Remembering Thanksgivings past
We are who we have been becoming. White Rose friends, what made them who they became?
Every Thanksgiving for as many years as I can remember, we would pack up our car late Wednesday or early Thursday and head for my great-grandmother’s house. My dad would carefully place whatever my mom had baked into the yawning trunk of the old behemoth. My sister and I would settle into the cavernous backseat of our Pontiac, Chevy, or Ford, books in hand for the 150-mile trip to Great-Grandma’s house.
In the earliest years, that was some trip. No Katy Freeway, nothing but a two-lane the whole way. Stopping at every bump in the road was so much fun (not!).
Until close to the end of her life, my great-grandmother lived in a tiny one-bedroom house on land that she had farmed for decades. Over time, one or two of her sons parceled off some of the land to create their own farms, cattle mostly. The government paid them not to plant crops. The USA has always “suffered” from having more food than we need.
This particular great-grandmother of mine – Minnie Lea Kelly Norris – had not grown up with first-world problems. When she was seven, her parents sold her to a wealthy childless family who supposedly wanted children. Turns out they wanted a maid. When she was thirteen, they married her off (likely for dollars). The newlyweds promptly moved to Texas, far away from anyone she might have known.
That husband was a no-good SOB who regularly got drunk and beat her and their nine children. My mother remembers as a small child that mealtimes were scary, because no one knew what could set him off. Once it was a glass of spilled milk.
Minnie Lea was much stronger than most people thought. In the late 1930s, in an era when women did not do such things, she dumped his worthless self. Kicked him out. In her fifties by then, she took over the farmwork and raised the kids, with the help of the older children. When we’d go to her house for Thanksgiving, she would “let” us help with chores, things like feeding the horses, doing the laundry in the wringer washer on her screened-in front porch, cleaning the outhouse (till the late 1970s!), picking corn, snapping beans. Everything but cleaning the outhouse was fun.
Most of her nine children and their families stayed close to the old homestead. Thanksgiving therefore was a rowdy affair. I was my parents’ oldest child, and oldest grandchild of both sets of grandparents, and oldest great-grandchild for all great-grandparents (read, spoiled rotten). I was the same age as many of my great-grandmother’s grandchildren, and much older than the other great-grandchildren, that is to say, at Thanksgiving there were several dozen teens and tweens causing trouble. Good trouble mostly.
We tended to split off into the usual three groups – one group would go smoke and drink behind the barn, a literal thing, not a metaphor; second group that I and my favorite cousins made up would sit with the adults and talk politics, sports, science, farming, food, oh, and learn how to not-cuss (“it makes me mad as H-E-Double-Hockey-Sticks that the Aggies fired Stallings!”); third and tiniest group were the loners who would go off by themselves and only come in once it was dark.
This was an incredibly imperfect family that had learned how to take the worst blows from life and keep on going. My maternal grandmother was one of Minnie Lea’s nine children. When my mom was thirteen, almost fourteen, her father suicided. It was supposed to have been murder-suicide, but mother’s mother had to work overtime (she was a nurse’s aid at the local hospital). The family pulled together, creating a foundation ever so strong, yet warm.
When, just shy of thirty years later, my sister suicided, that entire family made the 150-mile trek and surrounded my parents with a wall of love so impenetrable…
I’ll never forget the one year my dad’s side of the family expressed their dissatisfaction that we always spent Thanksgiving with the Norris clan. Paternal grandmother insisted that that year, we had to sit at table with the Sachs kin on Turkey Day. Problem was, most Sachs kin weren’t very… nice. Only a few were tolerable. My paternal grandmother and one of her sisters, plus two of the many cousins, that was pretty much it, sum total of the nice ones. I remember that year as having been a quiet (and boring) Thanksgiving.
After that, every year paternal grandmother and her good sister joined us at Minnie Lea’s. Minnie Lea and that swirling, crazy, never-quiet clan of Norrises welcomed the good Sachs sisters as if they were born into the family. Which in itself was an act of grace, since the much wealthier Sachs family had ridiculed and looked down on Minnie Lea and her happy brood when my mom married my father. “Can you believe it? She hangs her laundry on the barbed wire fence to dry!” My mom’s family hadn’t even been invited to the wedding – Sachs had to pay for it, because Norris had no money – which had deeply grieved my mother. Paternal grandmother never apologized to Minnie Lea and the Norris family, but that did not make a difference. They were welcome at the table.
I can hear you now. Denise Elaine!, what do these random Thanksgiving memories have to do with White Rose, with anything serious? Have you run out of things to write about?
To the second question: No. I have a list that stretches into January 2024 for Substack posts about the White Rose. You my readers keep giving me great material, with questions and comments that I appreciate and relish.
To the first question: Everything, these random memories have everything to do with White Rose, with the serious telling of history.
Because history does not happen in a vacuum. As my seventh-grade English teacher taught us, I am who I have been becoming. All those family dynamics – the above doesn’t even skim the surface – fed into my thought processes. It’s no coincidence that the Norris clan produced many strong, stubborn women. We had Minnie Lea as example. It’s no coincidence that my instinct when loved ones face trouble is to be there, to give them both firm foundation and warm hugs. It’s no coincidence that the conversations I most enjoy revolve around politics, sports, science, farming, and food, and not in a combative manner, but most likely with turkey and sweet potatoes on my plate and a football game on the TV… while we debate nicely, though sometimes loudly.
Layer in the teachers I had from kindergarten through grad school; the small group of friends whose pictures are in the dictionary next to “BFF” and who still make sure I’m all right, forty, fifty, sixty years later; the mentors to whom I still reach out when I get stuck – not to mention genetics, place, and jobs that have taught me skills. Anything I accomplish, anything I do, results from this complex, incomprehensible tapestry made of threads golden, purple, black, and every hue under the sun.
If I were to negotiate a peace settlement in the Middle East, or find a cure for Alzheimer’s, so that someone would be interested in writing a biography about my life (ha!), it would be a pitiful biography if it only focused on the time beginning with my first draft of the peace settlement, or the aha moment that isolated the medical issues behind dementia.
Yet that is how the overwhelming majority of books and essays about White Rose resistance, or the lives of the friends in that group, or other resistance efforts during the Shoah, seem to approach the topic.
Willi Graf’s life did not start in June 1942, when he met Hans Scholl. The Scholls’ lives in Ulm did not start in May 1939 when they moved to the great apartment on Münsterplatz. Traute Lafrenz’s life did not start when she transferred to the university in Munich.
All these lives, plus the lives of the dozens of others who worked with the ‘inner core’ of the group of friends, started 15-20 years prior. Messy lives. Lives that consisted of messy chores, maybe even cleaning an outhouse. Lives that sometimes had to sit at a quiet and boring table because of in-law issues with parents. Lives that were impacted by imperfect, horrendously flawed parents, grandparents, great-grandparents, siblings, and cousins.
Some had just cause to fear their elders and lived on a short leash. Others were granted immense freedom to do as they pleased. Some came from money. Others were brought up in families that knew penury. Some were city folk. Others hailed from rural environs. Some would have joined my cousins behind the barn, smoking and drinking at thirteen. Others would have sat with the adults, discussing politics, sports, science, farming, food, oh, and learning how to not-cuss.
It made a difference for these friends, how they had been raised, what their families were like.
I am going to add something that is hard to speak out loud, because some readers may explode at these words. We can see the difference it made in their lives by the ways their siblings, children, and spouses turned out.
Evidence of the discord, if not outright conflict, in the Scholl family could be seen in the postwar split between Aicher-Scholl and Hartnagel. The strength of the friendship between Christl and Schurik (Christoph Probst and Alexander Schmorell) could be seen in the friendship between Herta Probst and Erich and Hertha Schmorell. Lilo’s importance to the group was substantiated just by talking to her grandson Domenic and understanding the depth of his care for the people his grandmother loved. These by way of example. Talking to White Rose family members from 1995 on, this sense that WHO THEY ARE = WHO THEY WERE was inescapable. Or better said, who they were ==> who they became. They were who they had been becoming.
As you undoubtedly know, my White Rose histories try to bridge this gap. Volume I focuses on January 1933 through April 30, 1942, and is subtitled Coming Together. It was difficult finding information about the early years for this group of friends we admire. For example, the Jens edition of Willi Graf’s letters and diary entries essentially starts in June 1942, with just enough from Willi’s teen years to let us know there is so much more.
The good news: Archives are opening. Silences are being broken. Taboos are being recognized as unnecessary, if not silly.
Perhaps before 2030, we will know who the “Minnie Lea” for Willi Graf was, that person who exhibited the strength and courage of convictions that inspired that young man. It wasn’t his father, who was content to go along, if not outright collude. Perhaps before 2030, we will know who in Traute’s life showed her that it’s better to sit at table with the Norris clan than to suffer in silence with the Sachs kin – because it certainly was not her parents, who quickly aligned with Nazi ideology. Perhaps before 2030, we will know how Alexander Schmorell dealt with his stepmom’s side of the family, those Hoffmanns who were in Hitler’s inner circle, and yet emerged as champion for the Other despite the Hoffmann influence. Who set the example for him to follow?
As it stands, all we have are the equivalent of pumpkin pie with no whipped cream, blueprints for a house without context, mug shots with no background.
If these simple posts do nothing else, I hope I can inspire the next generation of scholars to do it right, to demand hard answers, to dig and dig, and dig some more.
In turn, I hope the next generation of readers will be better inspired to take whatever Life has thrown at them, good, bad, happy, sad, unbearable, ecstatic – take it all and look at it through the lens of these White Rose friends, who will then be better known as having taken whatever Life threw at them, good, bad, happy, sad, unbearable, ecstatic.
And understand that no matter the upbringing, or education, or dysfunction, or dwellings, or anything else that forms and shapes, no matter what – we can make a difference. We can take all that crap and transform it into the nobility of ‘liberty and justice for all.’ We can choose a better path, and change the world. One person at a time.
Minnie Lea did.
© 2023 Denise Elaine Heap. Please contact us for permission to quote.
I see the physical resemblance in your family photos and common personality traits through your words. Minnie Lea was clearly a tough little nut. She and my Granny Dickey had a lot in common.