by Avraham Burg
In the end, she held a vote in the bus. “Who wants to be a cedar?” she asked, and all hands were raised. “And who wants to be a bulrush?” Not a hand went up. Thus, despite all the explanations and verses, the swaggering Israeli cedar is much more seductive and attractive than the pitiful reed, that diaspora Jew.
Today I’m ready to retroactively renounce some cedar moments in my life for the opportunity to go back and be a bulrush according to the doctrine of the Dalai Lama. “China will be uprooted like a great tree exposed to wind,” he predicted at the meetings, as if we had been together on the school trip in fourth grade. If he had participated in the vote on the bus, he would have likely not voted like everyone else. In one moment of a buttoned-up official meeting I was again exposed to the doctrine of my teacher from my distant childhood days, a doctrine that I then considered ridiculous, and today turns out to be deep and full of hope and faith, strength and power, consistency and change.
THE SECOND MEETING THAT CHANGED MY LIFE WAS IN Berlin, on the eve of Rosh Hashanah in 2009, when I met a man different from anyone I had ever met in my lifetime—so different, but at the same time so remarkably similar to the Dalai Lama. Until now it isn’t clear to me if he was a small reed on the bank of a large lake, or the broken branch of a giant cedar that had collapsed. In the few hours I was with him, I felt again for the second—and so far, the last—time the same sense of a lone man containing power far greater than himself. Just as I had felt with the Tibetan monk.
In this case, I wasn’t limited in time and there weren’t any official representatives to interrupt us. I came specially to Berlin to meet him. We had planned this meeting for a very long time. One day I received a telephone call from a friend who asked whether he could give my email address to someone, an Israeli living in Munich. “Of course,” I replied. After two weeks, I received an email message from him, in which he asked whether he could pass along my email address to a friend of his, also the son of Israelis from Munich. “Of course.” Two weeks later, another email: Can I give your address to my wife? “Certainly.” And two weeks later, from her: Can I give your email address to my father? “Of course.”
One morning I received the following in an email: “Greetings, Mr. Burg. My name is Helmut. My children bought me your book about the Holocaust. And I wanted to thank you very much for your words.”
I answered him with the standard reply I issue to emails of this sort, and at the end added on impulse: “Dear Mr. Helmut, I greatly appreciate the special effort you have made—with your children and their friends—to find my address. I would be very happy if you could tell me a bit about yourself.”
It took a few more days, and the answer that arrived did not surprise me: “I’m an ordinary German, actually I don’t have anything to tell.”
“There’s no such thing,” I responded immediately. “Everyone has something to tell. Every person is a story, and since we don’t know each other, I’m sure that I haven’t yet heard a story like yours.” A few weeks passed and then another email arrived, with his resume attached. He had written it out over many pages by hand, and his daughter Irina translated the text for me from German to English. That reading produced an extended correspondence between us that ended with that meeting in Berlin. For the first time in my life I spoke with a Nazi. I had come for the Nazi, and was left with the great man inside him.
This is what he wrote to me:
My name is Helmut, I was born in 1923 in a village near Nuremburg. I love nature, botany, geology, fossils, classical music, singing, dance, painting and other performing arts. My father was the principal of a school in Heidenheim, the village where I spent my childhood years. He was also my teacher. He became an artist and hated France. He considered France a sworn enemy. He admired the heroes of the First World War and was super strict. My mother was just like him. They both admired militarism and nationalism. We children were educated in a strictly religious spirit. I don’t remember that he ever hugged me or gave me a kiss.
In Heidenheim there was a large Jewish community with a synagogue. Many Jewish children went with me to the same school. I remember names, like Solomon, Rorbach, Weinberg, and Gutman. Especially the Gutman family. We had a special relationship with them. Mrs. Gutman used to visit us, and on Jewish holidays brought us a basket full of Jewish delicacies. We were happy, and to this day, I like matza. When Mrs. Gutman had a son, she asked my mother if she could call him Lothar, the name of one of my brothers who died at a young age.
I remember exotic events from our childhood that were connected to Jews. Their homes were on our street, and the synagogue was on the other side of town. On Jewish Sabbaths and holidays, we children would watch curiously how the elegant Jewish men, with their black hats, would march to the synagogue slowly and with dignity behind the rabbi, who held the Torah with great respect. When they entered the synagogue, we would sneak up behind them, hiding and peering inside, in order to hear their singing and prayer. Oh, Avrum, I loved it so much, the beautiful singing of the cantor.
At the start of the 1930s I started hearing more and more about Hitler. In the family, from guests and other children. The few doubts my parents had about Hitler disappeared fairly quickly. We saw more and more marches of Nazi groups in our streets, and villagers from out of town joined them. Everyone loved him. He was a man. A hero, a fighter, not soft. He stood bravely against everything, everyone was saying. Hitler won the elections. Germany believed that with Hitler all the problems would be solved. Finally we have a leader, and he will bring us a better future.
In the summer of 1933 I was allowed to join the Hitler Youth. Mom sewed me my first “brown shirt,” I was given a nice black scarf to wrap my neck in, and a cap for my head. In 1934, I marched on Nazi Party day in Nuremberg. We cheered Hitler and his colleagues in the leadership of the Nazi party. I loved the Hitler Youth, the friendship and camaraderie, the scouting in nature, the songs, and especially the patriotic songs and stories about the heroes. I wanted to join the army and be a soldier. I loved to identify myself as a fighter, a soldier, a hero. I wanted to die for the homeland as a hero fighting our enemies. To fight the sub-human, the untermenschen who do not deserve to live. We, the Germans were the superior “race.” I was brainwashed. Avrum, my sense of guilt since those days weighs and will weigh on my heart like lead until the day I die. It is the shadow that is with me every day of my life, until the last.
Our high school, the gymnasium, was in Nuremberg. In those years, I was fascinated by airplanes and flight, and in the youth movement I was a young pilot. I learned how to fly gliders and loved it very much, that freedom and quiet in the air. I flew, and my parents officially joined the Nazi party. All our ties with our Jewish friends were broken off. I was forced to ignore them, the sub-humans. I was forbidden from shopping in Jewish stores. In school, we were forbidden to sit next to our former Jewish friends. The brainwashing of the youth movement inculcated with unbelievable power the belief that we are the superior Aryan race. On Kristallnacht in November 1938, synagogues were burned, along with the Jewish school and the shops of many Jews, including the Rorbach family store.
At the start of the 1940s I began working in the film industry in Munich. We documented special events with senior figures from the SS, who told stories from Russia about the inferior, terrible Russians who resembled animals more than people: “When you encounter one of them in battle, kill him immediately. Show no feelings or mercy. He simply doesn’t deserve them.” At Munich’s main train station, I found myself one day at the station gate. The train arrived, and Hitler himself got off the train car, six meters from me, like a demon screaming and shouting. Hitler’s soldiers, his bodyguards and all the teams were so busy that they didn’t notice I was standing there off to the side. I was in shock at the sight of this demon. I never had such images or thoughts about our leader, the führer. Later, when Hitler disappeared, I locked the feelings and shock inside me. At the end of 1941 I enlisted in the army. I fought in Russia and became ill. I ret
urned to Germany, was posted in France, went through officer’s training, and fought de Gaulle’s partisans. I returned again to Germany and was sent from there to the eastern front, to Russia.
In the beginning of June or July 1944 we fought in Minsk. The führer, Hitler, ordered us to defend the city like Stalingrad. But the Red Army captured the city and we were trapped inside. After nine days of heavy fighting, with the battle lines constantly shifting, it was all over. Most of our comrades were killed, many people died. After a few days, I met with my three closest friends. We stuck together for a few days. But during a heavy artillery battle at night I lost contact with them and got lost in a forest. I lost the three of them in a terrible swampy area. The nightmare became reality. I lost them and knew that soon I too would die. I tried to hide in a shallow river. I dived under the water, coming up for air from time to time. When I went back under water I heard voices talking Russian and people approaching the river.… I knew my end was near. Suddenly a hand grabbed me and pulled me out. The partisans beat me to a pulp, with fists, kicks, and rifle butts. Naked without a uniform, barefoot and covered with blood, I lay at the river’s edge. Suddenly the men stopped beating me. A female partisan on a giant horse approached them. She was their commander, and she shouted orders at them to stop hitting me. They obeyed and immediately stopped. She jumped off the horse and leaned over me. She looked at me, knelt next to me, and carefully lifted my head and cradled it. She wore a brown cap, and her blond hair was in two braids. Her head bent over mine so that I couldn’t see the sky, only her face.
She began speaking to me in German in a low and sensitive voice: “War is not a good thing, comrade. What are you doing here? You’ve come to destroy my homeland? Where the hell are you from?”
“From Munich,” I heard myself whispering to her somehow. The partisan continued: “Hmm… it’s a beautiful city, your Munich. Why didn’t you stay there, you German Fascist?” Those words of hers, of that sub-human, hurt me more than all the blows from the men with their rifles, kicks and punches. Her words seared my soul. It was logical, my feelings of guilt.… I have no words to express my feelings in those moments. Here I was, a blue-eyed German, and this sub-human, the untermensch, helping me… to sit. She pulled my wallet out of my uniform pocket and looked at the pictures inside. “Your mother?” she asked. “Your father?” When I nodded my aching head, I heard her say, “Mom is crying if you stay in Russia.” My mouth was completely dry, my lips bleeding. I could barely say a word. One of the partisans brought me a pitcher of tea and bread in a bowl. The partisan leader continued talking to me seriously: “Soon the war—kaput. Hitler—kaput. The Red Army will capture Berlin and the war will end. Everyone will go back home. I am a teacher, I teach schoolchildren the German language. To read German poetry. What beautiful music you have. We love Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, and Strauss, of course. I prefer to dance Strauss’s waltzes than shoot German fascists in Belarus. Comrade, do you know this waltz?” And she began to perfectly whistle the “Blue Danube,” and I cried and cried and cried.
She got up and shouldered her rifle. “Drink more tea and eat more bread,” she told me. After I followed her instructions, she ordered that I be given an old uniform and transferred the next day to the Red Army, which would hold me in a prisoner of war camp. She mounted her horse, and her last words to me were, “The war is over.”
Out of the group of partisans a Russian fellow of Jewish origin was assigned to watch me. He spoke a type of Yiddish. When we stopped for a moment in our long journey, he ordered me to sit next to him on a block of wood by the side of the road. He looked at me, slowly pulled out an SS pistol and pointed it at me. He told me in Yiddish: “So, Fascist, do you know what this is?” and looked at the gun. “Yes,” I replied. And he told me, “So, I can kill you with this weapon. I shot the commander of the Nazi unit and took his gun. But I won’t shoot you. It would be too easy for you.”
After many days with partisans, as a lone German among Russians, some of whom were Yiddish-speaking Jews, I was transferred to the control of the Red Army, and reality became difficult and repugnant. One tank commander shouted at me from the top of the turret, “An immediate execution is taking place. I will kill you near the village fence.” My Russian-Jewish bodyguard translated the sentence to Yiddish. I knew that I was about to die. Here. The villagers, women and children, cried to the soldiers, “The officer does not have to shoot the young German just like that.” The officer refused. He wanted to execute me, he wanted to kill. The officer pushed me to the wall. I stood there. As the officer was getting his gun ready, a young woman came out of the group of villagers that surrounded us. She pushed her body next to mine, raised her hands and shouted to the officer in Russian, “Don’t shoot.” A big commotion started. She shouted again, “Don’t shoot.” I felt how her body was shielding mine. Slowly I also felt that I was losing consciousness. I fainted.
The next thing I felt were strong but gentle slaps on the cheeks and cold water washing over my face. I lay on the ground and saw the blue sky. I’m probably dead, I said to myself. But then I heard the voice of the Jewish partisan, my bodyguard. He looked at my face and kept slapping me. He was so happy, he shook me. The first face I saw after my death was therefore a Jewish face. A Russian Jew who was so happy for me, that I hadn’t been shot to death, and these were his words: “Comrade, you are alive. Comrade, you are alive.” And he kept shaking me, “Everything is alright, you are going to a labor camp. The Red Army is in Berlin. Hitler kaput. When you return home, talk about us. So, comrade, you will never forget that Russian woman!” Where is she, Avrum? From July 13, 1944, until now that has remained my life’s question.
A few days later I arrived at the prisoner of war camp. Tens of thousands of prisoners like me. Days with nothing to eat, and nights of bombardments by the German air force. We were moved from place to place in closed train cars, without water or drink in the sweltering summer days. Then came the Russian winter, and with it diseases and epidemics that killed hundreds and thousands of us. In every moment of my life there, in those horrendous conditions, I didn’t stop saying to myself: that Russian woman did not save you so you could end your life here this way. No, no, no. I must survive in order to return to Germany and tell everyone about it. That sentence became my life’s mantra during the next five and a half years in Russian captivity.
I would like to share with you one personal and intimate memory. Since my conscription and in all the twist and turns I have experienced I never parted with a metal spoon that Mom gave me when I went off to war. “Son,” she told me, “in the war there will only be wooden spoons. Better to eat from a metal spoon.” Many soldiers tried to steal my spoon. But I always managed to keep it. That way, unwittingly, it became what represented my life. The spoon was the only thing that I had left from my mother. I knew that if I lose the spoon, I will never return home. Interesting, in German there’s a saying that goes, “To turn in the spoon,” meaning, to die. The metal spoon was the only thing I took with me all the way to Russia and back to Germany. Avrum, when we meet one day, I will bring you my spoon. I will show it to you.
A simple metal spoon can tell so many unbelievable stories: in winter we had to shovel snow outside the boundaries of the camp. We left for work at first light and returned to the huts at night. The gates of the camp were closed and locked until the next departure at dawn the next day. One snowy evening I returned to the camp and felt my leg, I wanted to feel my spoon in its regular place, on my leg. But alas, the spoon was not there. I was shocked. I shouted hysterically, “My spoon is gone, where is my spoon? It’s gone!” I apparently dropped it outside the camp when we were shoveling snow. “I must go out there! I must look for it!” My comrades grabbed me tight, and one of the guards asked if I had lost my mind, because the minute that the giant camp gates were shut and the fence lighting went on, no one could go out. Certainly not to search for a silly spoon in the snow. I cried and protested. I knew that I would not return home, that I would die in
that place if I didn’t find my spoon, the gift of my beloved mother. The chief warden, “the black” we called him, a tall and black-haired Russian Jew, came up to me and asked why I was screaming like that, what was going on? I told him that I had lost my spoon. The tall Jewish guard laughed, “So, no need to shout so much. You’ll get a new spoon.”
“No,” I begged him, “this is not an ordinary spoon. It is a spoon from my mother.” Suddenly he stopped laughing. “What, the spoon was from your mamushka?” With my limited Russian and his broken German, we understood one another completely. “Come with me,” he ordered me. He ordered the guards on the towers not to shoot me. The giant camp gates opened into the stormy night. I was so scared. Honestly, I hadn’t the slightest idea where to look. When the guards called me to come back, all my hopes were dashed. I crawled back. Right next to the gates something shined in the light of the spotlights from one of the piles of snow that we had shoveled in the daylight hours. I retraced my steps, looking for the place where the shine came from. I dug furiously and… my spoon was back in my hand. Unbelievable. I raised it in the air and screamed, “I have it.” When I returned to the camp, the Jewish guard, “the black,” came over to me and asked with curiosity and friendship, “Did you find it?” When I showed him my spoon, he was so happy for me and said: “What a guy. Great. He found the spoon his mother gave him. Fantastic.”
I had other Russian miracles. In the camp I studied Russian, and I especially learned from the children. I worked like that, as a prisoner among these sub-humans. And what did I discover? Goodwill, warm conversations, without harassment, help without any hatred at all. My full return to humanity began there. That’s what I told myself. I want to be friendly, I want to serve and help everywhere that I can.
HELMUT’S LIFE STORY UNFOLDED ACROSS A FEW MORE pages soaked in blood and tears. The journey of a Nazi child from Bavaria to today’s Munich, in which his daughter is married to an Israeli, and they have no children. The upheavals of an entire century on a few translated pages. For many months, I felt that I must meet him. First it was just curiosity. I have met many Germans and Austrians in my lifetime. Some are my friends, real friends. But none of them ever revealed the Nazi side of their families to me. The silent abyss of the past was always spread out at our feet, and I never really succeeded in crossing it and reaching them, hearing firsthand what happens in the family intimacy that comes from this past. Some indeed come from families that were always humane and socialist, and that is one of the roots of our friendship. And others, I have no doubt, were touched with evil. A father or grandfather, an aunt or sister. Someone there was part of the evil system, and a conspiracy of silence envelops them to this very day.
