When Memory Comes

by Saul Friedlander

  ALSO BY SAUL FRIEDLÄNDER

  When Memory Comes

  Franz Kafka: The Poet of Shame and Guilt

  Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1933–1945

  (abridged edition)

  The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939–1945

  Nazi Germany and the Jews: The Years of Persecution, 1933–1939

  Memory, History, and the Extermination of the Jews of Europe

  Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the “Final Solution”

  (editor)

  Visions of Apocalypse: End or Rebirth?

  (editor)

  Copyright © Saul Friedländer, 2016

  Production editor: Yvonne E. Cárdenas

  Text designer: Julie Fry

  This book was set in Fournier by

  Alpha Design & Composition of Pittsfield, NH

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from Other Press LLC, except in the case of brief quotations in reviews for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast. For information write to Other Press LLC, 267 FifthAvenue, 6th Floor, New York, NY 10016.

  Or visit our Web site: www.​otherpress.​com

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:

  Names: Friedländer, Saul, 1932- author.

  Title: Where memory leads : my life / by Saul Friedländer.

  Description: New York : Other Press, [2016] | Volume Two of Saul Friedländer’s autobiography. Volume One was originally published in New York in 1979.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2016008344 | ISBN 9781590518090 (hardback)

  Subjects: LCSH: Friedländer, Saul, 1932- | Jewish historians—Biography. | Jewish learning and scholarship. | Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945)—Research. | Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945)—Influence. | BISAC: BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Personal Memoirs. | HISTORY / Middle East / Israel. | BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Political.

  Classification: LCC DS135.F9 F75 2016 | DDC 940.53/18092 [B]—dc23 LC record available at https://​lccn.​loc.​gov/​2016008344

  eBook ISBN: 978-1-59051-810-6

  v3.1

  For Orna

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Part I: Changing Places

  Chapter One: Nirah

  Chapter Two: Paris

  Chapter Three: Sweden

  Chapter Four: New Horizons

  Chapter Five: Geneva

  Chapter Six: Turmoil

  Part II: The Unraveling of a Dream

  Chapter Seven: The Footsteps of the Messiah

  Chapter Eight: Hubris

  Chapter Nine: Expiation

  Chapter Ten: The Mount of the Blessing

  Part III: Germany

  Chapter Eleven: The Inability to Mourn

  Chapter Twelve: Berlin

  Part IV: America

  Chapter Thirteen: A Sense of Exile?

  Chapter Fourteen: Dilemmas

  Chapter Fifteen: The Time That Remains

  About the Author

  PROLOGUE

  How do you say “aubergines” in Hebrew? I’ve eaten hundreds, maybe thousands of aubergine dishes in my lifetime, particularly in Israel, and suddenly the word for it was gone. Strangely enough, the American English term surfaced immediately: eggplant. But never mind the English, it was the search for the Hebrew word that kept me awake.

  It was our last night in Paris. A few days earlier, in October 2012, we had celebrated my eightieth birthday. Tomorrow we’d be on our way back to L.A. At dinner we had a salade d’aubergines in a small restaurant close to the hotel and now, well past midnight, my wild chase continues. I notice that my wife has somehow half woken up. “What’s the salad we ate last night called in Hebrew?” In her half sleep, Orna manages to whisper, “Hatzilim.” Of course, hatzilim! What a relief! Now I can finally fall asleep. Damn it! What was the English word that had come up so easily? Oh yes: eggplant. That’s probably how the Dutch felt when they drained off seawater and secured a further patch of land: a victory against nature!

  Starting a book of memoirs with an episode of memory loss may seem like a joke. It is not; it is a real situation that nonetheless can be dealt with, as I will explain at the end of this prologue.

  Thirty-eight years ago, I published When Memory Comes, a memoir about my childhood and adolescence, focusing on my early life in Prague, the war years in France, adolescence in Paris, and my departure for Israel in June 1948. Some short glimpses of later years were included, up to 1977.

  In these pages, I turn to events that I hardly mentioned, or, in most cases, did not mention at all, between my return as a student to Paris in 1953 and the year preceding the publication of the early memoir, 1977. Then the narration goes on to this day (2015). As this text frequently deals with my reactions to and, sometimes, my involvement in public events, I opted, for the sake of clarity, to keep to an essentially chronological narrative. It so happens that the main clusters of events that I shall evoke indeed followed each other; thus, the text tells of a sequence that took place in real time.

  First come the years of apprenticeship, in which I move from place to place, from country to country, in search of an identity and a calling. The second part deals with Israel, at the very outset, then from about 1967 — when I started teaching in Jerusalem — to the early 1980s and, less intensively so, in the subsequent years. Germany follows, from segments of my early life to this day, but mainly as I experienced it during the eighties. The fourth part turns to life in the United States.

  No life progresses along such neat divisions, and issues dominant during one stage may carry over to all that comes thereafter. In this memoir in particular, the main issues — possibly less so regarding the American experience — are interwoven throughout. In short, these divisions represent temporary accentuations of one central issue during a given period, accentuations that are often narrated within the context of the minute incidents of everyday life.

  This book shows the influence of the Shoah (the Holocaust) on my personal life and on my reactions to Israel, Germany, and ultimately America. And, as the narration progresses, it also increasingly centers on the writing and teaching of history, particularly the history of the Holocaust, the essential work of my life. Thus, the writing of that history and, in my case, the unavoidable relation of memory to history is a recurring theme in each of the succeeding parts, even the first one.

  Beyond this central theme, by dint of circumstances, I became deeply involved at times in places and issues that continue to attract intense general interest; they are presented here from a subjective perspective, but as openly and candidly as possible and from as detached a viewpoint as I can manage. I also intend to share with the reader my doubts, debates, and regrets about this or that attitude or decision and, finally, the false starts and the right intuitions inherent in the history-writing process.

  I started writing these reminiscences after my eighty-first birthday, under the constant threat of some loss of memory. At my age, though, long-term memory is present, usually with added clarity, while the short-term past fades away at times. I have kept written traces of some recent events and integrated them into the text; it helps, but, all in all, they are only a tiny part of it, mere ripples on the course of the later years.

  PART I

  Changing Places*

  * * *

  * In homage to David Lodge

  CHAPTER ONE

  Nirah

>   “Dear Sir, when this letter reaches you, I will have left Paris for Palestine …” Thus began the letter I sent to my guardian, Isidore Rosemblat, in the early days of June 1948.

  You will probably be astonished, but don’t worry: I am with a group of Betarim [members of the right-wing Betar, the youth movement linked to Menachem Begin’s semiclandestine Irgun], entirely safe. Mainly, don’t alert the police or any other organization of the kind; it would only create additional problems and be of no help as, when you get this news, I will already be on the ship.

  Don’t worry about what my uncles may say as, before you even write to them, I shall be with them and I am sure that they won’t be terribly displeased.

  Let us now turn to concrete matters: I took with me, in my backpack, all my linen as well as my gray suit, my beige suit, and the leather jacket. Before leaving, I carried the yellow suitcase, the briefcase, and the textbooks to a friend who will return them to you as soon as possible.

  I must also ask you to send word to the lycée to inform them that I am leaving the establishment and that I am not presenting myself for the baccalaureate [the first part of the final high school exam, taken at the end of the eleventh grade]. Thus everything will be settled.

  I will send you a long letter as soon as I arrive; I would have liked to say goodbye and thank you in person for all you have done for me but I was worried about the possibility of some obstacle to my departure. In any case, don’t consider it as ingratitude on my part. While waiting to see you again in Palestine, I kiss you affectionately,

  Paul*

  PS (very important): Please do pay my third quarter boarding expenses as, otherwise, they will not return 1 pair of sheets, 2 shirts, 2 underpants, and 2 pairs of socks I left at the lycée.

  On June 5, two days after I had written that letter, the principal of the Paris Lycée Henri IV (where I was a boarder) wrote to my guardian:

  Sir,

  I regret to inform you that young Friedländer, a boarder student in First A [eleventh grade, classic] surreptitiously left the lycée yesterday at 4:30 p.m., using the exit of the day students. According to our investigation he intends to join the Jewish forces in Palestine.

  Please excuse my reminding you on the same occasion that the April–June quarter has not been paid. Please accept …

  P. Camenen, Principal

  News travels fast.

  1

  Thus, in June 1948, a few weeks after the creation of the State of Israel, I disembarked in the new country. One of my maternal uncles, Paul Glaser, whom I managed to phone, took me in. Paul lived in Nirah, a small village in the Plain of Sharon, close to Natanyah. The village had been established by newcomers from Prague and other Czech towns who, like my uncle, immigrated to Palestine in 1939, around the time of the German occupation of the Czech part of Czecho-Slovakia (the hyphen was added after the Munich agreements, in 1938).

  That same year, my parents and I, then six years old, left Prague for France. We were fleeing one sinking ship for another — though no one could have known that at the time. The approaching Germans cut short our precarious existence in Paris from April 1939 to June 1940. I don’t know how my father managed the impossible: to buy my mother and me two seats on a train departing southward in early June and, a few days later, one for himself. This must have cost a fortune.

  We made it to what became the “nonoccupied” zone of France and settled in a small resort town, emptied by the war: Néris-les-Bains. The local population went on living in Néris but soon refugees, mostly Jews, replaced the usual visitors to the spa. Some Jews were French, though the majority was foreign. Eventually the difference between these two groups would mean the difference between life and death.

  When the roundup of foreign Jews started in our zone in the summer of 1942, my parents, with the help of Catholic friends, hid me in a seminary in nearby Montluçon while they attempted to cross the Swiss border. They were arrested by the Swiss, delivered to the French, then to the Germans, transported to Auschwitz in November 1942, and murdered. The French Jews were pariahs, but most of them managed to hide; the foreign Jews were “dead men walking.”

  As I described some four decades ago, at the seminary I was baptized and became a staunch Catholic. In early 1946, the temporary guardian appointed by my uncles (my mother’s three brothers) compelled the nuns to let me go. I first became a boarder in the provincial collège of St.-Amand-Montrond, a small town in the center of France. After a year in St.-Amand, I transferred, as a boarder once again, to Lycée Henri IV in Paris. In the meantime, I lost my Catholic faith, became a Communist for a few months, and then a Zionist.

  From my Paris lycée, I passionately followed the events unfolding in Palestine and soon decided that instead of standing for the first part of the baccalaureate, I would somehow get to Eretz Israel (the land of Israel). On May 15, the State of Israel was officially established and was immediately invaded by armies of the neighboring Arab states; its chances of survival were scant. I wanted to fight. After one Zionist youth movement rejected me because of my age, I changed the birth date on my ID card from 1932 to 1930 and was accepted by the Betar, the youth movement of the right-wing Irgun. I had not the faintest idea who they were or what aims they pursued, but when asked, “What do we want?” I delivered the slogan a friend of mine told me to repeat: “Both shores of the Jordan.” It sufficed. But what the hell did “both shores of the Jordan” mean?

  In early June, after getting a message from the organizers, I “surreptitiously” left the lycée, walked to the Gare de Lyon, and joined my group. We made it to Marseilles, then to nearby Port-de-Bouc. After two days of waiting, we boarded a converted Liberty ship of D-day vintage, the Altalena, flying the colors of Panama, which had been bought by American supporters of the Irgun. I sailed with nine hundred companions and hundreds of tons of weapons donated by the French government. It was the first time I’d ever seen the sea.

  David Ben-Gurion, now prime minister of Israel, viewed the Irgun as a terrorist group. He feared that the additional Irgun fighters and weapons would incite a coup. He demanded that the movement’s leadership prevent the Altalena from sailing, while it was still anchored in Port-de-Bouc. Menachem Begin, the Irgun’s leader, wanted to avoid a confrontation and relented, but hotheads in Paris overruled his orders; the ship departed, and there we were, on June 20, 1948, anchored off the coast of Israel. None of us knew what was in store.

  On the shore of Kfar Vitkin — where the Altalena unloaded mounds of weapons and ammunition and disembarked most of its passengers (including me) — Israeli army units were waiting. A few hours later, after an ultimatum to surrender the ship expired, they started shooting. The ship sailed to Tel Aviv and we were moved to a camp of the Irgun. By the end of that dramatic day, the Irgun had disbanded. For me, it meant the end of the affair. My uncle Paul, whom, as mentioned, I had managed to call, picked me up. Instead of my initial plan of joining the army, I went to live with him in Nirah. As for the ship, artillery shells sank it near the coast of Tel Aviv. Sixteen of the passengers who had remained on board were killed, some as they attempted to swim ashore. For about two years, I think, when you strolled along the Tel Aviv seashore, you saw the massive hulk of the Altalena emerging from the shallow water. Then it was towed away and sold as scrap iron.

  In my previous memoir, I may have described the life in Nirah and its inhabitants somewhat too idyllically. That was my perception at the time. I also didn’t say much about my uncle Paul. In Rochlitz, in the Sudeten area, where the Glasers lived, Paul had managed the family textile factory before 1938. After his arrival in Nirah, he took over the management of a very small local factory, producing mainly camouflage nets for the British and, after 1948, for the Israeli army.

  A bachelor who had become rather morose over the years, Paul, the oldest of the Glaser siblings, was in his early fifties when I arrived in Nirah. He probably considered me a burden after a while and packed me off to an agricultural school, to learn a profession useful
for my new life. “Enough with intellectuals in the family,” he used to say (I suspected he was referring to my father; though resenting his remarks, I kept silent).

  Ben Shemen — that was the name of the school — was an excellent technical and agricultural learning institution, but I showed no talent whatsoever for any of the crafts they taught: I’d clearly been blessed with two left hands. Moreover, I desperately wished to get back to a regular high school. My uncle wasn’t moved by my pleas. After a while I decided to risk a rejection and, on my own, I paid a visit to Shaul Levin, the director of the high school in Natanyah. Easily convinced, Levin talked to my uncle, and, in the spring of 1949, I joined the eleventh grade at Shaul Tchernichovsky High. To this day I remain grateful to Levin.

  My relationship with Uncle Paul didn’t improve. Sometime in 1950 he underwent prostate surgery at the Hadassah hospital in Jerusalem; it led to complications and he became incontinent. It turned him, understandably, into an increasingly unfriendly person. Some two years later, uremia developed, which apparently caused paranoid delusions: he became convinced that I’d been spending his money, and that I harbored hostile intentions toward him. Luckily, by then I was in the army and did not live in Nirah anymore.

  2

  While Israel was winning its War of Independence, momentous events shook my native Prague: the Communists, backed by the Soviet Union, came to power. Soon a wave of refugees left the country and thousands of Czech Jews arrived in Israel, some of them to our village. There was even family in their midst, whom my uncle took in.

  It was then, in the spring of 1949, that I received an unexpected visit. I’ve since forgotten what my visitor looked like and the name he gave me. I remember only that he arrived on a powerful motorcycle. He asked me to follow him and, once assured that we couldn’t be overheard, told me that he worked for the government. It obviously meant that he had something to do with security. “You came on the Altalena,” he said without much of a preamble. “That’s not good. If you want to make up for it, you have to help us. Among the new olim [immigrants] from Czechoslovakia, there are Communist agents. I want you to listen to conversations and report anything that could sound suspicious to me.” He gave me his address — not far away by bus — and departed.