A Chosen Few

by Mark Kurlansky

  While fighting on the border, Isaac lost track of his brother. When the Arab-Israeli war was over, he and a friend traveled through Israel looking for Alex. Now Isaac began to reflect on what he had done. The Germans had forced Alex to separate from his father and mother when he was two years old. Then when he was seven and had another father and mother, Isaac had done the same thing to him. Isaac was starting to feel guilty when he thought of Alex alone in this ungentle new country. You ask a seven-year-old if he wants to take a trip with you and leave forever. What a question. It was crazy. Along with guilt came panic: What if something had happened to him? More than a thousand Jews had already been killed.

  Isaac served on the Israeli border for thirteen months. Then, unaccustomed to the lack of water in the desert, his kidneys gave out. This young survivors’ country intended to keep its forces at a lean fighting weight. Isaac was told that Israel did not need kidney cases, and he was sent back to Holland to recuperate.

  But before he left, he learned of a Dutch-speaking kibbutz and there he found Alex. Now he realized that he had no home to offer him. Alex could have a home in Israel. Isaac went back to Holland without him, and Alex, the little Jewish boy from Rotterdam who had become the little Christian boy from south Holland, was now called David, part of a new generation of Israeli citizens.

  ANTWERP WAS ABOUT TO LOSE its first postwar Jewish couple. After more than a year of traveling between Israel and Antwerp, Sam Perl and Anna had bought an apartment in Tel Aviv. In 1950 they shipped their furniture and prepared to move there. But they never went. Sam wanted to raise his children in a traditional Jewish world. He didn't like the religious schools in Israel and the schools in Antwerp were getting good again—the very schools in the very buildings that he had gone to before the war. Antwerp still seemed to be his home. He never knew exactly why he didn't leave. “Maybe I lost the guts,” he sometimes speculated.

  Many Jews did leave Antwerp in 1950. Europe was once again looking dangerous. The old wartime alliance had broken up, and the world was dividing into the Soviet and Western sides. In 1947, General George Marshall gave a commencement address at Harvard about a new policy directed “against hunger, poverty, desperation, and chaos.” The Marshall Plan promised to rebuild Holland at a point when the Dutch were becoming desperate. Shortly before Marshall's address, the Dutch government, faced with continued shortages of food and basic materials, had been developing wild contingency plans for survival. One such plan called for people to sleep longer and spend more of the day in bed.

  The Soviet bloc chose not to participate in the Marshall Plan, however, and from 1947 on there were two Europes. While people in the eastern bloc continued to struggle for basic materials, the western bloc after a few years began to experience spectacular growth under the Marshall Plan. Soon, used tires were no longer in demand in Amsterdam, and Mauritz Auerhaan, the Bucharest piano player turned Amsterdam tire salesman, switched to importing used West German televisions. The new West Germany was developing so quickly that it was far ahead of the old European Allies in new industries such as televisions.

  The creation of the State of Israel was one of the last things the old Allies did together. It was with the enthusiastic backing of the Soviet Union along with France and the United States that the close UN vote was carried. With the Soviets’ backing, Czechoslovakia trained pilots and devoted an entire airfield to sending weapons to the new Israeli Army, playing a critical role in Israel's survival in 1948. But that same year, the joint occupation of Germany began to break down. In 1949, with tensions mounting and Soviet and Western foreign ministers no longer even meeting, the West created a separate Federal Republic with a capital in Bonn. The Soviets responded by establishing the German Democratic Republic with its capital in Berlin.

  The following year, the first East-West shooting war broke out in Korea. This drove the West to do what had been up to then unthinkable: It rearmed the Germans. West Germany, which had been banned from military activity, was now once again to have an army, though only to operate on German soil. The Soviets responded by doing the same with East Germany. Meanwhile, the Korean War was causing such economic instability in Europe — inflation and shortages—that it threatened to undo all the progress of the Marshall Plan.

  Many Jews thought a new war was coming, once again brought on by economic chaos and a rearmed Germany. It was all happening again. Thousands of Jews, many of Eastern European origin, decided to leave Antwerp, for the United States and Canada. They sold off their property and abandoned the diamond trade, which, as the world grew less secure, was rallying. In Paris there was a great deal of talk in the Pletzl about the new war and about moving again to safety. Most of the Jews there were still alive because they had left when the last war started. Icchok Finkelsztajn was convinced that World War III was about to erupt and seriously thought of moving as far away from Europe as possible. He kept talking about Madagascar, a place so far away—“the end of the earth” — that a Jew could survive the next war. Ironically, before the Third Reich decided on the Final Solution, Adolf Eichmann had contemplated deporting Jews to Madagascar.

  Victor Waterman, whose family had been Amsterdamers for more than three centuries, remembered how long he had waited last time, how he almost hadn't made it out, how his brothers and sister and mother had stayed and died. He was worried about the Russians and about the soon-to-be-rearmed Germans and about what the Dutch, who had acted so badly before, would do this time. He concluded that he couldn't trust anyone in Europe anymore. He was still in the chicken business and still had contacts in the United States. In 1951 he and his wife and children moved to Union City, New Jersey, where he began working again in the kosher chicken industry. When people asked him why he had moved, he would say, “When you've experienced the Germans, you trust nobody.”

  10

  In the

  New Berlin

  WHILE THOUSANDS OF SURVIVORS WERE WAITING IN Germany to arrange for a ship to take them away out of Europe so they could be far from Germany, a small number of German Jews went to English ports looking for ships to get back to Germany. Most of them had barely managed to get out only a few years before.

  From the time Mia Lehmann left Antwerp for Berlin until she finally escaped to England in the late 1930s, moving to Germany had been for her a nearly fatal choice. Mia was a small woman —it seemed almost by design. She could lean close to people, ask them about their troubles, and then turn her head to listen so that her ear would be exactly at the level of the other person's mouth. Her strong and determined jawline contrasted with her soft and sympathetic eyes. An activist by nature, she did not think that Nazis coming to power and ruling the streets with brown-shirted bullies was any reason for her to be quiet. To her, it was all the more reason to speak out. She spent two years, from 1934 to 1936, in a Nazi prison in Silesia, accused of plotting to overthrow the government. She always laughed about the charge, because she thought it gave her undue credit; all she had really been doing was getting aid io families of political prisoners. She was one of six Jewish women in her cell block, all of whom served their sentences for political crimes and were released. The Nazis had not yet decided to murder every Jew. Maybe they would just send them to Madagascar. After her release, Mia had to report to the police once every week. She had no grasp of the extent of what the Nazis were planning, but as she watched Jews near the Oranienburgerstrasse synagogue being rounded up in open trucks and taken away, she understood that she would not survive if she stayed in Germany.

  To leave, another country had to agree to accept her as a refugee. She had to have a sponsor to get a permit. It all took money. The Jews who had money were leaving, and those who didn't were being rounded up in trucks. Between 1933, when Hitler came to power, and 1938, half of the 500,000 Jews in Germany got out. Finally in May 1939, Mia's international Communist connections landed her a permit to go to England and work cleaning houses. Three months later, the war started and it was impossible to escape.

  WERN
ER HANDLER'S FAMILY were German Jews who suddenly found themselves living in Poland when the borders were redrawn after World War I. Shortly after Werner was born in 1920, the family moved to the mountains a little to the west so that they would be in Germany again and not Poland. Eighteen years later, in November 1938, Werner and his father were among the twenty thousand Jews arrested during Kristallnacht, the night Jews and Jewish buildings throughout Germany were simultaneously assaulted. The Handlers were taken to Sachsenhausen.

  In those days Sachsenhausen had no gas chambers or crematoriums. Werner, 18 years old, could not really understand what this place was, this strange triangle of barracks in Oranienburg. He and his fellow inmates were marched and worked and abused, and it seemed like some sort of prisoner-of-war camp, but there was no war. It was still peacetime. The camp had been set up for six thousand political activists and criminals. But Handler and his father were among another six thousand men who had been brought in, all Jews rounded up on Kristallnacht. Werner did not understand what the Nazis were doing in this place, but with twelve thousand men it was now very crowded. Their clothes were not warm enough, and there were not enough blankets. The inmates found sleeping mates to keep each other warm on the straw where they slept. There were beatings, and disease, and overworking, and the one thing V/erner did understand was that “anybody who lives in these camps can be dead in ten minutes.” The political prisoners taught ihe Jews how to survive there, what to do and not to do.

  After a few months Werner and his father were both released. Before they got out of the camp, a group of political prisoners told Werner, “When you get out, wherever you go, tell about people like us. Tell what is going on. Tell them in England that Germany is preparing for an enormous war.” It was the time of the Munich pact, when Western Europe had appeared to convince itself that “peace in our time” was possible.

  Werner arrived in London with ten marks. On the boat over he had asked a fellow passenger what the English word for war was, and even knowing few other words, he told everyone he talked to that there was going to be “war.” The English patted him patroniz-ngly on the shoulder. Clearly the boy had been through some upsetting experiences.

  While Werner and his father had been in Sachsenhausen, his mother had tried to arrange passage to England for the family, but she had been able to get only one permit, for Werner. It was now up to him to arrange papers for the rest of the family. When he got to London, he went to his mother's distant cousin, a barrister named Bernard Gill is, and told him about the camps, the storm troopers on the streets, and how his parents were being robbed of their money and property. He tried to make Gillis understand what it was like in Germany, and he said that he doubted his parents could survive there much longer.

  The barrister listened sympathetically and then explained that if they came, he would have to support them, since they would not be able to work in England. But he could not assume this responsibility since he was already supporting a rabbi who had come over and he just did not have the money to support anyone else.

  Both Werner Handler's parents were killed in Auschwitz.

  When the war broke out, the British government decided it was too risky to trust any Germans in their midst. Werner Handler was sent to an internment camp on the Isle of Man and then to Canada. He had never been particularly political, but once again he found that the political militants were the people to know. They were the ones who spoke out for better conditions. They were the ones who knew how to survive, and he wanted to be one of them. In 1942 the British started allowing German Jewish refugees to work in defense jobs and even to serve in the military, but the British Army rejected Handler because it regarded him as a socialist troublemaker.

  Back in England, he worked repairing bomb damage. Mia Leh-mann could now work in a factory. German Jews had their own world in wartime England, with political organizations such as Free German Youth and cultural movements and leftist movements. By the end of the war, Mia Lehmann, Werner Handler, and many other German Jews had met and married fellow refugees.

  After the war there was little enthusiasm among them for returning to Germany. But a few German Jews, especially those still in their twenties, decided that even if they did not really want to, they had an obligation to return. Some thought they owed it to all the people they loved who were now dead. They believed that “a new Germany” was going to be built, one that was democratic and socialist—a complete break from the past. If idealistic young people didn't go back to build it and make sure it was very different from the old Germany, who was going to do it?

  Handler and his wife, Helle, were among those who went back to build this new anti-Nazi socialist Germany. Helle had come from an old Sephardic family in a town near the Dutch border. She had left Germany to try to get to South Africa, where her father's older brother ran a hotel. But she had not been able to get farther than England. After the war her South African uncle went to England to convince her and her new husband, Werner, to take over his hotel. But Werner and Helle wanted to fight racism, and they reasoned that in South Africa they would be in constant trouble. In the new Germany they had an opportunity to change things. Most of their fellow German Jews were not as enthusiastic as they were about the promise of the new Germany and regularly urged both of them not to go back. Of the more than eight thousand refugees in the Free German Youth movement in England, only a few hundred returned to Germany. They did not return as Jews, and they did not expect to lead a Jewish life. Werner Handler, one of the few German Jews of his generation to grow up in a kosher household, had concluded, “I am broygez with my God.” Broygez is a Yiddish word for when you quarrel, become angry, and stop speaking to each other.

  In 1946, Handler stopped off to say good-bye to Barrister Gillis. “I have always had a bad conscience about your parents,” Gillis said. “But we couldn't know what was happening. Not the truth of what the Germans were doing.”

  Handler understood. Before he had gone to Sachsenhausen, he v/ould never have believed what the Germans were doing either. In fact, for most of the war he had hoped his parents would survive. Then in 1944, Russian troops had liberated Maidanek. When Handler read an account by a Russian writer of this death factory that operated day and night, he scoffed, “Why is he telling us this? Does he think we don't hate the Nazis enough already?” For an entire week he dismissed the story. Then he started thinking about what he had seen in Sachsenhausen and how afterward people in England had patted him on the back very kindly and said, “It's all right, my boy.” He realized that the account was probably true and that he would never see his parents again. “Since then,” he said, “I have known that the unimaginable can be true.”

  THE LEHMANNS WENT to Berlin in 1946. The mountains of rubble had been mostly cleared from the thoroughfares, but there were still entire neighborhoods without a single building or even a wall—blocks of brick and stone heaps, with claws of twisted pipe reaching up. Mia's husband was a Berlin Jew from Charlottenburg, a suburb to the West. The first commuter train in Berlin had run between the center of Berlin and Charlottenburg. Now Berlin was not a center with suburbs, but four zones. The old center was the Russian zone, and Charlottenburg was the British zone. The Lehmanns believed that with the help of the Soviets a new democratic Communist Germany would be built, and that this bold new experiment would in time so outshine anything else that it would be adopted as the model for all of Germany.

  They moved to the Soviet sector, to Prenzlauer Berg, an area of three-story tile-roofed, vine-covered buildings in the stylishly severe Berlin design. It had no windows left, no heat and no hot water, but it still had its geometric bas relief friezes—little touches of detail on the gray, early-twentieth-century facades. Compared to most of Berlin, Prenzlauer Berg was in good condition. From Alex-anderplatz, which had been the center, they could see little but rubble in all directions. Many people were still living in the basements of collapsed buildings.

  They used rolls of plastic to cover the empty window fram
es, and they had a little coal-burning stove for the winter. In 1948, Mia, who was almost 40, became pregnant with her first child. The sector authorities had glass put in the window of one room for their baby girl. In the spring the trees that lined the streets of Prenzlauer Berg at methodically spaced intervals turned green again and birds nested in them. The Lehmanns felt as if they were part of an exciting experiment, working together with their old comrades who had fought and suffered and escaped and now were back to rebuild and this time make it work. They were not looking for Jewish life. Jewish life had ended for Mia Lehmann on that Yom Kippur morning in the Romanian Bucovina, when she found her mother sitting on the ground. They had other things in their life now. Mia had a whole city of people with troubled stories to listen to. Except that she knew that too many of those people had been Nazis.

  The couple who lived below them had been Nazis—not major figures, but what came to be known as “little Nazis.” They had been Nazi party snitches on the block. Mia avoided them, but one day she was walking with her baby girl, and the woman came up and peeked into the baby carriage. Her face rumpled into a goofy smile. “What a nice baby! What a lovely baby!” she cooed, while Mia stood in silence thinking that only three years earlier this same woman would not have allowed this baby to live.

  After that Mia and the woman talked almost every day, although they never discussed anything of substance. The other woman didn't seem to mind Mia's reserve. How was she to know that Mia was normally a very different kind of person? The woman loved the Lehmann baby. When Mia had to go out, especially when the weather was bad and she didn't want to take her outside, she would leave the baby with her new neighbor. The neighbor would always visit on their daughter's birthday and bring chocolate, which was hard to get in the Soviet zone after 1949. She had contacts in the West.