A Chosen Few (32 page)

“No, no …”

“The Algerian war?”

Finally he had to tell them. It was the Middle East Six-Day War. The Palestinian cry, “Drive them to the sea” had rallied him too. It had stuck in his mind. Another thing that stuck in his mind was something said to him when he was arrested in the police crackdown in Paris. Taken to one of the infamous French police commissariats, a policeman said to him, “You’re going to be sorry that your parents weren’t roasted at Auschwitz.”

O
ne thing that Ruwen Waks came to understand growing up in DP camps was that beyond the camp was Germany, and the people who lived there were Nazis. This was the general impression of the entire Waks family, and when they settled in Düsseldorf, their world was to be the 400 to 600 other Jewish people who had also settled there. They had learned German, but the first language of the family remained Yiddish. It was the kind of Jewish life more typical of Jews in their native Poland than of German Jews.

In the beginning Lea was afraid. She did not want to walk on the street. They were all Nazis out there. Aaron felt that he knew how to deal with these Germans. If there was a disagreement—over a price, over the right of way while turning a corner, anything at all—he would angrily glare at the German and shout, “You Nazi!” One day, he had an encounter with a policeman and he called him a Nazi and angrily walked away. The policeman was stunned. He had been a small child during the war. Why did this man, who seemed to be a Jew, a survivor of some kind, think he was a Nazi? Because the Jews, especially the foreign Jews, were few and stayed together in Düsseldorf, the policeman was able to find out who Aaron was and locate his apartment. Once he found Aaron, he asked him, “Why did you think I was a Nazi?” For the policeman to live his life as a German of his age, it was essential to understand
why this survivor was accusing him of this terrible thing. They talked, and in time the policeman became a close friend of the Waks family. Then they understood that there was at least one German who was not a Nazi.

Aaron and Lea continued to work with Zionist organizations, and their sons started working with the Zionist Youth Movement. Ruwen and Moishe were sent to school to learn Hebrew in preparation for their move to Israel. As for Łódź or the war or what happened in Poland or what happened to relatives, this remained a mystery to the children. The Waks family shouted about Nazis, but they did not discuss the Holocaust.

Lea’s parents continued their nomadic life, now returning to Düsseldorf and then going back to Israel. Then they settled near Düsseldorf, in Dortmund. Then back to Israel. When they were in Israel, they said that life was too hard. When they were in Germany—Germany was German. They moved almost once a year for the remainder of their lives. Lea’s mother died in Israel. Her father died in Germany.

The five-year age difference between Ruwen and Moishe reflected the change in West German society. When Ruwen was in school, the East German accusation that West German schools were full of Nazi teachers had been true. Ruwen’s history teacher had been a Nazi, but he had been a little Nazi. If he was careful about what he said in class, he could keep his job. And so in the busy year-long curriculum, there simply was never any time to discuss the years 1933 to 1945. When Moishe went to the same school, to his fascination, they studied the Holocaust in detail. He would come home with a torrent of questions. But his parents would not talk about it.

In nearby Cologne, on the day before Christmas in 1959, a monument to the victims of Nazism and a synagogue were marked up with Nazi graffiti, the handiwork of two youthful members of Deutsche Reichspartei, or DRP, a postwar extreme right-wing group. Neither was old enough to have had a real wartime Nazi past, although one had joined a Nazi youth group, Deutsche Jungvolk, just before the end of the war. The two had been schoolboy friends and had joined the DRP together the year before the synagogue attack. They later gave as reasons for joining that it was the only party that truly addressed the Jewish question and stood for the ideals of National Socialism. It was Germany’s first glimpse of a new generation of Nazis, the neo-Nazis.

The Federal Republic shuddered at the realization that the poison had spread to a new generation. There was even a drop-off in membership in extreme right-wing groups. The DRP was accused of being a resurrection of the old Nazi party. It had to publicly declare itself to be “antifascist,” and even that only gave it a temporary reprieve. Eventually it disappeared, only to be re-formed as the Nationaldemokratische Partei Deutschland, the NPD. This game with names was to become part of the standard procedure of neo-Nazi organizations.

All of West Germany was talking about the rebirth of Nazism. It led to a Nazi graffiti crime wave. In the half-year after the first two youths were arrested, 685 cases of anti-Semitic acts were recorded by law enforcement. In school, a fellow student walked up to Ruwen and simply said with no real fervor, “Heil Hitler.” Ruwen went home and told his father. Aaron immediately went to the school director. The boy’s parents, in a refrain that would become commonplace in the 1990s, said that they could not understand why he had said such a thing. They certainly were not Nazis.

A sullen misfit in Moishe’s class also adopted Nazi rhetoric. He became conspicuously anti-Semitic and even turned his exam questions into diatribes against the Jews. But for this he got very poor grades, and while Moishe was well-liked by his classmates, this unhappy colleague was an outcast. He was a curious figure for Moishe because for all he had heard about Germans, this friendless boy was the first openly anti-Semitic German he had ever encountered.

The Jewish community in Düsseldorf grew slowly. Romanian and Hungarian Jews, escaping the problems of their own countries, arrived in small numbers. In Budapest, György Gadó was divorced, and his wife and daughter moved to Düsseldorf. The official Jewish Community was eagerly receiving these new Jews, struggling to build itself up. But the Waks family was actively trying to get Jews to leave. Ruwen and Moishe worked hard for the Zionist Youth Movement. Youth were Israel’s future. Too many older people like their grandparents had found Israel to be too difficult a life, but young people could build Israel. Nowhere did Zionists apply more pressure than in Germany, because the idea of Jews staying in Germany was particularly distasteful to them. Yet they were never very successful in Germany. In a good year one or two Jews would move to Israel, but often they would not stay.

Nevertheless, Ruwen and Moishe were trying, and the Community was not happy about their efforts. The Jewish leadership was in a difficult position, because they did not want to say they were opposed to Zionism. They simply didn’t want people to leave. Wanting a Jewish community in Düsseldorf does not make you an anti-Zionist, but it does make you unhappy to see Zionists recruiting people in Düsseldorf.

Throughout West Germany the same tension emerged between the Zionists and the Community leaders. In Düsseldorf there was usually no room available at the Jewish Community Center for Zionist meetings. Ruwen and Moishe would sometimes hold their meetings in a stairwell. And they had to find their own financing. The Jewish Community had no funding available for Zionist activities.

Then suddenly in 1967 came a big boost to the Zionist cause—the Six-Day War. It was more a boost in sympathy than in actual numbers. Of twenty thousand Jews in West Germany, four hundred were members of the Zionist Youth movement. Only twenty actually went to Israel at the time of the war, and most of those did not stay. Yet it was a record year for German Zionism. Ruwen volunteered and stayed permanently in Israel. His parents had to sign papers to give him permission. Moishe was too young to go. Aaron could not even attempt to conceal his pride in his son who had volunteered for Israel. Lea jutted her jaw and wore a stiff face of approval as she sent her son off to a faraway war. She wasn’t supposed to think of it that way. She had raised her sons to speak Hebrew and be Israeli. She had no choice but to approve of what Ruwen was doing.

The war turned out to last only a matter of days, but Ruwen was sent to work on a kibbutz run by the German Zionist movement near the Lebanese border. After two months he returned to Düsseldorf, a hero in the Jewish Community, no longer confined to stairwells, giving talks about his experiences in the city’s major halls and meeting places to Jews and non-Jews. After several months, he returned to Israel, and soon he was running into many of his friends from Germany who had also decided to emigrate. But time passes swiftly in Israel, and to Israelis the war was already long over by then. The Germans lost their sense of purpose and, a few at a time, went back to Germany. Only Ruwen stayed to make his life as an Israeli. He married Carmela, an Iraqi Jew who had lived in Israel since she was a small child.

Aaron and Lea may have had their hearts in Israel, but their pants store was in Düsseldorf. Every year, while they preached Zionism, their lives became more deeply entrenched in West Germany and the German economic miracle. The store was prospering, and they had a large apartment on a wide rebuilt boulevard near the center of the city, not far from the birthplace of Heinrich Heine, the Jewish poet who a century earlier had written passionate verses of his love for Germany.

And others, like Lea’s parents, were returning from Israel. One German Jewish family that had lived in Israel since Hitler came to power moved to Düsseldorf over the sad protests of their two Israeli-born children. In Tel Aviv this family of four had lived in one room of a four-room, four-family house with a common kitchen and bathroom. Educated people, the father worked small teaching jobs and his wife was a maid. In 1953 they were evicted from the house and were about to move to a distant housing project in a slum. Instead, to their children’s great chagrin, they moved to Düsseldorf, where he worked as an editor on the Jewish newspaper and lived in an apartment in the center of town. He had a love of the language and culture, and in truth it was the country where he was most at home. Still, no one in this family loved Germany the way Heine had. They loved German literature and no doubt knew Heine’s famous verse, “
O Deutschland, meine ferne Liebe
,” but to them, for the past twenty years in exile, Germany had been not a far-off love but a horror they had escaped. Now it was simply a place where they could have a good job and a decent apartment. Israel had not offered that.

D
ÜSSELDORF
, like all West German cities, was being rebuilt with a modern opulence it had never before seen. Within walking distance from the Wakses’ was the Königsallee, where trees were planted and rococo bridges built over a little dark canal. Both sides were lined with cafés and shops, where enormous quantities of money could be spent on anything with a label on it. Nothing creative or original was being offered, only status name brands, so that West Germans could spend their money and display their wealth.

West Germans embraced materialism with the same set-jawed determination with which they had done everything else. The people who, when blockaded from munitions in World War I, had
made their own by learning how to extract nitrogen from the air, were now focusing their ingenuity on becoming rich. Economic growth became the all-important measure between the two Germanies. West Germany had it, and East Germany didn’t. West German growth was so rapid that in the early 1960s there was a labor shortage—a need for foreign laborers, guest workers to live in Germany without citizenship and do the work that Germany needed done. These growth figures were a point of national pride for the West. Every sign of prosperity was an important benchmark. Germany had been mired for too long in ideologies. The East Germans were still stuck in one. But West Germany would be the successful new Germany, a land of material wealth. As the ruined cities were rebuilt, each one had a boulevard like the Königsallee, the most important being the Ku’damm, because it was in West Berlin, the ultimate display case of the Federal Republic deep inside the GDR.

Protz
is a German word for showiness, too many gold rings, flaunted wealth. The Israeli-born daughter of the man who took the newspaper job in Düsseldorf concluded after years of reflection that it was this flirtation with gaudiness, the
Protz
, that seduced. It was a dramatic contrast to the harsh life in Israel. It kept bringing German Jews back, and it held them there. Aaron and Lea Waks would go to Israel someday, but for now they had the trouser business, just as for Ron Zuriel his law practice was keeping him in Berlin.

But the Wakses and the Zuriels had distanced themselves from the fact that they were in Germany by not associating with non-Jews, by preserving their stern and critical distance from “the Germans.” When student demonstrations began erupting in Berlin in 1968, Ron Zuriel found it an encouraging sign. Here was a truly new generation of Germans rejecting their parents’ world. “They actually revolted against the attitude of their parents … they were rejecting everything institutional,” he said. This was a German movement of which he could approve. They were saying the same things about Germany that he had been saying. He even began to hope that new Germans were being made who could construct a new Germany.