

Like the time dad shot down the Hitler flag “with the evil spider on it.” Naturally, there also had to be heroes in the Haase-Bussmann tribe. Every night before going to bed, our dedicated - and tired - parents would read my brother and me a bedtime story or tell us of a childhood prank they pulled. My parents had to swear to me that there were no Nazis in our family. I started my ancestry research even then. How could people do this to other people? Why did no one shed a tear or even apologize? How could people just go on living as if nothing had happened? How could people become such monsters? Six million Jews murdered at Auschwitz, Bergen Belsen, Treblinka, Dachau … Black and white images of starving human beings, looking at me with sad eyes from behind barbed wire fences. Instead, I learned about the unimaginable. It was the late 1960s and I was waiting for Star Trek to come on. I first learned about the Holocaust through a documentary on German TV.

I was born in Hamburg, Germany, in 1961, at a time when people were more busy with re-building their lives than confronting the past. The irony is that I spent much of my life running away from my German heritage. Might that be the mysterious father of my grandfather? I called back and asked, “Are these really my genes?” The answer, “Yes.” The 13 percent British came as a real surprise. Instead of being of mainly German heritage, I am actually 50 percent Swedish, 24 percent Eastern European, 13 percent British, 5 percent Jewish Diaspora, 4 percent Southern European, and 3 percent Middle Eastern.
#Barney waiting for santa german tv#
When I received the results of my DNA test a couple of years ago, I was surprised, like the actors in the Ancestry TV ads. F or more than three years, I have been researching my family’s history - and I’m still at it.
