgot, nor forgave, remembered perhaps in bitter hindsight in the light of what was to come’. Hitler, Lily told her grieving sister, ‘is a great man, Eunice. He is doing wonderful things for the German people.’ Holman’s grandmother died when he was in his late teens, so this story lay mostly forgotten until the late eighties, when Holman worked in a bookshop back in England. He came across a book about one of his great-uncles, Hector, and contacted the author, beginning his tentative investigations of the past:

History is never boring: it never truly dies but hides in the darkest places and dares us to come looking. In every crowd, in every picture we see of lost times and forgotten humans, there is always a witness; always there is an individual, a relative, a stranger looking back at us viewers, asking a question that can feel like this: ‘Were you here with me, where would you stand, what would you do, if you knew in your heart of hearts that you could not agree with this mob?’

And so we join Holman and his ancestors on this adventure of ‘wild goose chases and dead ends’, starting with his great-great-grandfather, a Welsh man who somehow fought in the American Civil War. Through his hard-won citizenship, he initiated a connection with the USA that would be exploited by generations to come – Jeffrey’s peripatetic great-uncles forge documents to get jobs at the American Embassy in Dresden, Jeffrey’s grandmother is shipped off to New Jersey to have a scandalous baby. These brothers with falsified documents, who speak multiple languages and never quite commit to their affiliations, may have made more interesting subjects than Lily herself, but Holman is committed.

His dedication is impressive, and we feel his satisfaction when ‘more and more stitches were appearing in the weaving of this tapestry’, just as we feel his frustration with the number of missing pieces. However, this isn’t just a story about Lily and a gripping family history – it is also Holman’s poetic examination of the process of uncovering such a story:

It goes to prove how dangerous an occupation it is to embark on a family history. One wonders about the masochism inherent in the modern hordes of genealogists who, like me, set out to uncover honour and greatness, perhaps; more often than not, coming up for air with proof of their opposites: cruelty, selfishness, all of life’s shadows. Genealogy is dangerous: our dead buried like countless unexploded shells lying, waiting, in the fields of France and Belgium, rusting away, exploding when some careless plough, in the oncoming years, strikes munitions fired long ago.

The momentum of the story stutters about halfway through, when Holman receives a scholarship to study German in Berlin for a few months as his only way to finance any kind of local research about Lily. He advises that these passages are adapted from a blog he was writing at the time, and we lose Lily’s trail in a blur of German grammar, Holocaust memorials and comparisons with the immigrant experience. Holman does try to connect this part back to Lily, asking, perhaps too often, ‘What was it like for Lily Hasenburg, Eunice’s sister, to go through this war as an alien citizen?’ He is clumsy in comparing her lack of German with his ‘own trials as a language learner’; the comparison with ‘Indian dairy owners who came to New Zealand to find a better life, many with very little English when they arrived’ and the Turkish community in Germany who have ‘learned the host language’ and have ‘worked hard and prospered’ seems forced.

In Holman’s examination of Lily, he seeks not to accuse or vilify her, but to observe and understand her. No matter their allegiances, anyone living in Europe at the same time as Lily, anyone who ‘never quite belonged’, experienced and was influenced by a period of history that must never be forgotten. Holman deftly places himself into history as a witness to all this:

In every crowd, in every picture we see of lost times and forgotten humans, there is always a witness; always there is an individual, a relative, a stranger looking back at us viewers, asking a question that can feel like this: ‘Were you here with me, where would you stand, what would you do, if you knew in your heart of hearts that you could not agree with this mob?’

He is, after all, a child of his time and place. ‘If these journeys do nothing else,’ he writes, ‘they will unearth a wider sense of belonging to the world the English boy within me needed’. At times he is perhaps too ingenuous, seeing Berlin as representative of all Germany, and declaring ‘We have much to learn from the German experience, in a journey of repentance, redress and reconciliation.’ This may have been easier to say in 2014 than in the political climate of ten years later; it’s also hard to state, with the rise of the AfD, that ‘Germans now possess a healthy fear of ideologues’. His comment on ‘the present Islamophobia in certain German cities in the former East’ is an understatement: it has become glaringly obvious in the past year that Islamophobia is baked into every level of German life, including the police and the current centre-left ruling coalition.

Holman asks us to interrogate ourselves alongside our ancestors, for our attraction to the past is no mystery: we are these people, we live in the same world, however different it may look now. His love for his family, for New Zealand, for history, for learning, radiates off the page and turn what could have been a macabre tale of a family ghost into a remarkable quest towards empathy.

Serendipity shook hands with the surreal: I felt once more that the story was as much in the process, the search, as in any result, if there were to be one. Writing memoir and history, we are prey to something novelists need not consider: the inadvisability of stepping away from known facts, into wishful thought.

.
We may be in search of the dead, but it is the living discovered along the way who will prove just as interesting.