The stories relayed by the Central American refugees Roma interviews in By the Bridge or By the River? are more harrowing than I could have imagined. The language of fear is amplified to those whose ears absorb it when stories are told and then retold when translated. The already-traumatized children who accompanied their mothers to the U.S. must hear again about the violence that led to their departure, because their mothers refuse to allow them out of their sight, having heard about the family separations taking place at these detention centers during that time.
About mid-way through the book, I had to take a break. I got some ice water. Stretched. Then I checked email. At the top of my inbox was a message from Ancestry.com, offering a “helpful hint” from their collection of emigration and immigration records. Though it turned out to be unhelpful, this particular “hint” did bring up the names of relatives on my father’s side, specifically, his maternal grandparents, who immigrated to the United States from Germany in the late 1800s.
Although my maternal great-grandmother died years before I was born, my great-grandfather was a part of my father’s extended household in Fort Wayne, Indiana, where he grew up in the 1930s and 1940s. A “vouched-for German,” as my father described him, my great-grandfather had found work in Fort Wayne as an apprentice for a home equipment company, later becoming a master pattern maker. While his motivation for leaving Germany was never clear to me, I recognize now that there had to be reasons why my great-grandfather felt the desire to leave the country of his birth with his new bride, even well before World War I, to make his way to America.
The story I told myself and the real story my great-grandfather would tell, were he alive to share it, may well be at odds; I never internalized any sense of his situation that might have involved trauma or violence. Instead, I always viewed my great-grandfather’s story as an exciting piece of my own identity, one that involved intriguing connections to cultures and histories other than my own. He was a talented carpenter, good with his hands. He made a life here and people respected him. He was a family man. A hard worker. That is what I could surmise from what I knew of him. The story I created of his identity, based on information that had been passed along to me, was a story not devoid of truth—but not complete, either.
Although I never grew up mindful of violence, genocide, or terror in my family history, that doesn’t mean these things didn’t happen in some ancestral migration chronicled so neatly in my DNA profile; it only means I’m not aware of such events in my personal story, that my choices have not been determined by inherited trauma.
To read the stories Roma shares about the seven women and their families, all from countries known to be among the most violent in the world, was to confront not just the terrifying reality that these women faced in their home countries; it meant I had to confront my own protected status in the world and the vast differences between the lives these women led and my own life, along with the safety and privilege I often take for granted.
As Albert Schweitzer famously said, “The world will not be destroyed by those who do evil, but by those who watch them without doing anything.” Roma’s book calls me to consider what I’ve seen but not fully seen, or can never completely see, and how I might open my eyes a little wider.