A Chosen Few

by Mark Kurlansky

  Amsterdam, like Antwerp and Paris, had an ever-increasing Israeli population. Like Moishe Waks and Ron Zuriel, these were people who found that material life was better in Europe than in Israel. But what was more embarrassing to Israelis, some of these new emigrants were not even European-born. They were Israelis or North Africans who had chosen to forget the Zionist dream and live in Europe, where they could earn a good living. In Amsterdam they often opened little carry-out restaurants featuring falafel and other Middle Eastern specialties. As in other European cities, most of the Israelis in Amsterdam were neither religious nor involved with the Jewish Community.

  Leo Palache worked for Israel for forty years as the Dutch director of the United Israel Appeal. He noted, not with unhappiness, that Holland had one of the highest percentages of Jews who emigrated to Israel. He called the ones who had left “the best of us/’ But in all those years he never was tempted to make the move himself. “It's very interesting. I worked forty years for Israel. I have visited Israel privately and in my job many many times. I have traveled up and down. I have a lot of friends. Israelis are my life. But looking at my background and my roots, my social contacts arid my friends are in Holland and the language and the climate and the food, and the total picture. Living there is a different story, I think, if you are very young.”

  ISAAC LIPSCHITS'S brother Alex, for whom Isaac had taken so many risks to get to Israel, stayed there, changed his name to David, became a civil servant living near Haifa, and had three children and grandchildren in Israel. But every now and then, Isaac still had a recurring nightmare that he was in Israel and something had happened to his brother. Most of Isaac's friends from the orphanage did not stay in Israel and ended up living in many different countries. They remained a family to each other and continued to visit each other regularly.

  Isaac became a noted Jewish historian, married, and raised two children in Groningen. The synagogue there had been converted into a dry cleaner after the war, then an Episcopal church. In the 1970s it was restored as a synagogue, only to lack enough Jews to fill it. So it was rented out for lectures and exhibitions.

  Isaac did not give his children a religious upbringing, but he did give them a Jewish identity. And he seemed almost driven to assert that he was no longer in hiding: “I am known as a Jew throughout the Netherlands. Fm on TV as a Jew. I'm writing in the newspaper as a Jew. Fm always writing on Jewish problems. Fm a Jew.”

  Isaac was a successful and well-adjusted man. The great irony of his life was that if his world had not been torn up by a Holocaust, he would have spent his life selling bananas in the Rotterdam market. When he turned 50, he completely broke down and sought psychiatric help. “You start looking back. I have reached things my parents couldn't dream of. My father was a poor man working in the market. My brothers worked in the market. All my uncles, as far as I know, worked in the market. Without a war I would have, too. Without any doubt. I worked so hard that I became a professor. I studied so hard. I was from such poor surroundings that I would never have gone to a secondary school. But I worked so hard, when I came home at quarter past five and I asked my wife when we would have dinner and she would say ten minutes, I would go to my study and work for ten minutes. Later, with the help of a psychiatrist, I found out that I didn't want to give myself the leisure to think. To sit and think, to sit and listen to music. I was frightened. If you are fifty, you can't stand it anymore. You have to sit down and think over what you have done in your life. And then the war comes. The memories. The problems.”

  THE PAIN did not vanish. It passed to another generation. Barry Biedermann contemplated how he had grown up with no surviving relatives but his parents, and how hard it had been for him when they died. And he often reflected on the fact that it would be much the same for his children. Because the camps had ruined his parents’ health and they had died young, the Holocaust that deprived him of grandparents had also deprived his two children of them. They, too, had no extended family and had a sense of being raised in isolation, with the sometimes-spoken subject always looming somewhere. “I wonder when it ends?” he asked.

  Most survivors said they saw little future for Jews except in Israel. But whatever they said, they were still Dutch, and Holland was their home, and many of them never left. In the 1970s their children started taking over the Community. To this new generation there was more than the Holocaust to Dutch history. They wanted to preserve the Jodenbreestraat synagogues in Amsterdam and turned the four that had been saved by the government into an elaborate museum of Dutch Jewish history.

  The old generation with its terrible memories was dying off. Mauritz Auerhaan retired from business and was alone. He moved into the Jewish home for the elderly in the south. As Amsterdam moved farther south, the architecture became more stripped down and less ornate. Far in the south it was just blocks of apartments and shopping centers. Beth Shalom, where Auerhaan lived, seemed to be the latest in homes-for-the-elderly, the optimal artificial environment that maintained the perfect temperature and healthiest air for elderly people —the human parallel to Dutch computerized greenhouses with their six-foot-tall hydroponic tomato vines. At Beth Shalom a central patio with comfortable chairs had a glass roof that assured that it was at once light, airy, and warm. In the hallways the elderly sat in silence. Auerhaan's room was not unpleasant, with its balcony arid little kitchenette, but neither was it quite up to what Bobby de Vries had in Wallenberg.

  Auerhaan looked around his small tidy room. “If you are young, you are young, and you see all from your young eyes, and you don't believe that one day you will live here. No. You can't believe it.” He held out his arm. “Do you see the number? That is the only proof that I have been there. Sometimes I think it was a bad dream. I can't believe it.”

  AMONG YOUNGER DUTCH JEWS, as in Paris, there was a trend toward more Orthodox practices. This, too, had its roots in the Holocaust—the conviction that assimilation did not work. One Orthodox rabbi said, “In my own family, directly after the war I had an uncle who said the only solution was to assimilate. But this was not true. Even Jews who were baptized—they found them.”

  Jewish culture remained ingrained in Dutch life, especially in Amsterdam, where Yiddish words belong to the popular slang in much the same way as they do in New York. Mazzel is luck, a crowd or gang is a miesjpoge, they speak of shlmeils. Amsterdam ended up with ten working synagogues and even four shtibls. Most of them had to struggle for a minyan, because so many of the Jews had moved to the flatland in the south and were no longer within walking distance for the Sabbath. Even the Esnoga began experimenting with offering a service in the south once a month.

  The five-hundred-year history of Dutch Jewry was not over. In the 1990s only thirty thousand Jews remained in all of Holland— just slightly more than the population immediately after the survivors returned in the late 1940s. Survivors wanted the past to be remembered by others, but they did not want to look back on it themselves. Leo Palache said about watching television, “If I know there is something about the war, I switch off because I don't want to test myself. Where is the limit of what I can stand? I don't want to test myself. And I say if I want to know about the war, the concentration camps, I just close my eyes.”

  33

  In Berlin

  and the

  New Bananerepublik

  IN NOVEMBER 1989, WHEN THE WALL OPENED UP FOLLOWING a surprise announcement, Sophie Marum, the daughter of a rabbi and a longtime Communist party member in the East, was asked if she wanted to join the thousands who were rushing across to the West for a four-decade-delayed shopping spree. “I didn't go there. I am not interested in eating something special. I don't think the things here were so bad. I like apples. I don't know why I must eat bananas.”

  For a long time the Westerners had been talking about how the poor East Germans had no bananas. Their Germany was such a failure that it could not even offer its population bananas. Such was the religion of consumerism that West Germany had embraced. A soc
iety that offered bananas was better than a society that didn't. When the Wall opened, a curious rumor circulated that parts of West Berlin had become strewn with banana peels. West Germans, Helmut Kohl, and probably most of the Western alliance wanted this moment to be their dramatic triumph, with the downtrodden East Germans, in hysterical joy, bursting into the West, basking in freedom. The cameras were there to record it.

  There were people who seriously believed the Ossis would be flooding in to buy bananas. They did flood in. The West German government gave each of them one hundred marks to spend (about fifty-five dollars at the time), a small price for a government to pay to assure its own version of history. According to West Berlin Mayor Walter Momper, Germans were now “the happiest people in the world.”

  Ron Zuriel was happy. Still a photography enthusiast and still a Berliner, he went daily to the Wall to take pictures of the Ossis coming through. “I was happy for them. To see those faces when they came into the West and saw all those lights and the shops and all that. They came into a different world. For them it was a fantasy.”

  After forty years of separation the visual differences were dazzling. The Wessis were throwing the party, and the Ossis came. Irene Runge, now a teacher of cultural anthropology at East Berlin's Humboldt University, heard that the Wall had opened, and her first thought was, “What fun!” You could just cross over and back anytime you wanted. The first night she went over, she turned around and went back. As a privileged Communist academic, she had often crossed over before. There was nothing in the West that she wanted, other than the thrill of walking through without being stopped.

  “I was not very happy,” said Sophie Marum. “I did not think it was good that we had gifts from the other side. I didn't think so. Things for nothing. And I thought, ‘In time it will become difficult/I had no illusions.”

  In not much time at all it became very difficult, and the staged moment faded. But for the first week Westerners were willing to go to great lengths to make it all seem the way they thought it should be. An American television crew asked Irene Runge, since she spoke American English, if they could film her shopping for food in the West. Irene never shopped anywhere but in Prenzlauer Berg. But they insisted, and she liked being on television. The gourmet floor of West Germany's most deluxe department store, the Ka De We on the Ku'damm, was chosen.

  “I would never go there. It's too expensive,” she said.

  But they argued that the Ka De We was where they had made all their filming arrangements, so for this one time she went shopping on the famous Feinschmeckeretage. Ka De We is the popular abbreviation for Kaufhaus des Western, or Western Department Store, so called because when it opened in 1907, the city center was the part of East Berlin where Irene's Kulturverein was located, and this was the far western suburb. Bombed into little more than a brick pile, the rebuilding of the Ka De We in the 1950s was seen as a symbol of the progress of West Berlin. Now it was being used as a symbol again, and Irene Runge, who lived in a badly lit world of pockmarked surfaces, was taken to this smooth, perfectly lit sixty-thousand-square-foot gourmet display on the sixth floor. The Feinschmeckeretage alone boasted more than one million dollars in weekly sales and claimed to be the largest luxury food store “outside of Tokyo.”

  This was more than bananas. There was Irene in her habitual baggy plaid, followed by a film crew, careening through an alleged 25,000 food items, including fruit and vegetables from around the world, 1,200 varieties of sausage, 1,500 varieties of cheese, and twenty aquariums for salt- and freshwater fish. Was not West Berlin a fun place to shop, now that there was no Wall? Irene did look as if she were having fun. In Prenzlauer Berg where she usually shopped, there were a few apples, a few kinds of cheese, and some smoked fish. Here, the stands were full of things that she had never seen before, things that she could pick up and poke at—like a ten-mark piece of fruit from Asia. The only problem was that she had never seen prices like this in Prenzlauer Berg. Even most West Berliners didn't normally pay Ka De We prices, and once the television crew turned off its floodlights and left, she could never afford to shop there again.

  Soon, most East Berliners began to realize that the change was not going to be quite what it seemed at first. “This euphoric feeling disappeared very quickly because they expected too much,” said Ron Zuriel. “They expected to be on the same footing as the West tomorrow. Not in a few days, but tomorrow. So their expectation was too high, and the German government promoted this.”

  West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl had rushed to assure East Germans that their future would be decided democratically by their own choice. Then he proceeded to lure their votes, bribe them with promises, guarantee them that in a united Germany they would get all the bananas and other goodies that the successful Federal Republic, the Bundesrepublik, had to offer. Factory workers were promised that their pay would be brought up to West German standards by 1994. Later, in the spring of 1993, they were told that the economic situation had changed and that their scheduled 26 percent pay raise was just not possible. When workers responded with the first industrial strike since before the Third Reich, West Germans expressed surprise at the depth of bitterness the Ossis were showing. What had happened to those radiant faces that Zuriel had photographed coming through the Wall and the happy woman in the oversize coat shopping at the Ka De We?

  Irene had been naive about the changes that were taking place. Walking over to the West, she did not at first realize that her country was about to vanish. “I never thought that the GDR would be lost,” she frequently said. “I think I just didn't want to believe it. Now I can't believe that I didn't believe it.” She always referred to the unification as “the beginning of the not-the-GDR time.”

  “I thought this would be the time for the better East Germany.” But soon there were elections, and the right-of-center parties backing Helmut Kohl won 48 percent of the vote. The Communists, who were offering the kind of program to reform the GDR that Irene had hoped for, only won 16 percent, and in October 1990, Irene's country ceased to exist.

  The Stasi, the GDR's state security police or Staatssicherheits-dienst, died with its state, and now its secrets were left unguarded. The Stasi had wanted to compromise everybody. According to Stasi records, it had deployed 100,000 agents and another 400,000 “unofficial agents,” its euphemism for informers. Some East Germans had spied for the Stasi. Others had fed it information. Others had simply been duped into an association. It had reputedly operated one of the world's finest espionage networks. It even stole the underwear of suspects, filing it in jars so that later they could be tracked down by sniffer dogs. Before it covered up the graffiti on its walls, it would analyze the lettering and brushstrokes. It collected minute details of peoples’ lives, such as what time they went to bed. But it also did an excellent job of monitoring popular sentiment. Stasi files showed that there had been a growing disenchantment with the regime.

  Once the Stasi files became accessible, people started finding that their friend Irene had talked about them. “You know, I gossip with everyone, and I gossiped with them. That was the problem,” Irene explained without a hint of embarrassment. Someone found a postcard they had sent Irene years ago stored in a Stasi file with a notation that Irene had turned it over. On the other hand, someone else found a letter Irene had written them, apparently turned over by someone else and filed by the Stasi, with the notation “This must be the Irene who teaches at Humboldt.” She had signed only with her first name.

  Irene had used her bilingual skills to show journalists and other foreigners around and then report to the Stasi on their activities. She was frequently questioned on her colleagues’ attitudes about the regime, and later on about people she knew in Jewish circles. But Irene tended to see everyone in her circle as loving the GDR. By 1985 the Stasi were convinced that she was untrustworthy and were having others inform on her.

  After the collapse Irene was the one compromised German who seemed to like talking about the Stasi and who often mentione
d it. Gertainly the many parliamentarians from the former East Germany who were involved with Stasi never mentioned it, because it would have destroyed their new political careers. All three new political parties in the East lost their leaders when they were ruined by Stasi revelations. Even the staff of the Committee to Dismantle the Stasi was found to include some with Stasi links.

  Irene had thought that since everyone wanted to start talking about this Stasi business, she should come forward. She and a friend made a joint announcement that they had been Stasi informants. It seemed like the civic-minded thing to do at this point. Other colleagues at the university could come forward as well, she reasoned, and they could discuss this Stasi issue. “Everyone said we have to talk about it. We have to talk about the past,” Irene explained. It was the old Communist way of doing things—have a meeting and discuss it. The new German way, however, was to fire both of them immediately. “All our former colleagues who we never knew were so antisocialist only turned out to be that way after the unification,” said Irene angrily. “I still think it is stupid what they are doing to marginalize people like us, but technically I agree. If they win the war, they will dictate the conditions.”

  A Canadian journalist interested in Jews in the former East wanted to speak with her, and he brought along an interpreter from the German government press office. Irene explained that there was no need for the interpreter since she was completely fluent in English. But the interpreter sat in on the interview and wrote careful notes in a little book. Suddenly Irene turned to him and in a loud, good-natured voice said, “I know what you're doing. I used to do the same thing for the Stasi!”