A Chosen Few (45 page)

Three months after the Goldenberg attack, a bomb exploded in front of a synagogue in the Antwerp diamond district. Once again, the attackers had completely misread their target. They imagined that a synagogue in the heart of the diamond district, the only
nonmodern building in that little hook of streets behind the Pelikaanstraat, would be a direct hit on the Jewish establishment. In fact, the synagogue has little to do with the diamond district and serves the small Sephardic community. The bomb was placed there on the morning of Simchat Torah, a holiday which celebrates the conclusion of the annual cycle of Torah readings, when all of the Torahs are removed from the arc and carried around the synagogue to the accompaniment of singing and dancing. Children join in, carrying candles and little flags. The next morning, the celebration is repeated. But because in Antwerp Jews tend to be excessive about these events, the night before they had danced late into the night. Realizing that they would have only a few hours to sleep, they postponed the nine o’clock morning service to nine-thirty. The bomb went off at nine-fifteen, blowing out the metal and glass facades of the diamond district and killing three and wounding 106 people, all of them non-Jews. The Jews who worked in diamonds were all in synagogues outside of the diamond district.

The bloodshed continued around Europe. Another man armed with an automatic pistol opened fire on the entrance to a Brussels synagogue during Rosh Hashanah services in September 1982. A few weeks later, as a crowd was leaving a Rome synagogue at the end of Sabbath morning services, assailants tossed hand grenades and opened fire with machine guns, killing a two-year-old boy and wounding thirty others. The Chief Rabbi of Rome charged that such attacks had been encouraged by the Italian government’s welcoming Yasser Arafat on a recent visit.

But the Palestinians were not the only problem. Even if an attack such as the one on Goldenberg’s showed every sign of Palestinian work, the assailants clearly had their European admirers. Mysteriously, mimeographed flyers appeared around Amsterdam saying in Dutch, “In the heart of Paris freedom fighters have done a brave act.” The statement attributed the attack to French “Nationalists … nauseated by the fact that there are Jews in the Red French government. Fiterman, a real French name isn’t it?” Charles Fiterman, a Jewish Communist, was the minister of transportation in the new leftist French government that had come to power in 1981.

Two of the bloodiest incidents of the period—the 1980 bombings of the Bologna train station, killing eighty-five, and the Munich Oktoberfest, killing 13—were both attributed to the extreme right. The Munich bombing was traced to a “martial sports group” led by Karl-Heinz Hoffmann. Shortly before the bombing, former
Bavarian Prime Minister Franz-Josef Strauss had been quoted describing the group as people who were picked on for doing nothing more than spending their Sundays hiking. Many leaders of the German extreme right spent time in Hoffmann’s sports camp. Hoffmann was released for lack of evidence in the Oktoberfest case, and after his sports group was banned, he became involved with the PLO and for a time centered his activities in Lebanon.

In France alone, between 1977 and 1981, 290 violent acts were attributed to the extreme right. A 1981 West German government report claimed there were 200,000 right-wing extremists in Germany, but that “only” 3,000 were armed and ready to commit violence. In March 1981 the Sinus Institute, a West German pollster commissioned by the chancellor’s office, found that 13 percent of the West German electorate—some five and a half million West Germans—held extreme right-wing political views. These views included hatred of foreign minorities and hatred of democracy and a reverence for what in German is called
Volk
, Germans as a racial entity. Almost half of these extremists said they approved of the use of violence.

Throughout Western Europe, verbal and physical attacks on immigrants became increasingly common in the early 1980s. The Germans, as is the habit of their culture, invented a word for hostility to foreigners,
Ausländerfeindlichkeit
. The neo-Nazi groups that had emerged in Germany in 1960 declined in the 1970s, but by 1980, they were larger and more active than ever before. As in France, the West German police seldom arrested right-wing extremists. On the other hand, in June 1983, when ten thousand people turned out to protest a planned rally of two hundred neo-Nazis in the Kreuzberg section of West Berlin, the police moved in with clubs and tear gas, and a pitched battle ensued in which 203 anti-Nazis were arrested. “
Ausländer ins KZ
”—foreigners to the concentration camp—became a common graffiti slogan. “Foreigners out!” in various languages was becoming a common slogan throughout Western Europe. What was no longer common anywhere in Western Europe was an unguarded synagogue or Jewish institution. A Jew looking for a Sabbath service needed only look for the armed guards strolling in the street.

F
OR THE FIRST YEAR
anniversary of the Goldenberg attack, French television did a special documentary interviewing Jo Goldenberg and
other people in the Pletzl. André Journo eagerly took his turn to explain his theory of how defeated President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing had been behind the attack. Henri Finkelsztajn, whose schoolboy stutter occasionally flared, was not eager to make such media appearances, but he was still angry. After the attack the people of the Pletzl—Arabs, Jews, Christians, even some gypsies—were scared and worried and had spent that afternoon together talking, but no one had chanted anti-Arab slogans. This had to be made clear to the public.

With the camera running and lights so bright that his little bakery looked twice its size, Finkelsztajn found himself face to face with the old lines. He was asked if he was a Frenchmen. If so, why did he call himself a Jew? There was no stutter. Finkelsztajn, the high school drop-out, had a smile of wisdom and eyes that seemed to be winking as he explained, “I say I am a Jew because we are in France. When I am abroad, I say I am a Frenchman.”

The interviewer, not content with this, pointed out that he was a Polish Jew. Henri, with the patience of a man who has spent a lifetime answering the same needless question, explained that he had never been to Poland, had had no contact with the country nor the slightest feelings for the place. Then he smiled his pleasant, amused smile—the same smile you get after buying one of his challahs.

I
n September 1989, Henryk Halkowski, the director of the musty, nearly deserted Jewish social club in Cracow, was eager to show foreign visitors his town. For the first time since immediately after the war, Poland had a non-Communist prime minister. The Polish Communist dictatorship was over, and among the new freedoms was the possibility of showing your town to a Westerner without being watched by the secret police. Halkowski was an enthusiastic man in his late thirties with steel-rimmed glasses and a sardonic smile. On the day that Tadeusz Mazowiecki was installed as the first non-Communist prime minister, a New York University professor was in Cracow and Halkowski wanted to take him to the place where Tadeusz Kościuszko had first vowed to fight for Polish independence almost two centuries earlier. Halkowski liked the idea that at this historic moment of the new Polish state, he should take someone to this historic spot. He also knew that Kościuszko was the one Polish patriot whose name was known to New Yorkers—because of the bridge bearing his name on the Brooklyn Queens Expressway.

Halkowski led the visitor to the large, empty medieval marketplace in the center of town that a few years later would be filled with tourist cafés. As he and his guest stopped at the very spot of the Kościuszko vow, six young people with shaved heads and laced boots whom he had never seen before pulled him from behind and
knocked him down. As they beat him with their fists, they shouted in German, “
Jude, Jude, Jude
,” and then ran off. There was a police station nearby, but the militia that didn’t allow youth to roam the streets attacking Jews, let alone curse them in German, had already been disbanded.

T
HE NEW
P
OLISH STATE
, which had for Halkowski so inauspiciously begun, was the fruit of two decades of political resistance. The crisis of the Communist state had become so extreme that the military had sought the help of the opposition but in the process gradually negotiated itself out of existence. The opposition had to be legalized, and then parliamentary elections had to be allowed. Power evaporated from Communist hands more rapidly than even Solidarity had been prepared for.

It fell to the former
Polityka
chief, Marian Turski’s longtime editor Mieczysław Rakowski, to ease the transition, first as prime minister, then as Jaruzelski’s replacement, becoming the last first secretary of a ruling Polish Communist party. In July, Rakowski appointed the last Communist-led government, but it lacked a following, and in August he had to replace the prime minister with a non-Communist.

The dream had failed. The Communist state for which people like Marian Turski had been working all their lives had collapsed, bankrupt in every sense. Turski and his associates had been fighting this failure for thirty years. Ever since the Soviets invaded Hungary in 1956 and they saw that the Communism they had dreamed of was betrayed, they had been trying to get it back to what it was supposed to be. Turski said of the final collapse, “It was not a certain must. There could have been a lot of change.” The existing power was to Communist reformers like Turski a monster that used the label “Communism,” although they themselves were never able to mount a successful reform movement. “For myself and many of the people close to me,” Turski said, “the regime was not Communist. It was nothing but a nationalist, imperialist policy of Russia.”