Rachel Stahr
Bozrah, CT
This is my heritage. My maternal grandfather and father are both Pennsylvania Dutch, but my great-grandmother is where things get interesting. Her family emigrated from Russia and was Jewish. She studied German and later moved there. She married a man who I’ve been told was in the S.S. Before things got too dangerous, she moved back to the US with her two daughters. This is what I grew up knowing. In the early 90s, I felt I had to hide the fact that I was of German descent because all the school children around me meant that meant I was a Nazi-and of course it didn’t. In high school, I adopted this phrase to describe my heritage. I don’t use it unless I can then explain it, but it how my family was shaped.
