SAN DIEGO(special)--Ernestine Schlant, a professor of German literature at Montclair State University in New Jersey and wife of Democratic presidential candidate Bill Bradley, has ambivalent feelings about her parents who raised her in nazi Germany.

"I wish they had been in the Resistance, but they weren't," she said. "At the same time neither of them was a member of the nazi party. Now that may not mean a lot to some people either, but that is what I can say." Schlant, in a brief interview Nov. 16 prior to her speech at the Lawrence Family JCC's Jewish Book Fair, said she was born in 1935, and had not yet turned 10 years old when nazi Germany was defeated in World War II. Afterwards, she asked her parents about their roles during the time of the nazis. "You know, of course, in my generation whatever they say is almost

ERNESTINE SCHLANT

discounted because they weren't in the Resistance," Schlant said.

"My mother, I know, she had problems because she was speaking out against the nazi regime," Schlant said.

"My mother did say, ja, one time she was in a movie with a friend and made comments about Hitler and was denounced by the people sitting behind her...If she hadn't been pregnant she would have gone to jail."

Schlant added that the incident "is not exculpation of any sort.

"You know that she actually lived during those years and was not a member of the Resistance so, you know, I guess all you can do is live with it," she said.

Her father served in the Luftwaffe, the German air force. "My father would say whenever he came home on furlough because he was in the military, he would get special ration cards and he remembered how he would give them to people who wore the Yellow Star, who didn't get enough food," Schlant said.

"But even that -- so what are individual acts of kindness compared to that major, major catastrophe? So that, it's very hard because you don't want to be hard on your parents, but what can you say?"

For her own part, Schlant said she was too young to understand what was happening in her country. Children were not enrolled in the Hitler Youth until age 10, and by the time she got to that age the war was over.

"When I was seven, eight and nine years old, the fact that there was a war was almost a given," she said. "That was the reality we grew up with. You didn't question it or doubt it, particularly since none of the adults verbally could oppose it because, as happened with my mother, the minute you opened your mouth, you were gone."

During the war, her family lived in Pasau -- on what is now the German Austrian border, but which then was in the midst of two countries that had unified under German-sponsored Anshluss.

A city of about 100,000, Pasau had no Jews during the war year, according to Schlant. At least in earshot of Schlant, who was then a child, Jews were never discussed.

"So I think, it was, later on only that the word 'Jew' even became a word, and then a concept ..." she said. "But when I grew up, there were no men; the women were working, the children, you know, roamed the city totally unsupervised. So there wasn't even the contact with grown-ups who would talk about Jews. ..."

In the first decade after World War II, Schlant said, Germans did not talk about the war -- a fact that was the subject of a portion of her book, The Language of Silence: West German Literature and the Holocaust . She spoke that book at the JCC.

Schlant said she personally did not know details of the Holocaust until after she came to the United States as a Pan American flight attendant in 1957 and enrolled as a student at Emory University in Atlanta, Ga.

"I had teachers who were refugees from nazi Germany and they were the ones -- this is incredible -- they were Jews who were as kind in making me aware as could be," Schlant said. 

"There wasn't any iota of hatred or anything ... They were the people who were clearly refugees and some of them lost their families in the Holocaust. And there they were kind and gentle and ... almost like midwives in my realization of what happened."

Schlant said she is not certain, but she believes that Walter Strauss, who was her undergraduate and graduate studies advisor at Emory was the first Jew she ever met.

"I grew up without any Jews around and nobody talked about them," she reiterated. "And then after the war, I don't know, in the late '40's and the early '50's still there were no Jews. What you had, and now I understand it was a euphemism...were 'displaced persons'... and they still lived in camps because they were coming from the east. ...That among those were the Jews, no, nobody talked about that."

Schlant agreed with an interviewer's suggestion that like many Germans who were children during the nazi era, as well as those who were born after the war, she struggles with the legacy left by her parents' generation.

She said she pondered for years what unvoiced thoughts Germans must have had about their role in the Holocaust, and then spent 10 more years writing her book. 

"At that time I wasn't that clear about it, but in retrospect, yes, this book is my attempt to -- I don't know what the word is 'work it through?'; 'come to terms?'; 'try to figure it out?'; 'try to see how it happened?' ... but yes, I am sure I would not have written the book if I had just been a scholar of German literature in this country."

In suggesting that Germans employed the language of silence, Schlant said she does not mean to suggest that as the years went by the Holocaust was not spoken about. Germany paid reparations to Israel; German politicians would discuss this. "But what I am saying is that literature talks about the deeper values, not just the politically expedient things. In the deeper levels, there was no mourning," nothing to show that the Holocaust affected people at their deepest level of consciousness.

Only recently, she said, in the fourth generation of Germans to write since the end of the nazi period, are novels beginning to deeply reflect on the Holocaust and "mourn the loss of a culture, a tradition, of individual lives, of families." 

This generation of writers includes former students who traveled to Israel to perform "acts of reconciliation" and who, in Europe, "are excavating former concentration camps to reinstitute them as concentration camp memorials," Schlant said.

In her study of the literature produced by the three previous generations of German writers, she found a variety of "silences" in dealing with the issue of the Holocaust.

Immediately after the war, short story writers like Heinrich Boll produced tales like "Across the Bridge" in which a war veteran remembers all the times he had to carry materials across the bridge: "I don't really know what was in those folders I carried; I was a messenger; I wasn't supposed to ask; I was only supposed to execute orders," Schlant paraphrased. "And then he says 'the only thing I remember was the color of the folders, and the color was yellow.'"

Yellow was code for Jewish because of the yellow stars that Jews were forced by the nazis to sew onto their clothing. "If you don't understand the context the fact that the folders were yellow means nothing," Schlant instructed an audience of 300 at the JCC. 

"This desire to say 'I didn't do anything, and I didn't know what I was doing; I only carried these folders' becomes like a confession in disguise." This, she added, "is one of the most explicit examples of silence."

The next generation of writers witnessed Israel's televised trial of Holocaust architect Adolph Eichmann as well as various war-related trials in Germany. From this came what Schlant called "documentary" literature: in which words of the trials -- words like "witness," "perpetrator," "victim," "judge" -- were ultized and the testimony of witnesses recounted. 

But in documenting the accounts of victims and perpetrators, the novelists avoided their own feelings, in Schlant's view. 

Another type of literature from this generation, she said, was that which sought to spread the blame -- books and play that pointed out that "it wasn't only the Germans; it was also others who helped to perpetrate the Holocaust." Among these works was The Deputy, which dissected the role of the Catholic Church during the Holocaust.

"I don't deny the collaborators, but my focus is not on them," Schlant said about her book.

In the third generation --that of the 1970's -- the children of those who lived through World War II embarked upon a "search for self-identification and identity," Schlant said. The children began by looking at their parents, and what their roles had been during the Holocaust. From such research came a range of reactions ranging from "orgies of hatred for their fathers to very reflective attempts to really understand why the parents did what they did."

Having lived as a child in nazi Germany, having studied post-nazi era German literature, and now as a woman who is potentially the next First Lady of the United States (and the only one in history born to two foreign parents), Schlant was asked what, above all, would she urge her husband to do or not to do to make sure a Holocaust never happened again.

"Well, first of all I would say that with Bill you don't need to tell him," Schlant said. "You know, he knows. Not only does he know because he is the best of what America has -- appreciating freedom and all of those things -- but also because he has gone with me -- we have been married for 25 years -- so he has seen me working through that whole past and through that whole legacy at great emotional investment to say the least." 

She noted that while Bradley was a United States Senator from New Jersey -- a state with a heavy Jewish population -- that he enjoyed good relations with the Jewish community. As for herself, she added: "I shouldn't say that really because I don't want to jinx it but I have only met kindness and if anybody is protective of me, it is the Jews."