A Chosen Few

by Mark Kurlansky

  WHEN WERNER AND HELLE HANDLER returned to Germany to begin their great task, they had nowhere to go. The Polish German border had been redrawn again, and the town Werner's family had adopted because it was in Germany, was now also in Poland. His only living relatives had escaped to South America. Helle's family, whose books traced their lineage back to the Spanish expulsion of 1492, was also gone. Her mother had last been seen in Minsk, and her father, she now learned, had been taken out in front of the inmates of Buchenwald and beaten to death. But that Germany was defeated and in ruins. They would help build the new one, a Germany that completely broke with its past.

  They arrived in Hamburg, and Werner's only skill was as a woodworker. Surely, they reasoned, Germany would welcome dedicated young people who were ready to build the new Germany. Handler wrote to the Northwest German Radio station that he had returned to Germany to do something useful and that he had heard they were offering training in radio. I am back with no qualifications; will you train me? That was all he had to say. They took him immediately. There was a great demand for Germans who had never been Nazis.

  With his tough, direct manner, Handler felt the ice of the cold war early. He was not a political sophisticate like Mia Lehmann, who had been active in the Communist party for more than fifteen years, or her husband, who had been thrown out of school in 1934 for forming a Marxist cell among his classmates. Handler was not even a member of the Communist party. He was simply an angry Hamburg radio journalist with a sense of mission, preaching the new socialist democratic anti-Nazi Germany when and wherever he had a chance. In late 1947 he was one of a number of journalists who were fired in what seemed to be a general housecleaning in western-sector media.

  Shortly after that he was offered a job with Berliner Rundfunk, or Berlin Radio, the Soviet-controlled German radio station for Berlin, Hamburg, and Cologne. The Handlers moved to an apartment in the British sector of Berlin, where the radio station was located. To them there was nothing political about the sectors—it was all occupied Germany. But in 1948, after their first daughter was born at the Jewish Hospital, separate currencies were established for East and West. The money Werner earned no longer had value in the sector where he lived, so they moved to the East, where their second daughter was born.

  When separate currencies were established for East and West, the Lehmanns understood what was about to happen and they were worried about it. The scenario was supposed to be a slow evolution toward a democratic socialist state. But if East and West split, the East would instantly be declared the new socialist democratic Germany. Both of the Lehmanns agreed that the Germans were not ready for this. Just a few years earlier, many of them had been Nazis. Now they would be socialists, and for the same reason—it was what the existing power told them to be. But how many of them understood socialism and were really prepared in their minds to embrace a totally new kind of society?

  There had never been an East and West Germany. Linguistically and culturally, the division had always been between north and south. But although both sides were Germany, both peoples were German, and the division of East and West was artificial, a mentality of “us” and “them” very quickly took hold on both sides. Contributing to this frame of mind was an 858-mile border that followed no regional lines, no cultural patterns, and lacked all historical logic. Rather, it was defined by guards, barbed wire, and minefields. Still, the small group of Jews who had returned to build the new Germany felt that their German Democratic Republic had a new vision, while the Federal Republic in the West was simply a deplorable continuation of the old Germany—the part that refused to go along with progress.

  One East German Jew, expressing a widespread point of view, said, “In West Germany the judges, the police, the civil service, the criminal police, and, once they started rebuilding it, the officers of the Army, were all people who had big jobs in the Nazi party, in the civil service, in the government.” The only inaccurate part of that observation was the word “all.” As the old alliance broke up and the West increasingly came to see the Soviet Union as its principle enemy, it treated Germany's Nazi past with an ever-increasing leniency. The first Bundestag election revealed a significant presence of extreme right-wing voters and political organizations. The American policy of “denazification” had been dropped in preparation for the creation of the West German state. Once created, that state in 1950 declared an amnesty for low-level Nazis. The Soviets had fired 85 percent of the almost 2,500 judges, prosecutors, and lawyers in their sector, and most of them went to the West, where they usually qualified for the 1950 amnesty. Of 11,500 West German judges, an estimated 5,000 had been involved in courts under the Third Reich. In the East, Nazis were also purged from the schools, the railroad, and the post office, and many of these ousted personnel found homes and jobs in the West as well. This fact was given enormous publicity in the East. Then there was the Globke case.

  Hans Globke was West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer's state secretary of the Chancellery. He had been known as an efficient, loyal administrator both in the Weimar government and in the Third Reich. At the 1935 Nuremberg rally Hitler had announced a new series of laws that gradually stripped Jews of their German citizenship, their right to own shops, their right to attend schools, and their right to mix with non-Jews. It was an important step in the dehumanizing of Jews that would lead to their being hauled off in cattle cars. To give legitimacy to these new laws, legal opinions had to be written, as they would for any other German law. These legal commentaries had been Hans Globke's contribution. Later, still serving in Hitler's government, Globke had proposed forcing all German Jews to take the middle name of Israel or Sarah. The East Germans denounced the Adenauer government for the presence of this. Third Reich figure, but when Globke offered his resignation, Adenauer refused it. The East Germans demanded that Globke stand trial and eventually tried him in absentia and sentenced him to life imprisonment. In the ten years he served Adenauer, Globke offered his resignation five times, but Adenauer insisted that his aide had done nothing wrong in simply writing “an objective interpretation of the racial laws.”

  Werner Handler had become the Bonn correspondent for Berliner Rundfunk, and he covered the Globke affair. He also covered the organized extreme right, which reached a level in 1950s West Germany that it would not reach again until the reunification of Germany decades later. In 1954 there were almost fifty extreme right-wing organizations in the new West Germany, with an estimated 78,000 members. Expelled Nazis from the East, former targets of denazification in the western zones, and some who had been quiet for a time were now regrouping. Handler thought the West Germans were at best soft on Nazis. While he was in East Berlin in 1948, someone painted a swastika on the Berliner Rundfunk building, and when Handler and others protested, the station director called a meeting and said, “There is one thing you should know. We don't have discussions with Nazis. If we catch one, we beat it out of him. We don't discuss it.”

  THE FIRST TIME Irene Runge saw Europe, in 1949, she was a seven-year-old New Yorker, her ship had just pulled into Gdansk, and she wanted to jump and swim back all the way to Washington Heights. Her father was a German Jew who might have been destined for the family's business in Mannheim. But when Hitler came to power, he went to Paris with his non-Jewish girlfriend and lived the leftist intellectual life of the days of the Popular Front, changing his name from Alexander Kupermann to Georges Alexan, which he deemed a fashionable nom de plume. He wrote articles and pondered larger works that he was never to write, but he did manage to use his base in Paris to get his entire family out of Germany.

  When the Germans invaded France, he fled to Palestine, where he convinced his girlfriend to convert to Judaism before they married. Then they moved to the United States, settling in the Washington Heights area of upper Manhattan, west of the Broadway trolley. It was a Jewish neighborhood with a concentration of Austrian and German refugees. He opened a shop in the vast, dark labyrinth of the Times Square subway station, where he sold bo
oks and art. The shop became a hangout for German refugees, who drifted in and out all day, were served coffee, and passed hours arguing and debating in German.

  Their only child, Irene, was born in 1942. After the war, the family did not go back to Germany. Irene's father still enjoyed his shop and his German intellectual life in Manhattan, and her mother liked living in the boom town that was postwar New York. But then came the cold war, and some of their friends—the crowd that passed through his shop—were called for questioning by the U.S. Congress on their leftist activities. In 1949, with the same quick instincts that had saved him from Nazi Germany, Irene's father told his wife and daughter to pack because they were moving to the newly formed German Democratic Republic. Over the protests of his wife and the whining of his daughter, they were soon living in Pankow, an East Berlin neighborhood just north of Prenz-lauer Berg. Pankow had not been bombed, and so many of the East German ruling elite lived there that Westerners often sneeringly referred to the East German government as “the Pankow government.”

  Back in Washington Heights, little Irene's only notion of a place called Germany had been that she would see her parents and neighbors putting together packages, and she was always told it was to help the poor people in Germany. They would joke about putting her in the box and shipping her off. And now here they were, off to that miserable place where the poor people waited for packages. But she was told that her friend Johnny, with whom she played in Washington Heights, would be there too. He was. In fact, she grew up in Pankow around the same kind of people, and in some cases the same people, as she had in Washington Heights.

  She grew up with the idea that East Germany was a place where Jewish intellectuals speaking a variety of languages had little houses with housekeepers. That was Pankow. Most of the people had fought the Nazis one way or another. There were no Nazis here. She never met one. She only met anti-Nazis. The Nazis must have been in the West, she thought.

  As the cold war progressed, Irene learned to speak more and more German, because Americans and their language were not well liked. An American was an “Ami,” and the look she saw in other children's eyes when they said to her “Ami go home” was enough to convince her to speak German. But she never did quite fit in. She learned to speak flawless colloquial Berliner, but she never thought of the language, the culture, or the idea of German-ness as being who she was. She was a Pankow Jew. Religion did not exist in Pankow and Irene did not exactly know what a Jew was—to her, a Jew was a Communist. But then, she did not have a clear idea of what a Communist was, either. To her, a Communist was a Jew. In her world all the Communists she met were Jewish, and all the Jews she met were Communists. Irene and her friends in their Pankow Jewish immigrant community had chewing gum and wore blue jeans. Some people said these things were symbols of imperialist culture, an idea she could not quite grasp. But her parents understood, and in time they stopped dressing her that way. Her mother never seemed to fit in, either. This life had been her father's grand scheme, and he lived happily in this neighborhood full of important builders of the new Germany and he talked with them and he thought and he wrote. But for her mother, it was an isolated life. There was nothing in Pankow for her. She was not building a new Germany and had been happy to be away from the old one.

  Irene's childhood dream was to be a guerrilla fighter—a Soviet guerrilla fighter, popping out of the forest and attacking the Nazis. Her childhood literature contained many stories about the good Russians fighting the evil Nazis. Her father had very definite ideas about what children could read. He encouraged them to read the great German literature, but he strictly forbade German children's fables and folk tales. The old Germans had been raised on those dark myths. Mickey Mouse, on the other hand, was allowed.

  Irene knew that the families in the Pankow colony were not the same as Germans. One of the ways they were different was that they were not supposed to eat pork. Also, if meat and dairy were served on the same dish, several minutes of fleishig-milchig jokes, most of which she didn't get, would follow.

  When Irene's parents had dinner guests, which was very often, the meat was a great topic of conversation. In Germany most meat turns out to be pork. Irene's mother had a special recipe where the pork was cut in thin strips and then marinated, breaded, and fried. The guests would take a bite and murmur that it was chicken, that it tasted like chicken, what good chicken it was. Then someone would whisper, “Yeah, but it's really pork, you know.” There would be a lot of whispering around the table, and finally someone would ask Irene's mother how she got the pork to look and taste like chicken. Her mother would explain the recipe, the cutting, the marinating, and the seasoning. It was called “ko-shering the pork.”

  Another peculiarity of Irene's secular childhood was her father's hat. Her father spent his days reading and studying, and as he did so, he wore a strange brimless hat. It was not a yarmulke. It was his own idea of a hat. But when people came over who were not in his regular circle, he would quickly remove it. He always said that he wore it because of a draft.

  One of the Jewish writers from New York who visited the family told Irene that she was Jewish, which she thought was a great idea. The writer gave her a children's book teaching the Hebrew alphabet. To her father's chagrin, Irene loved this notion of being Jewish, because if you were Jewish, you got a completely different alphabet, like a secret language. She could be a Jewish Soviet guerrilla fighter with a special language that nobody understood.

  When Irene started telling her schoolmates that she was Jewish, they paid little attention, except for once, when they came to her with a question. Since she was a Jew, they thought she might know the answer: Why did the Jews kill Jesus?

  Irene had no answer. She went home that day with two questions for her father. “Why did the Jews kill Jesus?” and “Who was Jesus?”

  One December day in 1951—by coincidence, Stalin's seventy-second birthday—Irene's mother was not home when Irene came back from school. Nor was she home the next day, or the next. Irene was sent to various people's houses to stay. At first, she was mostly aware that she didn't have to go to school. Gradually she came to understand that her mother had died, but she did not learn very much more because her father would not talk about it. In time, she came to understand that her mother had killed herself. Only years later, talking to cousins, did Irene realize how much her mother had disliked being in Germany and how unhappy she had been in Pankow.

  IN THE EARLY 1950s, West Germany launched a policy by the name Wiedergutmachung, which means “making it good again,” or setting things right. Israelis always preferred the Hebrew word shilumim, meaning “reparation payments.” Wiedergutmachung was the expansion of a program that had been started under U.S. direction in the American-occupied zone. East Germany refused to participate in this or any other such schemes, insisting that West Germany was the continuation of the Third Reich and thus should pay for its crimes, whereas the German Democratic Republic was a new society that had no predecessor. When the Federal Republic was created in the West, it agreed to pay an individual four marks, which was then worth about one dollar, for every day spent in a Nazi prison or concentration camp. It also made a payment for the loss of career and for loss of life. The payments amounted to billions of dollars. Much of it went abroad. In the Netherlands these payments financed the rebuilding of the Jewish community and remained the economic base of that community's activities.

  Israel, facing a desperate economic situation and unable to obtain financing from anywhere else, saw Wiedergutmachung as a last hope. Many Jews in and out of Israel were appalled by the idea that Israel would enter into any kind of relationship with Germany. This was a time when extremists were demanding that Jews who chose to live in Germany should be expelled from Judaism in some way. But the 1952 treaty, signed in the Luxembourg city hall, earned Israel some $700 million in goods, services, and capital annually for the next fourteen years, at a time when tens of thousands of Holocaust victims were living in Israeli tents. For that p
rice, the West German Federal Republic could claim to the world—in spite of what the East Germans were saying—that the Bundesrepublik was a new Germany trying to make up for its past, making it good again.

  The reparations created an entirely new German bureaucracy, as millions of claims for individual payments poured into Germany. That was how the Zuckers, who had left Germany for good, ended up back where they started in Berlin. Ron Zuriel was born Werner Zucker in Berlin in 1916 to a family that had immigrated from Poland. The Zuckers, like the Wakses, derived their Jewish identity less from religious practice than from a passionate involvement in Zionism. When Ron joined the Zionist movement at 15, he was firmly committed to the idea of a Jewish state someday in Palestine, but he had no real plans to leave Germany personally. Two years later, Hitler came to power. After two more years the first of the Nuremberg laws were announced. The Zuckers heard Jews discussing whether to leave or stay, whether things would get better or worse. But the Nuremberg laws were all it took for Ron and his father to decide. They were not going to live in a country where Ron's father had to give up his textile business because he was a Jew. Ron was not going to live in a country where the law forbade him to date a non-Jew. Now Zionism gained a new meaning for the Zuckers. The following year, Ron and his father (his mother had died years earlier) emigrated to Palestine. Soon Ron went to England to study law, but two wars interrupted his education. First he went back to Palestine to serve in World War II. Then, soon after resuming his education in England, he went back to Palestine to fight in the 1948 Arab-Israeli war. During this war he changed his name from Werner Zucker to Ron Zuriel. In 1950 he was at last ready to open a law practice in Israel.