A Personal Message to Us All in the LGBTQ+ Community: You’re Strong Enough

An inspiring story about my grandfather escaping the Nazis

Clara Dolderman’s grandparents, in approximately 1940.

Life is hard, sometimes especially, and for some people, in certain circumstances even more especially.

For LGBTQ+ people (and everyone else who finds themselves on the outside of some majority or normatively-held view), there’s no denying that life can be hard. It can feel like there’s no place for you, no end to the problems and challenges, and even when you find acceptance or peace of mind, it’s tenuous. You never know what even the very next social interaction will bring, and too often, it’s something-not-good.

Many times, in my life, I have felt like giving up. A couple of times I have withdrawn from life to a dangerous degree, once for several years. And yes, a few times I have stood on that precipice. Literally.

But here I am.

I’d like to tell you where I have found strength, even and especially when I was at the end of my rope and all my resources had been exhausted. Yes, it has happened. And it sucked. And yes, I did make it through.

The reasons why are universal. They are every person’s ancestral legacy. Even though your own sources of strength will differ in the details, you have them. Everyone does.

So let me tell you a story….

World War 2

My grandparents (on my father’s side) lived in Holland during World War 2. My grandfather was a member of the Dutch resistance movement. He was incarcerated twice in Nazi work/concentration camps. However, as a highly skilled machinist, he was useful to the Nazi military, and this fact allowed him to survive. He could fix pretty much anything, so while imprisoned, he was put to work fixing military equipment for the Nazi army.

After the war, he never talked about the feelings he must have had, the dissonance he experienced working on the very equipment, for the very army that was occupying his homeland and murdering his people. Of course, he had to or he would simply have been killed. It’s a horrible choice to have to make.

There were a lot of things he never talked about. But occasionally, he did talk about the opportunities he had to sabotage equipment with fake fixes that would last only long enough to get to the battlefield before breaking down. In conjunction with other resistance members, he was responsible for the breakdown of countless pieces of military equipment as well as farming and food transport equipment, making it more difficult for the Nazis to fight, to feed themselves, and to keep their supply chains going. In every way he was able, he threw sand into the Nazi gears.

Both prisons, he managed to escape. No doubt he worried how his disappearance, or any investigations into it, might have affected his wife, my grandmother, who was at home with her infant son (my Uncle Joe), as well as six Nazi soldiers who lived in their house. She survived by being their slave.

But there was no way, for a long time, that he could know how she was, except to know she was living in hell. Even after the war, my grandmother never talked about what life was like in that house during those years of occuption. Never, not once.

After my grandfather’s second escape, he was a fugitive, hiding in culverts and ditches during the day, and walking during the night across the countryside, from Belgium back to Holland, staying off roads as much as possible. He staved off starvation with whatever he could scavenge from garbage cans, eating weeds, or…well, we never knew how he survived. But he did.

After his several month journey back to his hometown, my grandfather made it to a cousin’s farm on the outskirts, and they constructed a little shelter for him to stay in, inside a large haystack. Remarkably, he lived in that haystack for about a year.

Sometimes, he was able to come out while the children of the family spent their time in trees on the edge of the property, watching for the tell-tale signs of dust that indicated that soldiers were coming to inspect the farm. When that happened, they would jump onto their bicycles, riding back to the farmhouse as fast as they could, yelling that the soldiers were coming. Whereupon my grandfather would burrow back into his little cave in the middle of the haystack, praying not to be discovered.

Meanwhile, my grandma, serving her soldier-masters at home, while caring for her infant son and trying to keep her sanity, underwent intense questioning, and on at least one occasion, torture. My grandfather was a wanted criminal in the eyes of the Nazis, and they wanted to find him. She only spoke of her torture experience once. It was like she wanted the details to not be forgotten, but also didn’t want to re-live what she went through.

I have often thought of how, if my grandmother had broken, if, under torture, she had told them her husband was in a haystack a few kilometres away, he would never have survived. My father would never have been born. I would never have existed.

My entire existence is possible because of the unimaginable strength, ingenuity, courage, and love, of my grandmother, my grandfather, and their families. They risked everything to hide my grandfather, and to smuggle bread and other food to my frequently-starving grandmother. And yes, she went through torture. And never broke.

Your existential inheritance

All of us have ancestors who, at one time or another, survived the most terrible conditions, the most horrendous violence, suffering that pushed them to the brink of human endurance.

But they endured. And we know that, because we are here, enjoying the gift of Life. Their legacy is every breath we take.

Whether these are blood-relations or not, doesn’t matter. Maybe it was friends of your family, people in the community, heroes during a war, the kind neighbour who stepped in and took care of an abandoned child, the kind family who opened their doors to someone who had nowhere else to go. We all are the end-point (thus far), of a near-endless stream of people whose existence gave rise, one way or another, to our own.

And they suffered. That’s one thing extraordinarily clear about history — things have never been easy. Not for most people, and not for very long. Humanity’s survival is a story of suffering, strength, courage, ingenuity, and love.

So when the evils of the world gang up on you, and they likely will, when you find yourself crushed by tragedy, trauma, discrimination, other people’s hate, or even the accumulated mass of your own mistakes and wasted time, I encourage you — find your own family’s and community’s haystack stories. They exist, in your background, somewhere. Learn them. Those stories are you.

And you can ALWAYS take steps to improve your circumstances, to change the outcomes of your life, to make things better for yourself and others. Always.

I know it doesn’t always feel that way. Sometimes change seems impossible. Not only in the world, but even in your own personal life. Your belief that You Can Do It can get overwhelmed by your shame, exhaustion, the constant grind of struggle, or the deep hole you’ve dug for yourself. The problems facing you pile up higher and higher, until you can’t see past them anymore, and you sink into regret, and worse, resentment.

Other people’s betrayal and abandonment hold you back. Your lack of confidence holds you back. Poor habits hold you back. Life crises hold you back. Health problems hold you back. $$$ problems hold you back. Addictions hold you back. Loneliness, depression, and regret hold you back.

All of these challenges are very real. You don’t overcome them through wishful thinking.

But you CAN overcome them. Even when, sometimes, it seems there’s no way out except — “out” — completely out. Standing on the precipice kind of out.

If there’s one single thing I would like to leave to humanity, it’s the guarantee that each person, including you, is strong enough, strong enough to persevere, to get back up again, to reach out again, to trust yourself again, and always, to try again.

And we, as a community? Hell yes the LGBTQ+ family is strong enough! The people who resist, who stand up against hate, who speak out, who dare to be themselves — we are all strong enough.

And you. For sure, you are strong enough. Your ancestors made sure of that.