A Chosen Few

by Mark Kurlansky

  MK: What is it like to be 83? What does the world look like?

  SINGER: The same like 23 because I am the same man. I have the same troubles. I have the same passions. I have even somehow, although I don't have as much, hope as I had at 20, but more or less the same. Maybe I'll write another good story.

  MK: But you mean all of the questions you have been asking all of your life, none of them have been answered?

  SINGER: No. No question can be. Of course if I ask what time it is and someone gives me the time, a question has been answered, but when it comes to the so-called eternal questions, none of them were answered.

  MK: So you keep asking them?

  SINGER: I was always compelled to. We always say what did God do. And God is silent as ever. We have to make peace with it or else.

  23

  Belgium,

  On a Bank

  of the Yser

  IN THE 1970S, WHILE JEWISH LIFE WAS PROSPERING IN Antwerp's diamond district, something very different was happening sixty miles away by a bank of the Yser River along a flat, muddy stretch to the North Sea. In the Flemish language it was called the IJzerbedevaart, the pilgrimage to the Yser. An annual event that began in 1920, the IJzerbedevaart was the kind of internecine Belgian affair that had rarely interested Belgian Jews. It had to do with the animosity between the Flemish, who are essentially Catholic ethnic Dutch, and the French-speaking Belgians. It was a dispute between Catholics.

  The pilgrimage was supposed to be a demonstration for peace, a ceremonial march to a dank and stark monument, a 150-foot-high tower with a bulky Celtic cross on the top. The words “no more war” are written on the tower in four languages. But it has never been a very peaceful pilgrimage. In the beginning, the Flemish made the pilgrimage to commemorate their staggering losses in the World War I trenches under the leadership of French-speaking officers. Why had the frontline troops been 80 percent Flemish without any Flemish-speaking officers? The IJzerbedevaart quickly turned into an expression of Flemish nationalism—the desire of the Flemish to have a separate country. Flemish nationalism is not popular with Belgian Jews because Antwerp is in the Flemish region and because, while Antwerp Jews claim to have a generally good relationship with their Flemish neighbors, those who lived through the German occupation remember that the extreme nationalists had many Nazi sympathizers in their ranks.

  By the 1970s, the Flemish, once the minority, made up more than half of the Belgian population, and within that population was a strong Flemish nationalist movement. At the same time a new crop of Europeans was emerging, and the IJzerbedevaart drew them with a magnetic force. Europe's second generation of Nazis, neo-Nazis, were coming into their own, and the Flemish pilgrimage gave them a place to meet—a place for British Nazis to meet Spanish Nazis, and more important, a place for the older ideological Nazis to connect with brutal young men who were looking for a reason to hit someone. A half-century after it started, Jews began to notice the IJzerbedevaart and the one-story village of Diksmuide where it took place.

  Among some 30,000 Flemish nationalists, only a few hundred foreign fascists attended the weekend. The organizers claimed that the foreign extremists were unwelcome but did nothing to keep them out. They virtually took over the town for the weekend. The few main streets of this village, the cozy Belgian cafes and dark bars, were filled with men of varying ages in gray and black uniforms and jungle fatigues, sporting swastikas, SS insignia, and other fascist emblems, passing out books and brochures—many of them printed in the United States in a variety of languages—praising the Third Reich and berating immigrants, Jews, and Zionists.

  While the pilgrimage was sponsored by groups with strongly antimilitary sentiment, uniformed young paramilitaries marched, legs high, through the little main street of Diksmuide. In Belgium, as in much of Europe, there are laws against “the open display of Nazi nostalgia,” which includes wearing Nazi insignia and uniforms and goose-stepping through town. But while the gendarmerie stayed vigilant and occasionally confiscated a club or knife, it did little to enforce the anti-Nazi laws. The city authorities were concerned only that the Flemings to whom they had given permission to march appeared to have had their ranks thoroughly infiltrated by West Germans.

  Diksmuide is in the heart of militant Flanders, and the great majority of the Nazi nostalgists were Flemish nationalists. The town's mayor, Hendrik Laridon, was a member of the Flemish Christian Democratic party, a moderate center-right party that often dominated Belgian governments. He stood passively on the main street as hundreds goose-stepped by and, in a familiar refrain, asserted that the wise policy was to let the young people “blow off steam.”

  After they marched, they blew off more steam in the taverns at one end of town, where they traded contraband Nazi memorabilia concealed in the innermost compartments of wallets, drank a great deal of beer, and expounded on their visions of Europe. The British, some in uniform, preached against Pakistanis. The Dutch denounced the Surinamese, the French lashed out at North Africans, and the Germans raged against the Turks. They also denounced each other. The northerners hated the Mediterraneans, although Spanish and Italian fascists were present. Scuffles with clubs and knives periodically erupted. As one neo-Nazi explained, they were, after all, nationalists. The one harmonious note in these beer-soggy interchanges was that they could all agree on their hatred of Jews. Most of them seemed to greatly enjoy explaining their own particular racist theories. These were young men with an inner anger because no one had ever wanted to listen to them. Neo-Nazis were usually instantly seduced by the proposition that someone thought they were significant. The appeal of being a neo-Nazi was that people paid attention to Nazis. Nazis had a history, and they frightened and worried people.

  Not all of the neo-Nazis were young. The older ones did not seem to want attention and shied away from uniforms and fascist salutes, instead quietly talking to the younger ones. Toward the end of the 1970s an even newer crop of Nazis began to appear at Diksmuide—the skinheads.

  The skinheads were different. They, of course, looked different. Their heads were shaved and often tattooed and their laced boots were often the largest thing about them. The fashion had recently started in the working-class districts of British cities, where the boots were used for “Paki bashing”—attacking Pakistani immigrants. But the idea had already spread to Germany, and the German skinheads were the scariest-looking people in Diksmuide. For one thing, they tended to be larger than the other Nazis. Maybe it was just the boots. Or maybe it was just that they were German and spoke German and thus resembled the real Nazis.

  The skinheads did not mix with the neo-Nazis. They mainly kept to themselves and drank. Later, when there was less debating and more fighting, the skinheads came into their own. Nazis and neo-Nazis could hammer out the arguments. Skinheads just wanted the action.

  By late Saturday night, there was enough action to keep the skinheads happy. The northerners had to show the Mediterraneans their place, and the Flemish had to show all the foreigners their place. It is not easy to have an international gathering of violent xenophobes. A dark bar called the Flemish House was the center of the beer-drinking and Sieg-heiling. Everyone liked to Heil Hitler. But the Flemish House was also the neighborhood pub, and townspeople were still there too —housewives, families with children, and cuddling young couples—none of whom showed any sign of seeing anything disturbing this night. The Flemish sporadically gave straight-armed fascist salutes and shouted “Sieg Heil!” Tlley were particularly happy when they could get a chorus going—sixty or more Flemish nationalists rhythmically jutting their arms out and shouting “Sieg Heil” over and over. These volleys greatly excited the foreign visitors. German skinheads stood up and stuck out their muscular tatoos and joined the chant. A small contingent of Italians from the neofascist party MSI (Italian Socialist Movement) got excited and started countering with shouts of “II Duce!” This angered the German skinheads, which in turn reminded the Flemish nationals that the Germans were shouting i
n German, not in Flemish. “We can say it, but the Germans have no right to say it in Flanders,” said one Belgian Army sergeant stationed near Dortmund who had come in for the weekend festivities. The Flemish looked for opportunities to jump the German skinheads, but this was difficult to do because the Germans stuck together in a large group.

  The British—an assortment of brown-shirted National Front members, Scottish nationalists, members of a fascist movement called League of Saint George, and skinheads—were easier to isolate and run out of the bar. Some of them were severely clubbed.

  The British were upset by the quantity of pro-German literature. Most of it celebrated the exploits of Flemish volunteers who fought for the Third Reich against the British and Americans. A British National Front member said in a wounded tone of voice, “I feel sort of unwelcome here with my Union Jack.” This was particularly problematic since his Union Jack was tattooed on the top of his shaved head.

  Only their hatred of Jews tied these groups together. They could always turn to this subject when they got bored with Dutchmen railing against Surinamers and Germans ranting about Turks. The Diksmuide meeting was, in fact, what monitors of anti-Semitism most feared—a meeting place for extremists from very separate segments of European society, people who did not often have occasion to encounter one another. With neo-Nazi groups growing in the 1970s, a new set of political opportunists was also emerging. As European unemployment figures steadily rose, they could exploit irrational anti-immigrant sentiments. In France the National Front was flourishing under Jean-Marie Le Pen, a veteran of the anti-Semitic Poujadeist movement that had briefly gotten into the National Assembly in the 1950s. The Dutch Centrum party won a legislative seat in the early 1980s on an anti-immigrant platform. In 1983 a former SS officer, Franz Schonhuber, founded the Republican party in Germany. These new parties avoided overt association with anything Nazi. They were sophisticated politicians looking for voters. They kept their language coded so that it would appeal to racists without scaring those who feared Nazis. They denounced immigrants and said they should be sent back where they came from, but they always argued that the immigrants would be better off there. Anti-Semitism was to be avoided as sounding too Nazilike, although there were occasionally slips, such as Le Pen calling the gas chambers a minor point in World War II history.

  In Diksmuide, activists from these political movements could make contacts with disreputable neo-Nazis and even skinheads, as well as the new crop of intellectuals that had emerged to say that the Holocaust was a lie that the Jews had foisted on history. In 1978 a group called the Institute for Historical Review was founded in California, offering $50,000 to anyone who could prove that at least one Jew had been gassed in Auschwitz, $25,000 for evidence that Anne Frank's diary wasn't a fake, and $25,000 for a bar of soap made from Jews. They later backed down, saying that this was just a publicity stunt. They also advertised the European Revisionist Tour, which was to visit Dachau, Bergen-Belsen, and Auschwitz, then wind up in Diksmuide for the IJzerbedevaart.

  The IJzerbedevaart was a place where the men of thought could recruit the men of action.

  24

  In Antwerp

  IF ASSIMILATION REMAINED A DIFFICULT ISSUE AMONG JEWS in Paris, in Antwerp it was simply a dirty word. But of course, in Antwerp there were always other things to argue about. The official Community had split into two organizations. One described itself as Orthodox. The other insisted it was more Orthodox. The Hasidim did not join either but remained about a dozen small cults centered around their own rabbis and their own small synagogues, often just a room in a building. All of these groups enjoyed good relations with each other. They would occasionally pray at each other's synagogues. They would go to each other's celebrations. Only an expert in Jewish affairs would have been capable of discerning the difference between the two principal “communities.” But whenever a communique from Antwerp Jewry was needed, they would be certain to disagree on the wording.

  Wandering through the Jewish neighborhood at sundown, the mutter of minchah, short prayers of the afternoon service, could be heard from buildings and houses on most blocks. Each synagogue had its own atmosphere, often determined by the personality of the religious leader. The Van Den Nestlei, rebuilt in 1954 to replace the ruins, served as the center for one community. It was large and modern, with its white pillars supporting a balcony, modernist stained glass, and a renowned silken-voiced cantor. The other community had restored its old synagogue, farther down along the turreted stoneworks of the train tracks. Past that was a block of ordinary Flemish stone buildings where no prayer was heard, but in one of these houses, down a long, dark tenement corridor, was a room on the right with a high enough ceiling for a small balcony. There a small group of Jews of German origin quietly prayed. This was the Eisenmann Shul, the one the Nazis had never found. The explanation always given was that the Nazis had missed it because these Jews were so quiet when they prayed. While every other synagogue was filled with gossip and chatting, at the Eisenmann Shul there was still a strictly kept rule of silence. It was the kind of German Jewish thing that Irene Runge so disliked.

  A Jew looking for a Friday-night service in another European city might go to a Jewish neighborhood, sight a man with a hat or yarmulke, and follow him. It would be more complicated in Antwerp because the streets were full of hatted men, and they headed in twenty different directions, clutching their hats and darting through the train line's dark underpasses of ornate ironwork and tattered posters. Christians stroll to church. Jews always seem to be rushing to synagogue, as though late for an appointment.

  In its Jewish neighborhood of about thirty blocks Antwerp gives the impression on a Friday night that it is the most Jewish city in Europe. In truth, this provincial center of a half-million people is in some ways Belgium's most Flemish city, with its northern Renaissance old center chilled by harsh gusts of wind from the mouth of the Scheldt, its trim and serious nineteenth-century housing, and its wide modern boulevards. The architecture offers an assortment of symmetrically ornate old Dutch brick, elegantly swirled art nouveau, and stark modern—all set against a chronically gray sky. The Flemish do not go out at night, unless to go to their neighborhood pubs, or if they do leave their neighborhood, they drive. There are no traffic jams in Antwerp. Virtually the only pedestrian crowds, aside from tourists in the old town, are the Orthodox Jews who cannot drive on the Sabbath. By the late 1970s, their neighborhood seemed so prosperous, so concentrated, that it was easy to forget that some twenty thousand Antwerp Jews was less than half the prewar population, which had lived in a far larger area of the city.

  Flanders as a safe harbor for the late flourishing of Orthodox Judaism is not without its logic. The Flemish, while achieving an affluent modern standard of living, have remained Europe's most steadfast traditionalists. They have kept their folk customs and the local rituals of each town. They still cling to the Catholic Church, arid like the Jews they usually send their children to their own religious schools. Like Orthodox Jews, the Flemish believe in large families (though in recent years the Flemish birthrate has not been keeping up with the Hasidim). Like their Yiddish-speaking neighbors, they refuse to part with or dilute their dialect. Flemish, which varies from town to town, has remained a purer form of Dutch than in Holland, where Amsterdamers like to adopt foreign words. Flemish eat their own cuisine—stews, husepots, and waterzoois— wluch are not flashy enough to interest foreigners but help fight the chill of a North Sea wind. Were it not for the fading memories of World War II recalled by the extreme Flemish nationalist movement—which grew more boisterous in the 1970s and by the end of the decade openly violent—Antwerp Jews could have felt totally at home in this Flemish heartland. There is even a marked preference for beards among Flemish men.

  Not all Antwerp Jews were religious, and it was sometimes whispered that the nonreligious might count for more than 50 percent. But the nonreligious also sent their children to Jewish schools. More than 90 percent of Antwerp's Jewish children a
ttend Jewish schools, the highest attendance record of any Jewish community in the world. And even the nonreligious will often keep kosher homes so that they can invite their friends and business associates.

  But the many Jewish schools do not include a university. The community is not a particularly well-educated one because it is centered around diamonds, a trade where a good income can be earned without an education. Jewish education in Antwerp emphasizes fluency in Yiddish and Hebrew and religious study. Yiddish is the most commonly heard language in the Jewish quarter, and it is the working language of the diamond trade.

  Dress is one of the ways that Antwerp Jews stand out. It is intentional. The clothing of the ultra-Orthodox serves to make a statement about commitment to a special life, a uniquely Jewish life. The belief is that a distinct exterior guards against assimilation and separates a Jew for a particularly pious life. Before the war, in places where Jews lived separate and pious lives, married women wore wigs, men wore curled side locks, long beards, black wool clothing, and broad-brimmed hats over their yarmulkes. The war generation, remembering their yellow stars, felt ambiguous about this idea of being visually set apart. Orthodox men simply wore a hat. They usually did not even grow beards. But their children, raised on tales of the Holocaust, grew up defiant. They thought their parents’ generation had paid for being too meek, for trying too hard to get along. They wanted to dare to make the statement, “I am a Jew and I am here.” The more outrageous, the better, according to the thinking of this new generation of observant Jews. Hats became even bigger. The shtreimel, a wide sable fur hat from pre-twentieth century Poland, became popular for young men to wear on the Sabbath in Antwerp. Beards and peots—curled side locks— became longer and were brushed, shampooed, and curled for greater elegance.