The Manson Women and Me

by Nikki Meredith

  Sometimes these discussions started calmly, even playfully, depending on the issue. It was, after all, a dream of a lifetime (my father’s dream, her lifetime, as she repeated, more than once), and then a detail would surface that triggered an outburst. Depending on the detail, she’d either calm down or her anger would mount and the yelling would continue long after we had all gone to our respective bedrooms.

  She won the argument about the SS Kungsholm. My father booked outside staterooms. He did, however, buy the Volkswagen microbus. The latter was the usual outcome of their pas de deux—my mother protesting initially and then ultimately my father prevailing. I think I know why. In spite of the fact that she was assertive in most areas of her life and as a successful career woman she certainly carried her own weight and had a right to have an equal say in decisions, she found it very difficult to insist on anything with my father. When you grow up poor with an eccentric single anarchist mother and a mystery surrounding your paternity, you’re lacking in the entitled department.

  I also think being Jewish (or as my daughter describes it, Jew-ish ish) was a factor. Had she been part of a big Jewish clan like her mother’s family of origin, she might have had a buffer. She only had her crazy mother for support. What I don’t know, to this day, is whether my father recognized this vulnerability and exploited it to override her wishes or whether he failed to recognize it at all. He certainly suffered the consequences; she held these unilateral decisions against him for the rest of their lives. (When she would bring up one of many grievances in their later years, his frequent response: “What’s the statute of limitations on that one? thirty years? forty years? fifty years?”) As a kid, I was not an objective judge. I always took my father’s side, if only in my heart.

  Before we left for Europe, my English teacher gave my parents a list of books she wanted me to read on the trip. The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank was one of them, and my mother suggested that I read it when we were in Amsterdam since that’s where Anne Frank was hiding with her family when she wrote it.

  In Amsterdam, we stayed in a two-bedroom suite in a small hotel, and my brother and I shared a room. After my parents went to sleep, he would leave the hotel and prowl the streets of the city. I don’t know everything he did, although smoking was one of them. Before we left home, he had figured out a way to attach cartons of American cigarettes to the lining of his London Fog raincoat, but he still needed to find times and places when he could smoke without my mother, who had the nose of a bloodhound, finding out.

  Every night, after he left for his usual venture, I was paralyzed with fear for him. I distracted myself by reading Anne Frank under the duvet with a flashlight; I was afraid that if my parents saw the light under the door, they’d be suspicious. As I got deeper into the book and as Anne’s situation got more perilous, my anxiety about both of them increased. It was difficult for me to sort my fears. Would he be arrested by the Dutch police? (He’d been arrested on Hollywood Boulevard with friends for drinking beer in his car right before we left home.) Would my parents discover that he was gone? Would I get in trouble for not telling them? Would the Gestapo discover Anne’s family? And what would happen to them? It’s a wonder I slept at all.

  Anne’s diary entries were addressed to “dear Kitty” so it read more like a collection of letters to a friend than a diary. I immediately identified with Kitty. I was Kitty, Anne’s best friend, and I pictured myself reading those letters while sitting on my bed in my bedroom in the Silver Lake District in Los Angeles where we lived. I don’t know why, but Kitty seemed like a gentile name and therefore I, as Kitty, was a gentile reading letters from my Jewish best friend. Initially it didn’t cause me to identify more with Jews, but it did open my heart to their suffering.

  In Anne’s early entries, before the family went into hiding, she cataloged the increasing restrictions. Jews could no longer ride streetcars or buses, they could no longer watch movies in the movie theaters, swim in public pools, sit in public gardens, eat in restaurants.

  I understood the issue of segregation. When, in 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that separate was not equal in Brown v. Board of Education, my parents used it as a teaching opportunity—discussing it at dinner a few nights in a row. Our country seemed to be getting better. When Anne lived in Hitler-occupied Holland everything, for the Jews, was getting worse.

  I must have been a little dim because when I started reading the book, I didn’t know that Anne died at the end. I was probably the only kid of my age in the country who thought it had a happy ending. I didn’t find out that Anne and her mother died in a concentration camp until I read the afterword. I was heartbroken. Anne Frank’s writing was so vivid, so immediate, I felt as though I had truly lost my best friend. How could it be that this funny, smart girl died for no other reason than she was Jewish? Mixed in with my sadness was my sense of outrage. I was heartbroken but, in my mind, it was still about losing my friend. It wasn’t about me.

  The morning after I finished the book my eyes were red and puffy from crying when I showed up for breakfast. My parents were talking about the town we were going to visit that day, Volendam. My mother kept glancing my way and finally asked what was wrong. “Why are your eyes so swollen? Have you been crying?”

  “No,” I said. “I think I’m getting a cold.” I blew my nose to prove it. I was embarrassed. I changed the subject. I pointed to a photo in one of the travel books. “So people still really dress this way?”

  “Yes!” she said. “It will be fun.” In 1956 the residents of Volendam wore traditional garb every day—starched white caps, dirndls with aprons, for the women, dark loose pants, red neckerchiefs, and suspenders for the men. Wooden shoes for everyone. (I bought a pair of wooden shoes for my teacher.)

  By the following morning I didn’t feel as raw. I told my parents I’d finished the book. My father asked me what I thought of it.

  “I was so sad,” I said. “I can’t believe Hitler killed those people just because they were Jewish.”

  There must have been something about the way I said “those people” that alerted my mother.

  She was standing at a side table pouring coffee. As she handed my father his cup, I saw her glance at him with a puzzled look on her face and then turn to me. “What do you mean, ‘those’ people?”

  I was confused by her reaction. What was I missing? Wasn’t Anne Frank’s family Jewish?

  When I thought about this years later, after I was a parent myself, it occurred to me that my mother wasn’t sure how to handle this conversation. Was I old enough to digest what she was about to tell me? Maybe it was like sex. She was trying to find out what I already knew. She didn’t want to plant frightening images that weren’t there already, but she wanted me to know the truth. She decided to rip the bandage off.

  She took a sip of her coffee and said, “You do realize that under Hitler, you would have been just as Jewish as Anne Frank.” Her tone was matter of fact as though she was talking about membership in the Girl Scouts. “He had rules about that.”

  “But I’m hardly Jewish at all.” The minute I said it, it felt wrong, cowardly or something like cowardly. I nonetheless soldiered on: “But Mama Sarah was the only Jewish person in our family.”

  “That’s true,” she said. “But it’s also true that the Nazis declared that anyone with a Jewish grandparent had to die. He wanted to get rid of everyone who had any Jewish blood. They had a word for it. Mischling. It means a hybrid . . . people who had both Aryan and Jewish blood.” (I think my mother might have been wrong about this. The Nazis had a complicated system of labeling. With one Jewish grandparent I would have been labeled a Mischling of the second degree. Apparently there wasn’t total agreement about what to do with my group. If I looked Jewish or acted Jewish or “felt” Jewish, I would be deported.

  There was agreement about one thing: Mischling of the second degree would be sterilized. My mother, however, because she had three or more Jewish grandparents, would have been gassed. (To
this day, I don’t know if my mother knew the truth—that I wouldn’t have automatically been eligible for extinction—but didn’t want me to distance myself from my heritage. I also don’t know how the knowledge would have changed my perception of my place in the world.)

  Everything I’d heard—the lampshades, the soap, the ovens, the showers—took on a new meaning.

  I must have looked frightened.

  “So I would have been gassed in the ovens?”

  Is that how I asked? I can’t imagine now but that’s what I remember.

  Again she glanced at my father. “I’m afraid so, sweetie.” My hunch was that the sweetie was meant to soften it, but it didn’t work. Later I would ask about the rest of the family, but at that moment, I was having trouble integrating my twelve-year-old self being gassed because I had a Jewish grandmother.

  Before, when I pictured losing my new best friend Anne Frank, my heart hurt. Now, when I realized I was not gentile Kitty, the view of my position in the world was entirely changed.

  chapter fifteen

  EVERYBODY CAN BE A KILLER

  1963, 2003, 2015

  After years of researching violence, I thought I would be somewhat desensitized to descriptions of brutality, but then I learned about the work of Father Patrick Desbois. He is a French Catholic priest who, for more than a decade, traveled from village to village in the Ukraine to unearth both the truth and the remains of 1.5 million Jews who were killed in the Holocaust. These murders occurred before Auschwitz, before Birkenau, before Treblinka, before Dachau, before the Nazis completed their methodical plans for the Final Solution. The killing centers that came later were out of public view; the massacres in the Ukraine occurred in plain sight. Unlike Poland and Germany, where reminders of the killings were memorialized after the war, the horror in Ukraine was hidden away, first by the Nazis, then by the Soviets. What attracted me to the story initially was that most of the people involved were simple country folks—not Nazis. Acting on orders from the Germans, they shot fellow villagers and dug the ditches where they threw the bodies and where the truth was buried for seventy-five years.

  Since the Holocaust, when so many ordinary Germans tortured and killed Jews, there has been ongoing research and corresponding dialogue about what impels presumably average people to commit “crimes of obedience” under the leadership of malevolent leaders. The most famous of these studies was initiated in 1961 by Stanley Milgram at Yale University. In a fake laboratory the “naive subject,” a volunteer who had answered an advertisement in a New Haven newspaper, was instructed to give increasingly painful electric shocks to a person in response to every wrong answer to a test question. The subjects were told they were participating in a study of the effect of punishment on learning and memory, when in fact it was their capacity for cruelty when ordered to do so by an individual in a position of authority. Milgram’s idea was to see how average Americans would behave when put in a situation roughly comparable to ordinary Germans who were ordered to participate in the torture and killing of Jews. No real shock was actually administered, but the recipient of the faux shock would scream louder every time the voltage was set higher.

  In his 1974 book about the experiment, Obedience to Authority, Milgram wrote of his surprise at the large number of ordinary people, from lawyers to day laborers, who were willing to obey orders. Over two-thirds obeyed the experimenter and kept pulling the lever despite hearing the screams from the person receiving the shocks. Most subjects continued giving shock after shock. Milgram speculated that this tendency to obey orders (even immoral, anti-social orders) is rooted in our species’ evolutionary struggle for survival. Without this capacity for obedience we would not be able to function in a hierarchical social organization, a social form that insures the survival of the weaker of the species. “When the individual is on his own,” he wrote, “conscience is brought into play. But when he functions in an organizational mode, directions that come from the higher level of competence are not assessed against the internal standards of moral judgment.”

  This seemed like a credible explanation for Pat’s and Leslie’s behavior. If ordinary people were willing to inflict suffering on orders from an authority they didn’t know, it seemed plausible that the women were compelled to follow orders of someone they considered their leader, even if those orders were repugnant. But every time I found an explanation for their behavior, a circumstance was revealed that either invalidated my conclusion or made it problematic. This happened when I watched the films of Milgram’s experiments. The degree to which ordinary people obeyed was shocking, but I was struck by something else: it was traumatic for the majority of them to do so. Many tried to resist but were ultimately bullied into submission.

  When Milgram varied the conditions of the experiment, he got different results. In the original study, the person administering the shock was in a different room from the recipient, though he could hear the screams. As Milgram moved the subjects closer to each other so the people administering the shocks were better able to witness the expressions of pain, the more frequently they were willing to defy the orders of the experimenters. In the final stage of proximity when the administrators of the shock had to place the victims’ hands on the shock plate, a fully 70 percent refused to administer shocks.

  While it’s true that, like the majority of Milgram’s subjects, Pat and Leslie were willing to obey the orders of an authority figure, unlike 70 percent of his subjects, being close, hearing the cries, seeing the pain on their victim’s faces had no effect on them. Zero. Does that mean they could be in the same category as the 30 percent in Milgram’s experiment or does that mean that something in addition to obedience to Manson’s authority was at work?

  Over the years, Milgram’s obedience-to-authority explanation of the Holocaust has had many challengers—the best known of these is Daniel Goldhagen. In his 1997 book, Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust, he wrote that what fueled the brutality of ordinary Germans who killed Jews in the Holocaust was not the drive to be obedient to authority but centuries-long hatred of Jews embedded in the German culture. Goldhagen also took issue with the findings of American historian Christopher Browning whose 1992 book, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland was influenced by Milgram’s work.

  Battalion 101 consisted of five hundred policemen who, before the war, had worked as businessmen, dockworkers, truck drivers, construction workers, machine operators, waiters, druggists, and teachers as well as some who had been professional policemen. Only a minority were members of the Nazi Party, and only a few belonged to the SS. According to Browning, none of the men were openly anti-Semitic. Battalion 101 participated in the shootings and/or the transport to the Treblinka gas chambers of at least eighty-three thousand Jews.

  After the war, many assumed that ordinary Germans were under orders to kill Jews from a brutal regime and therefore had no choice but to obey. Browning’s research revealed that the men killed even when not under a direct threat to obey. In one situation, the commander of the unit gave his men the choice of opting out of the massacre if they found it too troubling. Out of five hundred men, only twelve opted out. Chris Browning and Daniel Goldhagen drew opposite conclusions from that behavior. Browning’s take-away: the men in Battalion 101 who did not opt out were acting out of an instinctive drive to obey authority, even when they found what they were ordered to do morally reprehensible. They were not, he asserted, motivated by fear, blood lust, or primal hatred.

  Goldhagen, however, believed that so few opted out when given the opportunity because they wanted to kill Jews and to kill them in a way that maximized suffering. He identified what he called “eliminationist anti-Semitism,” a mentality that grew out of medieval attitudes and was fundamental to German national identity. “The eliminationist ideology, derived from the German cultural cognitive model of Jews, was at the root of the policies of the 1930s which the German people supported,” he wrote. “The genocida
l program of the war was grounded in the same ideology.”

  At the time of these debates, not much was known about the killing of the 1.5 million Jews in the Ukraine. Now, thanks to the interviews Father Desbois and his team started conducting in 2003, we know the murders were coordinated by German special killing squads but with the participation of willing locals. Most of the villagers Father Desbois interviewed had been children and teenagers at the time of the killings, but they remembered witnessing the horror. They remembered that the victims had been primarily women, children, and old people who the willing locals knew as friends, neighbors, or childhood playmates. They remembered that the victims were taken from their homes on foot or by car or truck to pits just outside the villages where they lived. They remembered that these women, children, and old people were often stripped of their clothing, lined up, and shot at close range, face-to-face or in the back. They remembered that many of the victims did not die immediately and were left to suffer in a pile of death. They remembered that the massacres were treated as spectacles—the villagers flocked to watch the people they knew slaughtered.

  There are photographs that document these events, and if I thought the photographs of the Tate-LaBianca victims and the photos of the brutality at Abu Ghraib prison would be the ones to haunt me forever, it’s only because I hadn’t seen these yet.

  It now seems clear that the motivation for killing in the Holocaust was not, by any means, binary. Obedience to authority? Yes. Anti-Semitism? Yes. Primal hatred? Yes. Blood lust? Yes.

  Which boxes would Pat and Leslie check? They say they were motivated by the wish to obey Manson but even more, the desire to please him. (I would imagine that the desire to please authority figures would have figured prominently in the Nazi bureaucracy, if only for career advancement.) And it was Manson’s primal hatred they were acting out, not their own.