A Chosen Few

by Mark Kurlansky

  More praise for A Chosen Few

  “This book is a fascinating review of the changing life of Jews and Judaism and Europeans in general since the Second World War.”

  —Rocky Mountain News

  “Kurlansky does an astonishingly informative job here, covering a vast array of individuals and communities throughout Europe, chronicling the economic, political, and cultural trends that reshaped and often played havoc with their lives and destinies. His descriptions of life in Antwerp, Paris, Budapest, and Amsterdam are superb, while his chapters on Poland are among the best I've read.”

  —SUSAN MIRON Forward

  “A richly descriptive and insightful survey of post-Holocaust European Jewry… With a novelist's eye for irony and description, [Kurlansky] offers many moments of transcendence and humor; entertaining culture clashes between communists and capitalists, religious and secular, Zionists and diasporists.… A lively, penetrating follow-up to Holocaust readings that speaks volumes about the resiliency of the Jewish people.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “Kurlansky's collection of case histories unfolds like a novel.”

  —The Jewish Advocate

  Acclaim for the work of Mark Kurlansky

  Salt

  ‘An immensely entertaining read… Kurlansky continues to prove himself remarkably adept at taking a most unlikely candidate and telling its tale with epic grandeur. Salt reveals all the hidden drama of its seemingly pedestrian subject. There is even a kind of poetry in the very chemistry of salt.”

  —Los Angeles Times Book Review

  “Bright writing and, most gratifyingly, an enveloping narrative… It is Kurlansky's neat trick to be both encyclopedic and diverting, to leave no grain unturned as he ties one intriguing particular to another, through time and space, keeping the reader's attention.”

  —San Francisco Chronicle

  “Mark Kurlansky is a writer worth his salt.… [He] always manages to bring out the sharpest flavors in his subject matter. For readers thirsty for well-told history, Salt hits the spot.”

  —Minneapolis Star Tribune

  “Throughout his engaging, well-researched history, Kurlansky sprinkles witty asides and amusing anecdotes. A piquant blend of the historic, political, commercial, scientific, and culinary, the book is sure to entertain as well as educate.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  Cod

  “[An] eminently readable book… History filtered through the gills of the fish trade.”

  —The New York Times Book Review

  “[A] fascinating study of the interrelationship between humans and fish.”

  —The Philadelphia Inquirer

  “[A] naturalist triumph, a smoothly written, beautifully designed book… Kurlansky's steady tone, somewhere between Captains Courageous and the mourner's Kaddish, is perfect.”

  —Boston magazine

  “[An] engaging history… Highly recommended.”

  —Library Journal (starred review)

  The Basque History of the World

  “Thoroughly engaging… Kurlansky writes history with a quirky verve that makes his books as entertaining as they are enlightening.”

  —The Boston Globe

  “A rich mix of mythos and reportage, history and anecdote, literature and etymology, culinary lore and recipes, this history may be the most important English work on Iberia since Robert Hughes’ Barcelona”

  —Miami Herald

  “[A] lively, anecdotal, all-encompassing history of Basque ingenuity and achievement.”

  —The Atlantic Monthly

  “Kurlansky's book makes for highly enjoyable history, food, and travel reading.”

  —The Washington Times

  Other Books by Mark Kurlansky

  Salt: A World History

  The Basque History of the World

  Cod: A Biography of the Fish that Changed the World

  A Continent of Islands: Searching for the Caribbean Destiny

  The White Man in the Tree and Other Stories (fiction)

  The Cod's Tale (for children)

  To LISA BETH

  “If God lets me live,1 shall achieve more than my mother ever did, I shall not remain insignificant, I shall work in the world for people.”

  —ANNE FRANK'S diary, April 11, 1944

  “Solange ed Juden gibt, wird es immer Nazis geben.” (As long as there are Jews there will always be Nazis.)

  “A Jew is a citizen of no country except Israel.”

  “Waarom leefik?” (Why am I alive?)

  —three of the comments written in the guest book at the Anne Frank house in Amsterdam

  CONTENTS

  INTRODUCTION 2002

  INTRODUCTION 1994

  PROLOGUE: The Fifth Son m Berlin

  PART ONE

  THE BREAD YEARS

  1 From Lodz to Paris

  2 Liberated Paris

  3 Liberated Antwerp

  4 Liberated Budapest

  5 Liberated Prague

  6 Liberated Poland

  7 Liberated Amsterdam

  PART TWO

  BROYGEZ IN THE COLD WAR

  8 From Lodz to Dilsseldorf

  9 From the Lowlands to Palestine

  10 In the New Berlin

  11 In Czechoslovakia

  12 From Moscow to Warsaw

  13 In Budapest

  14 From Moscow to Berlin

  PART THREE

  ’68

  15 From North Africa

  16 In Paris

  17 West Germany and the Promised Land

  18 Passing in Warsaw

  19 Czechoslovakian Summer

  PART FOUR

  RITE OF PASSAGE

  20 East German Autumn

  21 In Budapest

  22 In Warsaw and Cracow

  PART FIVE

  THE SILENCE

  23 Belgium, On a Bank of the Yser

  24 In Antwerp

  25 In Paris

  PART SIX

  EUROPE, NEW AGAIN

  26 In Poland

  27 In Budapest

  28 In the Czech Republic

  29 The New Slovak Republic

  30 In Antwerp

  31 In Paris

  32 In Amsterdam

  33 In Berlin and the New Bananerepublik

  EPILOGUE: Freedom in the Marais

  APPENDIX: Jewish Populations in Europe

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  A READER'S GUIDE

  INTRODUCTION, 2002

  if they do it for no reason

  there's no motive

  if they all do it

  no one knows who has done it.

  —HENRYK GRYNBERG, “The Perfect Crime;’ 1989

  Anti-Semitism has proven to be one of the most enduring concepts in European civilization. In a 1927 book called The Wandering Jew about the struggles of poor eastern European Jews, Viennese Jewish novelist Joseph Roth concluded that anti-Semitism would vanish from the world, ended by the Soviet Union. He wrote of anti-Semitism, “In the new Russia, it remains a disgrace. What will ultimately kill it off is public shame.” He noted virulent outbursts in Russia but dismissed them as the death struggles of dinosaurs resisting the inevitable future.

  Roth even speculated that “If this process continues, the age of Zionism will have passed, along with the age of anti-Semitism— and perhaps even that of Judaism itself.”

  Today the Soviet Union has been gone for a decade but anti-Semitism is still here. So for that matter, is Judaism. “The Jewish question”—I have never been certain what the question is—that Roth predicted would be put to rest with Russian leadership, has endured.

  The lesson to be learned from Roth, aside from a warning to writers not to publish predictions in bo
oks, is that both Judaism and anti-Semitism have deep and permanent roots in Europe. Though Judaism is a less European idea than anti-Semitism, for many Jews, Jewish culture is European—or was.

  Because of the Holocaust, Europe is no longer the most Jewish continent. It may have remained the most anti-Semitic, though Africa and Asia, with their Muslim populations are certainly vying for the title. It is difficult to be certain because anti-Semitism is more difficult to quantify than Judaism. As the nations of the former Soviet bloc struggle for acceptance in the West—admission into Western clubs such as NATO and the European Union— Jewish organizations such as the World Jewish Congress have urged that progress towards democracy in these nations be measured by the way they are treating their Jews. This is not as skewed a perspective as it at first sounds. Anti-Semitism, whether in Hungary, Germany, or France, has usually been tied to undemocratic movements. The growth of anti-Semitism in France, from the Dreyfus case to World War II collaboration, was tied to monarchists, fascists, and other groups that did not support republicanism. The Soviet Union was in principle opposed to anti-Semitism, and even outlawed its outward manifestations. But as that nation grew increasingly repressive, it also became increasingly anti-Semitic. The “anti-zionist campaign” in Poland in the late 1960s was the precursor to general repression.

  But a more subtle anti-Semitism is allowed to breathe and grow even in the setting of democracy. Now in the early twenty-first century when so much urgency is given to fighting international terrorism, it is useful to remember that in the late twentieth century Jews feared Arab gunmen and bombs in Paris, Antwerp, Munich—much of western Europe. No European Jew went to a Jewish restaurant or a synagogue without calculating the risk of attack. These attacks against social organizations, restaurants, schools and synagogues were met with official statements of outrage and very little else. Almost no effort was made to capture or punish the perpetrators, even when Israeli intelligence offered information that could lead to their capture. Today when wondering how international Arab terrorism could have become so brazen, we should note that twenty years ago they were allowed to kill Jews in western Europe with impunity.

  In the decade that has passed since I researched A Chosen Few, the standing in Europe of both Judaism and anti-Semitism has barely changed. This is not surprising, but what is surprising is that none of the countries about which I wrote in this book has moved one step further away from World War II. Europe, sixty vears after the Holocaust, has achieved no more closure than had Europe fifty years after. Dariusz Stola, a historian of the twentieth century at the Polish Academy of Sciences, said in a lecture delivered in June 2001 at the University of Warsaw, “The Holocaust is not a problem of the past. It is a problem of the present. I can hardly find a European country without a World War II problem from Germany, French collaboration, Swiss banks, the role of the Vatican. If you do not have problems with World War II, you are not European.”

  The World War II problem, the Jewish question—these are distinctly European debates. It would have been logical to imagine that these issues had to be resolved, before the Jews would return. But in fact they returned before there was any resolution and now children, grandchildren, and even great grandchildren of survivors, live their lives half citizen and half metaphor.

  The Jews have an irrefutable claim on what all Europeans want—standing as World War II victims. Everyone was either— in the words of Holocaust historian Raul Hilberg—a victim, a bystander, or a perpetrator. The worst fate has become the best status. Just as Jews have always been envied and resented for whatever they had, they are envied today for their victim status. Europeans need to show that they too, not just Jews, were the victims of World War II. The French and Dutch accomplish this with some difficulty. The Poles stubbornly fight for their victim status. Even the Germans hope that somehow Dresden gives them a chance for victim status.

  The Jews of Dresden in the former East Germany have recently found their real life in Germany and their metaphorical one at cross purposes. Across the wide and curving Elbe, in the Baroque historic city center, where blackened sandstone fairies cavort from ancient rooftops, workers waddle by, clearing debris with wheelbarrows. The city is finally digging out from the famous February 13, 1945, British RAF bombing run followed the next morning with an attack by the U.S. Army Air Force. Initially, the German police claimed 18,000 dead. But in subsequent years the count has wavered between 30,000 and 130,000.

  Germany fell, and with little chance for recrimination against the rest of the world, Germans have, for a half century, denounced the bombing of Dresden as cruel and unnecessary.

  Before it was bombed into a rum, Dresden, the capital of Saxony, had been one of the prized centers of Germany. The old walled medieval town reached its golden age in the eighteenth century. A Protestant church with a huge dome defining the city skyline, the Frauenkirche, became the symbol of Dresden—like an Eiffel Tower or an Empire State building. Bach gave the Frauenkirche's first organ concert.

  But for forty-five years after the 1945 bombing, the view across the Elbe was of the piles of stone, staircases overgrown with bushes, wall fragments silhouetted against the sky, the skeleton of one burned-out dome sticking out above overgrown rubble piles amid a huge vacant lot that had been cleared with bulldozers.

  In 1949, when the Cold War began with Germany splitting into West and East, East Germany, the German Democratic Republic, found a perfect convergence of political rhetoric and economic reality. They did not have the money to completely rebuild their cities, but in leaving central Berlin with bullet holes and crumbling walls and Dresden with its charred remains, they were creating monuments to the horror the fascists had brought on the German people. Fascists were the perpetrators and Germans were the victims.

  In the new East Germany, history might be rewritten, but it was never to be forgotten. Every February 13, Dresden school children were gathered in a remembrance of the bombing. Townspeople went to the remaining charred tower facing the pile of rocks that was once the Frauenkirche, and lit candles.

  All this ended in 1990 along with East Germany. The West Germans, unlovingly known in the East as the Wessies, arrived with their own brand of Wiedergutmachung, making it good again. It was all so nice before the Communists and the Nazis, they said, couldn't we just put it back the way it was.

  Since the reunification of Germany—that is the term always used because it has been unified before—the Wessies have been rushing into the bombed-out parts of the East such as Dresden and the center of Berlin and rebuilding, making Germany historic and lovely again and, in so doing, removing those East German reminders of unlovely history.

  In Dresden alone, in the ten years following the reunification of Germany in October 1990, about $47 billion, some private and some government funds, was spent on reconstruction. Dresden's new tourist literature, in giving the history of the city, seldom offers a date between 1918, when the Saxon monarchy was abolished, and the 1945 bombing. “The Friends of Dresden” brochure to raise money for the rebuilding of the Frauenkirche, offers no date between an 1843 Wagner debut and the 1945 bombing. Photographs of the blackened rubble, some of it untouched until very recently, are readily available More difficult to find is the 1934 picture of little Nazi boys in brown shirts, all at attention for the visit of Nazi Propaganda Minister Josef Goebbels to the city, or the 1944 photo of thousands of Dresdeners cheering flags of the Third Reich, the graceful arches of the fourteenth-century Augustus Bridge in the background.

  A decade after reunification, Ossies and Wessies still look and think so differently that they are immediately distinguishable in a bar or on a street corner. The Ossies look defeated and the Wessies strut like conquerors. The demeanor, the body language, would betray them if the clothes and words didn't. The Ossie Jews who went back to build Communism and the Wessie Jews, who went back to earn money, along with their children, have remained even farther apart than non-Jewish Germans.

  The local Ossies, even the non-Jewi
sh ones, showed little enthusiasm for the Wessies and their billions spent rebuilding the Frauenkirche. Many viewed the project as the destruction of their anti-war and anti-fascism monument.

  Other curious controversies have arisen. The Dresden castle was to be restored to its 1733 condition. But as stone fragments are fitted together and missing parts resculpted and a fresh bright layer of gilding laid on, an argument has emerged. Should it all look bright and shiny the way it did in 1733, or antique and historic the way it did in 1945 before the bombing? Should the Frauenkirche be furnished with a baroque organ, the kind of light, crisp, harpsicord-like instrument for which Bach and the other baroque composer wrote, an organ like the original installed when the church was completed in 1743, or should they install a large, grumbling nineteenth-century organ like the one that was destroyed in the 1945 bombing?