How polishing my father's silver became my most meaningful holiday ritual

The Nazis took so much from my family. Somehow, the silver survived.

Spoons.
(Image credit: Ann_Zhuravleva/iStock)

As soon as the leaves begin to flutter and fall, I start my holiday ritual. I fan out forks, knives, and spoons in a shining arc, like soldiers ready for inspection, then hunt for rags and silver polish. No one understands why I bother. Few know that, to me, the dull gleam of my silver represents survival.

The scrolled-edge silver plate, produced in Germany before World War II, has personal provenance. It was collected one piece at a time by my father and his first wife. The young couple added to it while setting up house in Bussum, a small city near Amsterdam, a move that brought them closer to her parents and was better for the children. Faded, black and white photos with crinkled edges show they lived in a small brick house with a yard. From there it was a short walk to the park where the children, a boy and a girl, could feed the ducks. After his job in the bicycle shop, my father wrote children's books, and, since his wife was a bookseller's daughter, she approved. Some day my father would be a famous writer — or so they hoped. They started buying silver when they wed and collected it while contemplating the very real threat of a Nazi invasion. The day the Nazis crossed the Dutch border, two of my father's brothers fled to America, but he could not — would not — leave, without his family. They had no means of escape.

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Joan MacDonald

Joan Vos MacDonald is a journalist and author, who has written about the creative mind, food, history, travel, the Hudson Valley, and Korean pop culture for Mental Floss, Playboy, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Chronogram, and Hudson Valley Magazine.