A Chosen Few

by Mark Kurlansky

  I wanted to know the answer to that rude question. I also wanted to know what price had been paid and what struggles waged over the past fifty years to stay and rebuild. Not surprisingly, I found no single answer to the question. People stayed because, in spite of what anti-Semitic countrymen might claim, they were indeed Poles or Frenchmen or even Germans. Some stayed because they did not want to see the history of their Jewish community come to an end. Some sta)ed to build a new society. Some never intended to stay but couldn't get their relatives to move. Some hated the thought of moving anywhere. Some always meant to move but could not get organized to leave, and some just got too involved with their careers.

  What has emerged is a half-century of European history seen through the eyes of Jews—a traumatized and damaged people's experience in rebuilding their lives in the postwar, cold war, and post-Communist eras.

  The Jews who were committed to rebuilding their communities sometimes found themselves at cross-purposes with their local Zionist movement. In much the same way, this book too is in conflict with Zionism, a conflict that is inevitable but in neither case specifically intended. I have never believed that all Jews should move to Israel, and I have always been bemused by Zionists who themselves had no plans to move there. I like the idea that there are still Jews in Europe, that Amsterdam's Esnoga and Prague's Old-New Synagogue are still working synagogues and not museums. Perhaps it is just that I do not want Hitler to posthumously attain his goal.

  On the other hand, I understand that many Jews and non-Jews alike view Europe's future with foreboding. This is not an optimistic moment in Europe, a continent long given to pessimism. Eastern Europe's borders are tense and the Balkans are embroiled in a shooting war. Western Europe's slowly nurtured trading bloc is suffering from rising unemployment and feels outmaneuvered by deals in the Americas and Asia. Europe is turning inward, becoming obsessed with its own internal relations, problems, and battles.

  As I write this introduction, during the week leading up to the 5754th year of recorded Jewish history, the French government has moved to rewrite its constitution to facilitate laws harassing immigrants; a statue of Kaiser Wilhelm I, a symbol of German military aggression, has been installed in Koblenz; while in the south, yet another of Germany's almost daily attacks resulted in the death of four immigrants in a burned-out hostel. This incident was not uniquely German—a week later a Bangladesh man lay in critical condition after being beaten and kicked in East London. The remains of Admiral Miklos Horthy—who, although less bloody than his successor, allied Hungary with the Third Reich and initiated the persecution and massacre of thousands of Jews—were re-buried in his hometown with honors. Several government ministers attended the ceremony. The Hungarian prime minister asserted that Horthy had been a great patriot who had gained back Hungarian land, which angered the prime minister of the Slovak Republic, Vladimir Meciar—not because of Horthy's war record but because some of that regained land had been at Slovak expense. The same week, Meciar made an interesting observation of his own. Gypsies, the prime minister explained, are “socially unadaptable and mentally backward.” Later, he denied the quote but rephrased the same thought in more polite language. While these things were happening, Bosnians were openly slaughtering each other for being Croats or Serbs or Muslims.

  This is what European news is like these days. Although the style of this nationalism may be particularly European, the racism and racist attacks are not. The United States, too, has seen an increase in extreme right-wing facist violence groups like the Ku Klux Klan find willing shock troops in young skinheads. What is especially worrisome about Europe, however, is that the political establishment there reacts to such activities by pandering to the extremists. Rather than ostracizing the extremists, the establishment treats them as mainstream and goes on to ostracize the victims of extremist violence by discussing the “immigrant problem/’ In reality, the problem is not immigrants but the fact that immigrants are being attacked.

  Germany, whose culture I have always admired—its music, its demanding and expressive language—is a country with which I have been trying to come to terms during twenty years of visits. While I am awed by its brilliance, there is something undefmable that I fear. Germans themselves fear it as well. Today, Germany's best writers are consumed with a dread of their own country. But it is too tempting to make simplistic assumptions about Germany. One time in Cologne, while I was trying to catch a soon-departing express train to Berlin, I cut into the only moving line. As I ordered my ticket in German, I heard a British couple behind me saying, “They're still like that. They'll never learn.”

  This book is not intended as an argument about where Jews ought to live. It is the story of brave and tenacious people who have rebuilt their lives in the face of incomprehensible horror and refused to be pushed out of their homes by bigots.

  The Jews I write about here are an eclectic group, selected in as arbitrary a fashion as possible. My only criterion for choosing a particular community was that it had previously been decimated by the Holocaust. In those communities I sought out Jews of any kind—the more varied, the better. I spoke with tailors, bakers, and butchers—I did not want only prominent people. But two people I interviewed are well-known political activists: one has an international literary reputation. A few are well-known leaders in their communities, because such people, after all, are highly representative of European Jews. There are atheists, Yom Kippur Jews, and Hasids. Any Jew in Europe is a representative of European Jewry.

  Wherever possible, I have tried to verify facts, and while most of the stories seemed truthful, there were a few rare interviews that I eliminated because the stories did not check out. Though some of the material in this book is derived from my own eyewit-nessing in the late 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, most of the stories here are of people's lives as they told them to me. It is true that all people tend to remember their lives in selective and self-serving ways; nevertheless, I have confidence in their essential truth. Where there is dialogue, I was either present or I reproduced it as it was related to me by a participant. Scenes that I did not witness were described to me by those who did.

  I avoided people who would not let me use their names, although I respected some requests to leave out the names of or information about certain relatives.

  Verifying stories and probing for truth was particularly difficult with camp survivors, who often went into tremendous but selective detail about their camp experiences, even though I did not ask them. Survivors often have a despairing sense that no one can possibly understand them, and I think that to some extent they are right. The more I learn about the Holocaust, the less I understand it. When radio correspondent Edward R. Murrow was reporting on the liberation of Buchenwald, one of the emaciated survivors went up to him and asked him if he intended to write about what he saw. The survivor, a Frenchman who had formerly worked for the news agency Havas, told him, “To write about this, you must have been here at least two years, and after that… you don't want to write anymore.”

  But people did continue with their lives—damaged people whose psyches were wounded in ways that go beyond the comprehension of the rest of us had the strength and courage to rebuild, remarry, and raise children. Because of them, Jewry today has a future in Europe, and Hitler, at last, has been defeated.

  Paris, October 1994

  P R O L O G U E

  The Fifth Son in Berlin

  “Afterward Moses and Aaron went and said to Pharaoh

  Thus says the Lord, the God of Israel: Let my people go

  that they may celebrate a festival for me in the wilderness”

  -EXODUS 5:1

  A loud thumping noise at the head table shook the plastic wine cups but failed to silence the die-hard old Communists. It was a rabbinical gesture—a long fluid arm motion resembling the straightening of an egret's neck, ending in a palm-down whack on the table. Orthodox rabbis do this at the reading stand when they want to silence the synagogue. Irene Runge had been accuse
d of numerous things in the past year, but being an Orthodox rabbi was not one of them. Still, having seen the gesture, she thought she would give it a try. As former East Berlin drifted in the post-Communist era, there was something enviable about the authority wielded by an Orthodox rabbi.

  In East Berlin the Passover dinner, the seder, was being offered in a government-subsidized cultural center off the Oranienburger-strasse for fifteen marks per person—a bargain, considering that the official Jewish Community over in West Berlin was charging fifty marks. The East Berlin seder was strictly kosher—to the satisfaction of Irene, the hostess. A lifelong Communist, she had lost her position at Humboldt University after the collapse of the Communist state for having ties to the East German secret police, the infamous Stasi. The seder was to be supervised by a religious leader, long-bearded and behatted, a virulent anti-Communist religious traditionalist from the ultra-Orthodox Lubavitcher sect. He was to bring together fifty atheists—a blend of committed German Communists and Russian immigrants who had never been exposed to any religion—in the recitation of praise to God, while outside in the cool spring night, a dozen prostitutes stood in tights and glittery string bikinis, plying their trade in the newly capitalist East Berlin.

  The prostitutes were happy to see the neighborhood getting more foot traffic and the Communist thought it was a “lovely evening,” although a few of the Russians wished there was more singing. To the English Lubavitcher, just the fact that Jews were still having seders in Berlin was a victory.

  This was Berlin almost a half-century after it was bombed into rubble. Berlin, the haunted city, still had a wall running through it. But it was no longer white concrete covered with colorful graffiti. The wall had become invisible. There was still never any doubt here or anywhere else in Berlin as to whether you were in the East or the West.

  This seder was held in East Berlin, in an old central Berlin neighborhood that had once been the home of impoverished Ostjuden, with synagogues, kosher shops, brothels, and cabarets. The neighborhood—the buildings, but not the residents—had survived the war. Now it seemed earmarked for gentrification. Slightly chic little bars with a West Berlin slickness were starting to open. The prostitutes had come out on the street. The Oranienburger-strasse, famous for its large synagogue that was just now being repaired from Allied bombings, had long been a red-light district, but since prostitution does not exist in a Communist state, it was kept judiciously indoors. Now the prostitutes stood off the curb every night dressed in oddly colored tights, sequined strings, and blond wigs that looked like doll hair. Here, West Berliners in BMWs could cruise for prostitutes more discreetly than they could by walking the clean modern Ku'damm in the West, where all their friends and colleagues coming back from the movies might see them.

  East Berliners called West Berliners Wessis, and the Wessis called the East Berliners Ossis, and neither term was meant to express fondness. At this point there still wasn't much question of the East Berlin Jews mixing with the West Berlin Jews, whom they referred to as “the millionaires.” There were only a few hundred East Berlin Jews, and there were a few thousand in West Berlin. Both groups’ ranks were being swollen by Russian Jews. The new unified Germany had opened its gates to welcome—even help finance—any Soviet Jews who wanted to immigrate, a fact that many Russians discovered when they came to Germany to buy goods for the black market in Russia. Thousands of Jews, along with half-Jews and would-be Jews, were now coming to Germany to escape anti-Semitism.

  In Germany they received housing and a living allowance. Between 1991 and 1993, Germany had given permission for 25,000 Soviet Jews to immigrate, and with less than half arrived, the Berlin Jewish Community was already 70 percent Russian. For the first time in half a century, there were more than just a small handful of Jews in Berlin.

  Many of these Russian Jews would have preferred to go to the United States, but Germany welcomed them and the United States didn't. They spoke little English or German but, in the presence of Americans, they would sporadically blurt out geographical information on the northeastern United States. “Ocean Parkway,” a man from Leningrad who spoke no other words of English asserted for no apparent reason, to which a Muscovite woman responded with the well-pronounced but not entirely accurate assertion, “New Haven, Connecticut—250 kilometers from New York City.” A woman from Odessa smiled approvingly, though she had no geographical data to add.

  The East Germans were still groping around, looking for a place in the new unified Germany. “New unified Germany” was a Wessi concept. To many Ossis, it was simply the newly expanded West Germany. The change was particularly difficult for people who felt that they had had a place in the old German Democratic Republic. Irene Runge felt certain enough of her place to freely acknowledge her vague links to the Stasi; for this act of candor she had been fired from her university post.

  Sympathetic East Berliners would now say to Irene, “I understand. You had to cooperate. They tried to blackmail you, didn't they?” Over and over again she would explain that no one blackmailed her—“I thought it was the right thing to do.”

  After the fall of East Germany, it was discovered that about a half-million East Germans had contributed to Stasi files. These Stasi revelations had cost people like Irene not only their jobs but some of their friends. Still, the old-line Communists understood. Mia Lehmann, 84, said, “If you believed in your country and a government agent said, ‘This is for the good of the country/wouldn't you cooperate?” Many people might answer negatively to that question, but among Irene's circle were many who had said yes. In the last years of the German Democratic Republic, Irene had grown increasingly disenchanted with the government and, at the same time, increasingly interested in Judaism. After the GDR collapsed, she had no job, no party, no country really, but she did have the Jewish Cultural Association, or Judische Kulturverein, which she had created. She was also a paid member of the Jewish Community, but that was mainly Wessis. If not for the American movies and her unshakable determination that “Wessis make better popcorn,” she wouldn't go over there at all. At her Kulturverein she gathered a small group of the kind of people she had always been around, Jewish Communists.

  Unlike the Jewish Community, the Kulturverein was something she could run herself. She liked running things, holding them together with her own wild charisma and whimsy, shouting in her harsh Berlin German or her harsh New York English. She had been born in Washington Heights, New York, where many leftist Jewish families had taken refuge from the Third Reich. Most of the Jews at her Berlin Kulturverein had lived part of their life somewhere else. That was how they or their parents had survived.

  These days, Irene's lifetime beliefs earned her only the contempt of the Wessis. There was no more party, no more Stasi, no more inside line. But she did have an ultra-Orthodox rabbi in Jerusalem who called her every Friday and before every Jewish holiday and gave her religious instructions and holiday wishes. Then there were the Lubavitch Hasidim, who had been quick to come to the aid of this little East Berlin community. Lubavitchers are a sect of the Hasidic movement, a more-than-two-hundred-year-old current from Eastern Europe that takes a more spiritual, less intellectual approach to strict observance of Jewish laws and customs. Unlike other Jews, the Lubavitchers have a missionary zeal of near Christian proportions for searching out secular Jews and bringing them back to religion. This has made them unpopular in some Jewish communities, but since the collapse of Communism, they have found fertile ground in Eastern Europe, where Jews for the first time in their lives are trying to learn about Judaism. A West German journalist who happened to be Jewish telephoned Irene to ask about her Passover plans, and as she started describing the event, he asked, “What is your thing for Lubavitchers?”

  She explained, “They are poor people without pretension, and they are easy to relate to.” In other words, they act like Ossis, not Wessis.

  In 1989, Irene had gone to Brooklyn to see Menachem Mendel Schneerson, the white-bearded Rebbe who at almost 90 was leade
r of the Lubavitchers. Schneerson, who regularly predicted the coming of the Messiah and according to some of his followers was himself the Messiah, told Irene to get money and help from the official West German Jewish Community. Irene patiently pointed out that he was talking about West Germany, but she was in East Germany. What did this New York rabbi know about Germany? She patiently explained, “But Rebbe, I am in East Berlin, you know. I mean, there's the wall.”

  ‘Yes, yes, yes. I know,” replied the Rebbe in his Yiddish-inflected English. “But this will not stay. It will change. Everything will change.” Seven months later, to the amazement of almost everyone but Schneerson, the wall came down.

  Now, for several weeks before Passover, Irene, who had never kept a kosher kitchen in her life, boasted to everyone she could find, in and out of the press, that her seder would be extremely Orthodox and strictly kosher. She took to wishing everyone she saw a “kosher Passover.” Only a few years before, she had thought that keeping kosher meant not eating pork. But she had recently learned a great deal about not mixing meat and dairy, eating only fish with scales, looking for the right seals on kosher meat that guaranteed the animal had been properly slaughtered, not eating eggs with blood spots, and even more obscure things, such as cutting off pieces of apple rather than biting into the fruit whole.