A Chosen Few

by Mark Kurlansky

  According to the De Gaulle version, World War II was much like World War I, and the French in unison had fought and defeated the Germans for the greater glory of all France. He always emphasized the 1918 armistice celebration and played down anniversaries of World War II victories, in which France had played only a minor role. The betrayals of French Jews by their fellow Frenchmen, the history of deportations, the fact that there were French concentration camp survivors—all that was inconvenient for the Gaullist myth.

  Nevertheless, De Gaulle did not have particularly bad relations with French Jews. He was remembered as a leader who had worked closely with many Jews in the fight against Petain. Politicians did not think about “the Jewish vote,” which to this day is thought to be an American concept. Even on policy toward Israel, the sentiments of French Jews were not a key factor one way or the other. Mendes-France felt that he had to prove that he did not favor Jews because he was Jewish. De Gaulle had nothing to prove, and Jewish interests were not an issue for him.

  As it happened, his relations with Israel greatly pleased French voters, Jews and non-Jews alike. There was probably no foreign leader with whom De Gaulle had a better relationship than David Ben-Gurion. France had hated the British Mandate because it was British, and from the beginning it had been a strong backer of the State of Israel. De Gaulle continued this policy. In 1961, France provided Israel with sixty-two state-of-the-art jet fighters, the Mirage III, and five years later it provided fifty more. First-class French tanks and helicopters were also furnished. If Israel had a military force that could stand up to the Arab League, it was in part thanks to France. No doubt in De Gaulle's mind, it was entirely thanks to France. The policy made French Jews feel good about their country, but it had the same effect on French non-Jews. France was proud of what it was doing for Israel at a time when France needed to feel proud.

  Since De Gaulle's treatment of his own countrymen was marked by almost unbearable paternalism, it is not surprising that he treated poorer, weaker nations the same way. It seemed that since France had supplied the arms, it should be able to tell Israel how to use them. When on May 22, 1967, the Egyptians decided to block the Gulf of Aqaba, De Gaulle and his military advisers determined that this was not a serious threat to Israel. The Israelis, however, saw it as the first step in a joint Arab war against Israel. Rather than wait for what they were certain would be a coordinated military attack, they decided on a preemptive air strike. While Arab leaders were once again talking about the destruction of Israel and the massacre of Israelis, the President of France forbade Israel to go to war and announced an arms embargo to the Middle East. On June 5, when the Israeli air force began to obliterate the Egyptian air force, De Gaulle was furious.

  From the perspective of French Jews, a war of extermination against Israel had begun, and France was not only refusing to help, it was embargoing. A fundraising committee quickly formed under the Baron Guy de Rothschild, so quickly that no one stopped to think that French Jews had never launched such an emergency fund drive before. Tightly organized demonstrations were immediately planned. To the Ewenczyks, there was nothing new about demonstrating for Israel, only this time they were really worried. If Israel did not get help quickly, the entire population, they feared, would be massacred. Their daughter Suzy marched with Lazare. Men in the Pletzl got shots and medical certificates and prepared to go fight in Israel. Henri Finkelsztajn marched with his father, Icchok, and with most of the people in the neighborhood. Chaim Rottenberg, the anti-Zionist troublemaker from Antwerp, organized his own Orthodox contingent and marched them to the mass show of support that was building in front of the Israeli embassy. Daniel Altmann, a wealthy seventeen-year-old student with no religious feelings at all, demonstrated and helped with the fundraising drive.

  Each group had leaders with portable walkie-talkies to coordinate movements. An estimated 100,000 people brought Paris traffic to a standstill for hours in front of the Israeli embassy. Standing there 100,000 strong, Jews suddenly realized that French Jewry had changed. The North Africans had more than doubled the Jewish population of France to 650,000, almost twice as many Jews as before the war. It had become, after the United States, the Soviet Union, and Israel, the fourth largest Jewish population in the world. And now it was a population that was speaking out.

  The Jews may have been surprised by their own numbers and the effectiveness of their organization, but De Gaulle was astounded. Even when Israel triumphed in only six days and most French cheered the Israeli victory, he turned French foreign policy away from Israel. In a November press conference called to explain the new policy, the French president reflected, “Some people even feared that the Jews, hitherto dispersed but remaining what they have always been—an elite people, self-assured and domineering—might, once reassembled on the site of their former grandeur, transform into ardent and conquering ambition the very moving wishes that they had been formulating for nineteen centuries: ‘Next year in Jerusalem.”

  Jews reacted with shock and fury to the statement, and that surprised the general too. When Grand Rabbi Jacob Kaplan told him that his statement had been anti-Semitic, De Gaulle seemed baffled, insisting that it was a compliment. Possibly it was. The whole thing resembled a kleptomaniac revealing his suspicions of thieves. De Gaulle himself was elite, self-assured, and domineering. Put in Ben-Gurion's position, he might very well have succumbed to all kinds of ambitions. The notion of a people returning to “former grandeur” was pure Gaullism, a phrase he frequently applied to France. But at that moment a new generation of French Jews changed their mind about their parent's World War II hero, Charles De Gaulle.

  Nothing was going to ever be the same again. The Jewish community noticed that they were now sizable and could organize and be heard. The Sephardim had brought a new militancy along with a new population. If nothing else, never again would a deputy be able to stand up in the National Assembly and shout “Sale Juif without hearing a huge outcry in response.

  FRANCE'S “ ‘68” had begun. It began in most places in ‘67 or even a little earlier. It is difficult to understand exactly why, but 1968, like 1848, was a year of spontaneous combustion. The year 1848 had seen similar rebellions for similar reasons in similar countries, but it is more difficult to find a pattern to 1968. In the United States the reason for the rebellion was opposition to the Vietnam War. In Paris and Berlin the Vietnam issue was thrown in as an extra course. French students were tired of the essential myths of Gaullism, a system that had dished out half-truths in the shape of platitudes as their future grew ever more bleak. More than half a million Frenchmen could not find jobs in 1968. Under De Gaulle, these students had seen the economic boom of their childhood slowly evaporate. The Paris movement was loosely related to similar student protests in Berlin and Rome. The Italians started with university issues and ended by protesting the venality of society. In Spain students demonstrated against Franco. The Basques became militant, revived their language, and founded the armed group ETA. In Berlin students started by protesting the way the university was controlled and then moved to protesting the capitalist press monopoly, but ultimately they protested a corrupt German society that could not grasp democracy because it was founded on lies. Young people started asking what their parents had done and what they had not been told in school.

  At the same time, Czechs, not just students but government officials, were turning away from the Soviet model, much as the Hungarians had tried to do, and they were realigning Communism with the ideals that had made it attractive in the first place. Polish students, carefully watching Prague, wanted the same.

  But all these uprisings had a spontaneous quality, starting with smaller issues and growing to increasingly broad intellectual concepts. Perhaps the one thing they all had in common was that the generation had been raised on a glossy version of the horrors their parents saw. The first nuclear generation, who had spent their childhoods from Budapest to California learning to go into the shelter and cover their heads when the bombs
that would destroy the earth were dropped, were coming of age, and they felt that their parents had swallowed too many lies. For young European Jews, there was another issue: Why had their parents not resisted the Nazis more? Why had Jewish communities cooperated in deportations? Why, in 1961 at his trial in Jerusalem, was Eichmann, who negotiated with Jewish leaders for the orderly deportation to death of their people, able to assert when asked about his conscience that he had never encountered any opposition to what he was doing?

  In Paris many of those who had demonstrated for Israel in 1967 also demonstrated in May 1968. Not coincidentally, many of the same organizational techniques, such as walkie-talkie communications, were used. Daniel Altmann, after demonstrating for Israel, had his curiosity piqued enough to spend time on an Israeli kibbutz. But he returned to demonstrate in May. Henri Finkelsztajn, a thirty-year-old high school dropout, also demonstrated. What had begun as a demand for coeducational dormitories was now a general protest backed by the major labor unions.

  One of the leaders of the student movement was Daniel Cohn-Bendit, a German Jew whose parents had returned to Frankfurt in 1949. He was called Dany the Red both for his politics and for his very unsemitic-looking red hair. A kind of folk hero in France, for years afterward French journalists would look him up in Frankfurt and ask him how he became a student radical. “What was the turning point in your life?” asked Andre Harris and Alain de Sedouy, the team who had written the celebrated 1970 Max Ophuls film on French collaboration, The Sorrow and the Pity.

  “It was the war,” said Cohn-Bendit.

  “World War II?”

  “No, no… “

  “The Algerian war?”

  Finally he had to tell them. It was the Middle East Six-Day War. The Palestinian cry, “Drive them to the sea” had rallied him too. It had stuck in his mind. Another thing that stuck in his mind was something said to him when he was arrested in the police crackdown in Paris. Taken to one of the infamous French police commissariats, a policeman said to him, “You're going to be sorry that your parents weren't roasted at Auschwitz.”

  17

  West Germany

  and the

  Promised Land

  ONE THING THAT RUWEN WAKS CAME TO UNDERSTAND growing up in DP camps was that beyond the camp was Germany, and the people who lived there were Nazis. This was the general impression of the entire Waks family, and when they settled in Dtisseldorf, their world was to be the 400 to 600 other Jewish people who had also settled there. They had learned German, but the first language of the family remained Yiddish. It was the kind of Jewish life more typical of Jews in their native Poland than of German Jews.

  In the beginning Lea was afraid. She did not want to walk on the street. They were all Nazis out there. Aaron felt that he knew how to deal with these Germans. If there was a disagreement—over a price, over the right of way while turning a corner, anything at all—he would angrily glare at the German and shout, “You Nazi!” One day, he had an encounter with a policeman and he called him a Nazi and angrily walked away. The policeman was stunned. He had been a small child during the war. Why did this man, who seemed to be a Jew, a survivor of some kind, think he was a Nazi? Because the Jews, especially the foreign Jews, were few and stayed together in Dusseldorf, the policeman was able to find out who Aaron was and locate his apartment. Once he found Aaron, he asked him, “Why did you think I was a Nazi?” For the policeman to live his life as a German of his age, it was essential to understand why this survivor was accusing him of this terrible thing. They talked, and in time the policeman became a close friend of the Waks family. Then they understood that there was at least one German who was not a Nazi.

  Aaron and Lea continued to work with Zionist organizations, and their sons started working with the Zionist Youth Movement. Ruwen and Moishe were sent to school to learn Hebrew in preparation for their move to Israel. As for Lodz or the war or what happened in Poland or what happened to relatives, this remained a mystery to the children. The Waks family shouted about Nazis, but they did not discuss the Holocaust.

  Lea's parents continued their nomadic life, now returning to Dusseldorf and then going back to Israel. Then they settled near Dusseldorf, in Dortmund. Then back to Israel. When they were in Israel, they said that life was too hard. When they were in Germany—Germany was German. They moved almost once a year for the remainder of their lives. Lea's mother died in Israel. Her father died in Germany.

  The five-year age difference between Ruwen and Moishe reflected the change in West German society. When Ruwen was in school, the East German accusation that West German schools were full of Nazi teachers had been true. Ruwen's history teacher had been a Nazi, but he had been a little Nazi. If he was careful about what he said in class, he could keep his job. And so in the busy year-long curriculum, there simply was never any time to discuss the years 1933 to 1945. When Moishe went to the same school, to his fascination, they studied the Holocaust in detail. He would come home with a torrent of questions. But his parents would not talk about it.

  In nearby Cologne, on the day before Christmas in 1959, a monument to the victims of Nazism and a synagogue were marked up with Nazi graffiti, the handiwork of two youthful members of Deutsche Reichspartei, or DRP, a postwar extreme right-wing group. Neither was old enough to have had a real wartime Nazi past, although one had joined a Nazi youth group, Deutsche Jungvolk, just before the end of the war. The two had been schoolboy friends and had joined the DRP together the year before the synagogue attack. They later gave as reasons for joining that it was the only party that truly addressed the Jewish question and stood for the ideals of National Socialism. It was Germany's first glimpse of a new generation of Nazis, the neo-Nazis.

  The Federal Republic shuddered at the realization that the poison had spread to a new generation. There was even a drop-off in membership in extreme right-wing groups. The DRP was accused of being a resurrection of the old Nazi party. It had to publicly declare itself to be “antifascist,” and even that only gave it a temporary reprieve. Eventually it disappeared, only to be re-formed as the Nationaldemokratische Partei Deutschland, the NPD. This game with names was to become part of the standard procedure of neo-Nazi organizations.

  All of West Germany was talking about the rebirth of Nazism. It led to a Nazi graffiti crime wave. In the half-year after the first two youths were arrested, 685 cases of anti-Semitic acts were recorded by law enforcement. In school, a fellow student walked up to Ruwen and simply said with no real fervor, “Heil Hitler.” Ruwen went home and told his father. Aaron immediately went to the school director. The boy's parents, in a refrain that would become commonplace in the 1990s, said that they could not understand why he had said such a thing. They certainly were not Nazis.

  A sullen misfit in Moishe's class also adopted Nazi rhetoric. He became conspicuously anti-Semitic and even turned his exam questions into diatribes against the Jews. But for this he got very poor grades, and while Moishe was well-liked by his classmates, this unhappy colleague was an outcast. He was a curious figure for Moishe because for all he had heard about Germans, this friendless boy was the first openly anti-Semitic German he had ever encountered.

  The Jewish community in Dusseldorf grew slowly. Romanian and Hungarian Jews, escaping the problems of their own countries, arrived in small numbers. In Budapest, Gyorgy Gado was divorced, and his wife and daughter moved to Dusseldorf. The official Jewish Gommunity was eagerly receiving these new Jews, struggling to build itself up. But the Waks family was actively trying to get Jews to leave. Ruwen and Moishe worked hard for the Zionist Youth Movement. Youth were Israel's future. Too many older people like their grandparents had found Israel to be too difficult a life, but young people could build Israel. Nowhere did Zionists apply more pressure than in Germany, because the idea of Jews staying in Germany was particularly distasteful to them. Yet they were never very successful in Germany. In a good year one or two Jews would move to Israel, but often they would not stay.

  Nevertheless, Ruwe
n and Moishe were trying, and the Community was not happy about their efforts. The Jewish leadership was in a difficult position, because they did not want to say they were opposed to Zionism. They simply didn't want people to leave. Wanting a Jewish community in Dusseldorf does not make you an anti-Zionist, but it does make you unhappy to see Zionists recruiting people in Dusseldorf.

  Throughout West Germany the same tension emerged between the Zionists and the Community leaders. In Dusseldorf there was usually no room available at the Jewish Community Center for Zionist meetings. Ruwen and Moishe would sometimes hold their meetings in a stairwell. And they had to find their own financing. The Jewish Community had no funding available for Zionist activities.

  Then suddenly in 1967 came a big boost to the Zionist cause— the Six-Day War. It was more a boost in sympathy than in actual numbers. Of twenty thousand Jews in West Germany, four hundred were members of the Zionist Youth movement. Only twenty actually went to Israel at the time of the war, and most of those did not stay. Yet it was a record year for German Zionism. Ruwen volunteered and stayed permanently in Israel. His parents had to sign papers to give him permission. Moishe was too young to go. Aaron could not even attempt to conceal his pride in his son who had volunteered for Israel. Lea jutted her jaw and wore a stiff face of approval as she sent her son off to a faraway war. She wasn't supposed to think of it that way. She had raised her sons to speak Hebrew and be Israeli. She had no choice but to approve of what Ruwen was doing.