JTA — Charlie Scheidt and Kat Rohrer met from opposite sides of the 20th-century moral universe: Scheidt is the only child of German Jewish refugees, raised in New York in a family haunted by what came “before”; Rohrer is the granddaughter of a committed Nazi soldier, raised in Austria amid an atmosphere of denial, silence and only partial reckoning.

And yet together, they have written a book about Scheidt’s family’s harrowing escape during the Holocaust.

“Inheritance: Love, Loss and the Legacy of the Holocaust” is based on family letters, archival research and visits to sites in Europe where Scheidt’s family lived and from which they fled. Although Rohrer’s family’s story is only touched upon in the book, the two spoke about their collaboration during a Zoom event earlier this month hosted by the Olga Lengyel Institute for Holocaust Studies and Human Rights in partnership with the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.

“I grew up in a German Jewish world where the history was unspoken,” Scheidt said during the event. “My first language was German. But we didn’t talk about what happened.”

Rohrer, an Austrian filmmaker whose maternal grandfather volunteered for the Wehrmacht and died fighting in Yugoslavia before her mother was born, describes a parallel silence.

“I grew up knowing he was a convinced Nazi,” she said. “But I never met him. There was distance. And with distance comes questions that others in my family didn’t always want to ask.”

Scheidt took years to begin asking such questions. When his mother died in 1988, she left behind an armoire. Expecting to find drawers stuffed with “junk,” he discovered a buried universe.

Inside were nearly 1,000 documents — letters, fragile airmail pages, official papers written in German, French and Dutch. For years, he couldn’t bring himself to fully enter them. They belonged to another time and another world, and he wasn’t ready to unravel the story of family loss and hardship they might reveal.

“I had a life to lead,” said Scheidt, 82, the chairman emeritus of Roland Foods, an importer of specialty foods. “I had a family to raise. I had a business to run.”

In 2009, Scheidt met Rohrer, 46, whose films include the award-winning documentary “Back to the Fatherland,” about Israelis living in Germany. By that time, Scheidt had begun slowly to piece together the correspondence between his father, Bruno, who had fled Frankfurt in 1933........

© The Times of Israel