Nina Wolff (ninawolff.com) had more than the usual number of unanswered questions during her childhood. She grew up wondering why her family spent so much time in Europe, always bringing the children, yet never maintained a second home there. She wondered, too, why on Sundays at home in New York City, her parents took her to see grownup films such as The Odessa File and Mr. Klein. And why did her grandparents live the rest of their long lives in a hotel in New York instead of buying a new home? The answer she heard most often was: “Someday you will understand.”
What initially opens Wolff's eyes to the secrets of the past are the contents of a green metal box her father, Walter C. Wolff, owner of the Bon Marché furniture shops, casually hands to her in 2006 when he discovers he is dying. The box contains over 700 letters, drawings, and photographs dated from 1943 through 1946. She had never known anything about them. Written by her father primarily in French, the letters describe his adventures before, during, and after the war. Wolff becomes obsessed with reading and translating the letters and begins doing research on the Second World War. Ultimately she orchestrates the personal and outside sources into a riveting nonfiction narrative, “Someday You Will Understand: My Father's Private World War II”.
Much of what she reads and translates provides keys to her own life and history, but she is caught off guard by many of the revelations about her father and others. Wolff's project is colored by the bittersweet realization that her father's last gift comes too late for them to discuss his revelations—or for her other questions, which increase exponentially while she is reading the letters. As she breaks through the wall of silence that had always stood between her father and herself, Wolff rises to the challenge of filling in many of the gaps without her father's help to guide her.She remembers that she was a married woman about to have her first child in 1998 when she first learned about her father's teenage experiences on the run—indirectly, from his ninety-minute videotaped session for Steven Spielberg's Shoah Foundation. Her father characteristically chuckled throughout the interview and afterward did not want to speak further about it. Nina begins to wonder how much lay beneath the surface. She first starts to grasp the depth of his scars after hearing his response to 9/11. Five tumultuous years will pass before she learns about the 1940s letters and wartime memorabilia.
In “Someday You Will Understand”: My Father's Private World War II Nina Wolff Wolff distills the harrowing, hilarious, and inspiring details of civilian and military life on both sides of the Atlantic. The vignettes, conversations, political reflections, humorous episodes, and vividly drawn people throughout the book are unforgettable. In the process of putting all this together and expanding the borders, tracing her family's suspenseful tale through 2011, Wolff also creates a memorable double portrait of father and daughter—both brilliant polyglots, both urbane world travelers--and undergoes dramatic transformations as a woman and as an artist in her own right.
Her story highlights her father's flight from the Nazis through Europe with his family when he was fifteen, his arrival in the United States in 1941, and his sojourn as a refugee student in New York's Dwight School before his basic training in the U.S. Army. She reports on her father's basic training during the war, the pleasurable, sometimes even lavish evenings after-hours for the victorious troops in postwar Europe, little- known aspects of life behind an intelligence officer's desk—and her father's sometimes divided loyalties. At barely twenty years old he was tasked with reading and classifying Mussolini’s documents and translating one part of the orders of the Allied Forces to the Nazis in northern Italy for their unconditional surrender. Having reversed his role as a young Jew on the run in Europe to occupy a position of authority in the U.S Army Intelligence Corps, he went from being persecuted by his oppressors to prosecuting them. With his fluency in five languages, his job was to interrogate German POWs and separate average German combat troops from the Nazi war criminals, many of whom went on to be prosecuted at Nuremberg.
In Europe, Wolff travels from the boot of Italy, north to Germany where like a Jewish John Wayne, his gun at the ready and his holster frequently adorned with a yellow star, he reclaims the family’s ancestral home in Landau from its illegal occupiers. Then onto Austria where he visits the notorious Ebensee camp and writes home on the infamous red bordered Nazi stationery; back to France, and finally to Belgium for an emotional return to his childhood home in Brussels, where the Wolff family had begun their escape just four days before Hitler rained bombs on Brussels in May1940. Yet, despite the Allied triumph and her father's more enjoyable experiences, Wolff finds ample illustration of what it takes to recover from a childhood disrupted by war. She is moved, too, when she discovers her father's involvement in helping the displaced survivors, DPs, and his disillusionment with the many ineffectual postwar efforts and political stances.
Artist and writer Nina Wolff, grew up in New York City and, like her father, has traveled extensively across the United States and throughout Europe. Youthful, energetic, and passionate, Ms. Wolff is a knowledgeable historian of World War II and several generations of her family. Educated from childhood at the Lycée Français de New York, she received a B.S. in Fine Art from Skidmore College in 1984 and a Bachelor of Architecture from the Pratt Institute School of Architecture in 1988. During the 1980s her paintings became part of the East Village and Soho art scene and have been privately collected.
She speaks French, Italian, Spanish, and English fluently.
Walter Wolff founded Bon Marché furniture stores in New York. The monumental project she took on—translating seven hundred letters from French to English, and the archive—became a galvanizing experience for Ms. Wolff and her family. With her retelling of her father's remarkable journey, his story takes on even larger, more dramatic significance on a world stage. Her own life, too, comes into sharper focus and changes in unexpected, even astonishing ways as the project takes her up and down the East Coast speaking to groups of all ages and ethnic backgrounds about the perennial importance of keeping history alive and the new lexicon of hate and current surge in anti-Semitism.
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