A Chosen Few

by Mark Kurlansky

  Moishe Waks did come back to help German Jews. After living in Israel for seven years, in 1980 he was asked to run the youth center for the West Berlin Jewish Community. With a lifelong commitment to German Jews, he thought this would be a worthwhile project for a few years, and then he would go back to Israel. Bat he became involved in the profitable real estate market. “If you start to make a living here, if you try to set yourself up here, it is very hard to leave. There is no doubt that a good standard of living is much easier to get here than in Israel.”

  Before unification, however, Moishe had still considered returning to Israel. There was no opportunity to make money in real estate there, but he thought he might be able to get something going in import-export. He had made some contacts with Russia. Then Russia had collapsed, and the German real estate market exploded. At the same time things were getting very difficult in Israel. His friends in Israel and his brother Ruwen were growing increasingly frustrated with the right-wing Israeli government, and when Moishe talked of returning to Israel, they discouraged him.

  The woman he lived with was born in Israel, but when she was three years old, her parents had returned to Germany to study and never left. Neither she nor Moishe was committed to living in Germany, but that was nevertheless where they lived. And since he lived there, he wanted to be active in the Jewish Community because that was how he had always lived. “As long as I am here, I think that I have to be active in Jewish life and try to do something for the Jewish community/’ he said. To him, part of that was a concern for the few Jews from the former East Germany. But he was almost alone in that view. Ron Zuriel visited the Jewish Community in the East “once or twice” when they were divided. Among Westerners, ironically, there was less interest in the East once it opened. Irene Runge complained that she knew people in West Berlin who always kept in contact with her until the Wall came down. After that, she never heard from them.

  “I KNEW THEM from the thirties, and I can't believe they're back,” said Mia Lehmann. Skinheads and neo-Nazis marched through Prenzlauer Berg with their white-laced boots, swastikas, and slogans of hate against Turks and Jews and foreigners. Mia, who had not participated in a Jewish organization since the German Communists in Belgium had side-tracked her plans to move to Palestine almost sixty years earlier, now became a regular participant at the Kulturverein. She had not found religion or forgotten how the synagogue in the Bucovina had closed its doors and made her mother cry. Mia probably never forgot anything. It was just that she thought she should be around Jews, that Jews should stick together, because Nazis seemed to be coming back.

  It is widely believed that the fall of the GDR and the unification of Germany brought neo-Nazism to the East. According to the Western version, the GDR was too repressive for neo-Nazis to function, and now, because there was freedom of expression, neo-Nazis appeared. In the Eastern version, neo-Nazism was imported to Eastern Germany from the West.

  Neither version is completely true. Neo-Nazism may have had a twenty-year headstart in the West, but by the 1980s, and probably earlier, there were neo-Nazi activities in the East. In 1987 neo-Nazis broke up a concert in Prenzlauer Berg shouting anti-Semitic slogans and “Sieg heil” This was known because for the first time the GDR media were allowed to report on the neo-Nazis’ trial, at which the light sentences belied the legend of GDR severity toward Nazis. Neo-Nazi graffiti was seen on walls, carefully analyzed by the Stasi, and then painted over. Numerous neo-Nazis were brought to trial and imprisoned. The West German government had a practice of paying the GDR for East German “political prisoners.” Curiously, a number of the prisoners they chose to rescue—for substantial fees —were neo-Nazis, who went on to become active in West German neo-Nazi groups. By the time of unification, the extreme right organization had become fairly sophisticated, with the Republicans and their former SS leader Schonhuber winning votes by staying above the fray, the neo-Nazi parties changing names as fast as they were banned, disseminating trie propaganda, while the brutal young skinheads did the dirty work. The same pattern had emerged in other Western countries, including the United States, where orchestrated racist violence was also on the rise. But while the FBI and other law enforcement agencies were concerned about the degree of organization, even international organization, of racist attacks, German law enforcement continued to insist that these attacks were only random. In the; face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary and a mounting international embarrassment, in 1994 they grudgingly conceded that there was some organization to skinhead violence. In Germany approximately five racist attacks occurred every day, usually against immigrants, with at least one person killed almost every month.

  In 1992 there were an estimated 2,200 right-wing attacks, in which 17 people were killed. Yet in February 1993, Federal Prosecutor Alexander von Stahl said that neo-Nazis were under control and the real danger was left-wing terrorists. There had been only one death caused by a leftist that year. But von Stahl went on to explain that the leftists were organized while the neo-Nazis were just drunken kids.

  The skinheads learned when arrested to always say they were drunk, and they consistently got lighter sentences than the leftists. Until 1994 law enforcement had tended to stand by passively and “let the young people blow off some steam.”

  The politicians were scrambling to master the winning Nazi issue, immigration. It was true that Germany had an extremely liberal immigration law and that the 450,000 asylum-seekers taken in by Germany in 1992 were twice as many as those taken by the rest of Western Europe combined. But it was also true that at the time of unification the foreign population of East Germany represented only 1.2 percent of the total. Yet “the foreigner problem” was given great credence there. When Hitler had first gained popular support by decrying “the Jewish problem,” Jews had been only one percent of the German population. In reunited Germany, the growing antiforeign sentiment did not correspond to the presence of foreigners. Violence against foreigners increased even in East German cities, which foreigners had left after the fall of the GDR. While Magdeburg experienced a dramatic increase in anti-foreigner violence, the number of foreigners there declined from 9,200 in May 1990 to 1,400 in January 1991.

  The extreme right was able to get the government to treat the antiforeigner issue as though it had some validity. Once the right started winning voters, the establishment started talking as though there really were a foreigner problem. The Republican party, by watching their rhetoric and not talking too often about Jews, was able to give the Nazi agenda the appearance of a legitimate grievance, winning seats in municipal elections and respectable showings in state contests.

  Helmut Kohl had been trying to gain the anti-immigrant vote for years by toughening the immigration law, but the Social Democrats had blocked him from gaining the two-thirds in Parliament required for a constitutional amendment. At the end of 1992, seeing where their votes were going, the Social Democrats were ready to cave in, and the German asylum law, a showpiece of the West German constitution that was supposed to demonstrate a new Germany open to foreigners, was curtailed. Three days later, skinheads set a fire in Solingen, near Dusseldorf, and killed five Turkish women and children.

  Neo-Nazis liked to talk about making Germany “great again.” This was a cause that was spirited by the unification, the anniversary of which has become a neo-Nazi holiday, like Hitler's birthday and the anniversary of Rudolf Hess's 1987 death. It was clear that after unification, many Germans wanted to see Germany's past treated more kindly. Helmut Kohl decided that the 1992 anniversary of reunification would be an appropriate occasion to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the first launching of a V-2 rocket, one of the stars of the Third Reich's arsenal. International protest forced him to cancel.

  One of the first problems with making Germany “great again” was that it was still a nation in disrepute because of what it had done the last time it was great. For this reason a major part of the neo-Nazi agenda everywhere was to establish that the Holocaust did not ha
ppen. This was an oddly flawed argument that basically claimed both that the Holocaust never happened and furthermore that the Jews deserved it. Nowhere was this contradiction more succinctly stated than on the walls of a suburb north of Paris, where it was scrawled in matching penmanship both “Auschwitz is a lie” and “Gas the Jews.”

  The right was able to offer Germans not only the catharsis of racial hatred but also freedom from guilt. Germans who were born after 1945 had spent their lives with the guilt of Nazi Germany around their neck. Now the extreme right was freeing them. Republican leader Schonhuber was promising that there would no longer be “a television program of Dachau on channel one, Treblinka on two, and Auschwitz on three.” He called for an end to all this examination of the past, presumably including an end to the examination of his own SS record—freedom at last from the legacy of guilt and at the same time Germans could blame all their current problems on foreigners. Auschwitz is a lie, and the Jews should be gassed.

  After unification the issue inevitably arose, as it had in Poland, of what to do with the concentration camps that had been in the GDR, where the Communist version of history had been imposed on them. Two forms of revisionism were being attempted at East German camps. One was an attempt to ignore, banalize, and forget the sights. There was a cobblestone road leading up to the Ravens-brilick camp, where 200,000 women had been imprisoned, of whom 90,000 had been beaten, tortured, starved, shot, or gassed to death. The road itself had been built by forced women's labor from the camp. At the entrance to the road was a stark black-and-white sign that said “Frauen-KZ Ravensbrlick,” Ravensbruck Women's Concentration Camp. Next to it was a red triangle, implying that it had been a camp for Communist political prisoners. That was one of the badges used in the camps. But the sign made no reference to other badges, such as the yellow triangle, which was used for Jewish prisoners.

  Next to the sign was another one with a palm tree, which said “Sylvia's Fitness Center.” There, at the camp entrance, a sauna and solarium were made available, in spite of protests. As a compromise, the fitness center sign was moved slightly away from the camp sign. Across the street was built a new but empty supermarket with a fresh unblemished blacktop parking lot, new windows, checkout lanes, and fresh wires hanging from the ceiling waiting for fixtures. That was as far as the supermarket got before international pressure stopped it from opening. A rival supermarket chain decided to try for one next to Sachsenhausen.

  Sachsenhausen had been mostly leveled. One of the few remaining barracks had been burned down by neo-Nazis in 1992. The small triangular field where the camp had once been was now marked with various Soviet monuments. But a pathology laboratory for medical experiments, the remains of a gas chamber, and crematoriums with their iron racks were still there. Nearby, on the site of an SS barracks, the town of Oranienburg had plans to build a new housing project, complete with a fitness center.

  But the other kind of revisionism was also in evidence. In addition to building new housing, there was a move for a new monument to the victims of Stalin. While the other Allies had also had prison camps in which many died of diseases, tens of thousands had died of illness and starvation in the Soviet camps. Sachsenhausen was one of a number of concentration camps that, after Liberation, the Red Army had used to imprison Nazis, black marketeers, prostitutes, and political opponents. But the proposed monument at Sachsenhausen would have honored them all equally as victims of Stalinism. This seemed to be part of a broader desire to equate Communist crimes with Nazi crimes. If it could be said that the GDR was as bad as the Third Reich, in time it could be said that the Third Reich—which had racial hatred as a founding premise and mass extermination as a stated goal, and which killed by the millions—was no worse than the GDR, which had egalitarianism as a founding premise but became a repressive dictatorship. Once the German Communists were established as the worst of all Germans, and once all Germany needed to do to purge itself was to chase down Stasi informers, once the German past started in 1945, Germany would be a country like other countries without a special guilt, and it would be free to be “great again.” It was already written in Die Welt that former GDR leader Erich Ho-necker was “the greatest German murderer and war criminal.”

  Among the active Sachsenhausen survivors who were objecting to the proposed monument was Werner Handler. He still felt the obligation of the Sachsenhausen prisoners who had asked him, when he was leaving, to tell the world about what he had seen: “I think these men who said to me in the winter of 1938 look here, tell them that we are going in for a war, I feel that I have their vote.” Using the same direct language with which he confronted people all his life, he said, “The original ovens are still standing there in the Fatherland, so anybody saying there's nothing to it, we can bring them there and lie them on the roaster.”

  THE NUMBER OF JEWS in Germany suddenly increased. After reunification there were 30,000, and then the German government approved permission for 25,000 Soviet Jews to be distributed in all the major areas of Germany, welcomed, offered temporary housing and language lessons, and given a home in Germany. But it was not always clear why these Russians had come. When asked their reasons, they consistently said that it was because Berlin had nice weather. No one else had ever thought so.

  Boris Kruglikov, 33, had been a railroad engineer until Mikhail Gorbachev came to power. Realizing the opportunities presented by glasnost, he started selling radios and VCRs on the Russian black market. Soon this business became legal. In 1991, on an electronics-buying trip to Germany, he learned about the program for Jews and immigrated to Germany with his wife. He had originally hoped to move on to the United States, but decided to remain in Germany. “The social services are good. I was told they are not good in the United States,” he explained.

  Stanislava Mikhalskaia was born in Moscow in 1963. In 1990 she learned that her mother, who had been adopted by a Russian family, was originally the daughter of two Jews. Shortly after that a friend of hers went to Germany and told her about the new law. The Soviet Union had just survived a coup d'etat attempt, and the future was looking uncertain and frightening. Since she now was Jewish, she applied, after first marrying her non-Jewish boyfriend. They both moved to Berlin. In Moscow they had both been suecessful professionals with large apartments, a car, and a country home. In Berlin they moved into a fifty-square-foot room in an immigrant hostel. Eventually, they were able to find a small apartment, and Stanislava hoped to resume her profession as architect in time. But Germany worried her. “Germans are against foreigners, and now I think it is not a good country for Jews.” Still, like most Russian Jews in Germany, she planned to stay. Economic and political problems were steadily worsening in Russia.

  Most of the Russian Jews arrived with excellent credentials but no skills. They were engineers, doctors, and scientists—but they somehow did not qualify for any work in the West. Their stories were not always convincing. One who spent time with coffee and cakes at the Kulturverein claimed to be a psychologist researching the creativity of left-handed people. He admitted that he did not exactly have a degree in psychology but he was, in fact, himself left-handed. Eugeni Elizatov, 34, from Turkmenia, claimed to be a matchmaker. In traditional Judaism marriages are arranged by a shadkhan whose business it was to know many families and bring together good matches. This looked to Elizatov to be a promising business in Berlin, because there were many Jews hoping to find Jewish mates. But he did not really know how to be a shadkhan according to Jewish law, because he didn't know Jewish law. He said that his parents had both been Jewish, but they had given him no Jewish education. To offer his services to East Berlin Jews, he simply took their names and then tried to find an eligible woman in Leningrad who wanted to move to Germany. Not surprisingly, his clients had little confidence in this process, and in his first two years in Germany he did not make a single match, not even one for himself. His wife had divorced him before he moved.

  Whatever their motives for coming, the Jewish communities around Germany we
lcomed the Russian Jews, and most of them tried to participate in their communities. By 1994, 70 percent of the nine thousand members of the Berlin Jewish Community were Russian. Few of the Russians knew anything about Judaism, but Jewish communities offered them courses in religion and Hebrew that, like all Jewish programs offered in Germany, were widely attended by German non-Jews. In fact, they outnumbered the Russians.

  German Jews suspected that not all of these Russian immigrants were Jewish. A rumored figure was that 30 percent were non-Jews who had lied for papers. Considering that there were still Jews wanting to leave the former Soviet Union and that the 25,000 quota was already filled, with no assurances that any more would be allowed in, the Community was deeply disturbed by this. But there was little they could do. They did not want to rigorously interrogate each applicant because they understood how difficult it would be for Soviet jews to prove their Jewishness after seventy years of Communism.

  When Mark Aizikovitch came to Berlin, he discovered to his surprise a great local interest in traditional Yiddish songs. He had grown up hearing Yiddish in the Ukrainian town of Poltava. The few religious jews there had died off and been given traditional funerals, as had his father, but when his mother died in 1985, he did not know how to say kaddish for her. He went to the few elderly men left in the neighborhood, but none of them knew either. Aizikovitch had received formal theatrical training, played Chekhov, and sang opera. But when times changed, he learned that the money was in folk rock, and he performed with a Ukrainian rock group called the Philharmonica. When he immigrated to Berlin with a non-Jewish wife and two children to support, he could see that no one was int(crested in Russian folk rock. Speaking no German, he had few possibilities in theater. But this great interest in the Yiddish folk songs of his childhood gave him his opportunity.