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WHILE THOUSANDS OF SURVIVORS WERE WAITING IN Germany to arrange for a ship to take them away out of Europe so they could be far from Germany, a small number of German Jews went to English ports looking for ships to get back to Germany. Most of them had barely managed to get out only a few years before.
From the time Mia Lehmann left Antwerp for Berlin until she finally escaped to England in the late 1930s, moving to Germany had been for her a nearly fatal choice. Mia was a small woman —it seemed almost by design. She could lean close to people, ask them about their troubles, and then turn her head to listen so that her ear would be exactly at the level of the other person's mouth. Her strong and determined jawline contrasted with her soft and sympathetic eyes. An activist by nature, she did not think that Nazis coming to power and ruling the streets with brown-shirted bullies was any reason for her to be quiet. To her, it was all the more reason to speak out. She spent two years, from 1934 to 1936, in a Nazi prison in Silesia, accused of plotting to overthrow the government. She always laughed about the charge, because she thought it gave her undue credit; all she had really been doing was getting aid io families of political prisoners. She was one of six Jewish women in her cell block, all of whom served their sentences for political crimes and were released. The Nazis had not yet decided to murder every Jew. Maybe they would just send them to Madagascar. After her release, Mia had to report to the police once every week. She had no grasp of the extent of what the Nazis were planning, but as she watched Jews near the Oranienburgerstrasse synagogue being rounded up in open trucks and taken away, she understood that she would not survive if she stayed in Germany.
To leave, another country had to agree to accept her as a refugee. She had to have a sponsor to get a permit. It all took money. The Jews who had money were leaving, and those who didn't were being rounded up in trucks. Between 1933, when Hitler came to power, and 1938, half of the 500,000 Jews in Germany got out. Finally in May 1939, Mia's international Communist connections landed her a permit to go to England and work cleaning houses. Three months later, the war started and it was impossible to escape.
WERNER HANDLER'S FAMILY were German Jews who suddenly found themselves living in Poland when the borders were redrawn after World War I. Shortly after Werner was born in 1920, the family moved to the mountains a little to the west so that they would be in Germany again and not Poland. Eighteen years later, in November 1938, Werner and his father were among the twenty thousand Jews arrested during Kristallnacht, the night Jews and Jewish buildings throughout Germany were simultaneously assaulted. The Handlers were taken to Sachsenhausen.
In those days Sachsenhausen had no gas chambers or crematoriums. Werner, 18 years old, could not really understand what this place was, this strange triangle of barracks in Oranienburg. He and his fellow inmates were marched and worked and abused, and it seemed like some sort of prisoner-of-war camp, but there was no war. It was still peacetime. The camp had been set up for six thousand political activists and criminals. But Handler and his father were among another six thousand men who had been brought in, all Jews rounded up on Kristallnacht. Werner did not understand what the Nazis were doing in this place, but with twelve thousand men it was now very crowded. Their clothes were not warm enough, and there were not enough blankets. The inmates found sleeping mates to keep each other warm on the straw where they slept. There were beatings, and disease, and overworking, and the one thing V/erner did understand was that “anybody who lives in these camps can be dead in ten minutes.” The political prisoners taught ihe Jews how to survive there, what to do and not to do.
After a few months Werner and his father were both released. Before they got out of the camp, a group of political prisoners told Werner, “When you get out, wherever you go, tell about people like us. Tell what is going on. Tell them in England that Germany is preparing for an enormous war.” It was the time of the Munich pact, when Western Europe had appeared to convince itself that “peace in our time” was possible.
Werner arrived in London with ten marks. On the boat over he had asked a fellow passenger what the English word for war was, and even knowing few other words, he told everyone he talked to that there was going to be “war.” The English patted him patroniz-ngly on the shoulder. Clearly the boy had been through some upsetting experiences.
While Werner and his father had been in Sachsenhausen, his mother had tried to arrange passage to England for the family, but she had been able to get only one permit, for Werner. It was now up to him to arrange papers for the rest of the family. When he got to London, he went to his mother's distant cousin, a barrister named Bernard Gill is, and told him about the camps, the storm troopers on the streets, and how his parents were being robbed of their money and property. He tried to make Gillis understand what it was like in Germany, and he said that he doubted his parents could survive there much longer.
The barrister listened sympathetically and then explained that if they came, he would have to support them, since they would not be able to work in England. But he could not assume this responsibility since he was already supporting a rabbi who had come over and he just did not have the money to support anyone else.
Both Werner Handler's parents were killed in Auschwitz.
When the war broke out, the British government decided it was too risky to trust any Germans in their midst. Werner Handler was sent to an internment camp on the Isle of Man and then to Canada. He had never been particularly political, but once again he found that the political militants were the people to know. They were the ones who spoke out for better conditions. They were the ones who knew how to survive, and he wanted to be one of them. In 1942 the British started allowing German Jewish refugees to work in defense jobs and even to serve in the military, but the British Army rejected Handler because it regarded him as a socialist troublemaker.
Back in England, he worked repairing bomb damage. Mia Leh-mann could now work in a factory. German Jews had their own world in wartime England, with political organizations such as Free German Youth and cultural movements and leftist movements. By the end of the war, Mia Lehmann, Werner Handler, and many other German Jews had met and married fellow refugees.
After the war there was little enthusiasm among them for returning to Germany. But a few German Jews, especially those still in their twenties, decided that even if they did not really want to, they had an obligation to return. Some thought they owed it to all the people they loved who were now dead. They believed that “a new Germany” was going to be built, one that was democratic and socialist—a complete break from the past. If idealistic young people didn't go back to build it and make sure it was very different from the old Germany, who was going to do it?
Handler and his wife, Helle, were among those who went back to build this new anti-Nazi socialist Germany. Helle had come from an old Sephardic family in a town near the Dutch border. She had left Germany to try to get to South Africa, where her father's older brother ran a hotel. But she had not been able to get farther than England. After the war her South African uncle went to England to convince her and her new husband, Werner, to take over his hotel. But Werner and Helle wanted to fight racism, and they reasoned that in South Africa they would be in constant trouble. In the new Germany they had an opportunity to change things. Most of their fellow German Jews were not as enthusiastic as they were about the promise of the new Germany and regularly urged both of them not to go back. Of the more than eight thousand refugees in the Free German Youth movement in England, only a few hundred returned to Germany. They did not return as Jews, and they did not expect to lead a Jewish life. Werner Handler, one of the few German Jews of his generation to grow up in a kosher household, had concluded, “I am broygez with my God.” Broygez is a Yiddish word for when you quarrel, become angry, and stop speaking to each other.
In 1946, Handler stopped off to say good-bye to Barrister Gillis. “I have always had a bad conscience about your parents,” Gillis said. “But we couldn't know what was happening. Not the truth of what the Germans were doing.”
Handler understood. Before he had gone to Sachsenhausen, he v/ould never have believed what the Germans were doing either. In fact, for most of the war he had hoped his parents would survive. Then in 1944, Russian troops had liberated Maidanek. When Handler read an account by a Russian writer of this death factory that operated day and night, he scoffed, “Why is he telling us this? Does he think we don't hate the Nazis enough already?” For an entire week he dismissed the story. Then he started thinking about what he had seen in Sachsenhausen and how afterward people in England had patted him on the back very kindly and said, “It's all right, my boy.” He realized that the account was probably true and that he would never see his parents again. “Since then,” he said, “I have known that the unimaginable can be true.”
THE LEHMANNS WENT to Berlin in 1946. The mountains of rubble had been mostly cleared from the thoroughfares, but there were still entire neighborhoods without a single building or even a wall—blocks of brick and stone heaps, with claws of twisted pipe reaching up. Mia's husband was a Berlin Jew from Charlottenburg, a suburb to the West. The first commuter train in Berlin had run between the center of Berlin and Charlottenburg. Now Berlin was not a center with suburbs, but four zones. The old center was the Russian zone, and Charlottenburg was the British zone. The Lehmanns believed that with the help of the Soviets a new democratic Communist Germany would be built, and that this bold new experiment would in time so outshine anything else that it would be adopted as the model for all of Germany.
They moved to the Soviet sector, to Prenzlauer Berg, an area of three-story tile-roofed, vine-covered buildings in the stylishly severe Berlin design. It had no windows left, no heat and no hot water, but it still had its geometric bas relief friezes—little touches of detail on the gray, early-twentieth-century facades. Compared to most of Berlin, Prenzlauer Berg was in good condition. From Alex-anderplatz, which had been the center, they could see little but rubble in all directions. Many people were still living in the basements of collapsed buildings.
They used rolls of plastic to cover the empty window frames, and they had a little coal-burning stove for the winter. In 1948, Mia, who was almost 40, became pregnant with her first child. The sector authorities had glass put in the window of one room for their baby girl. In the spring the trees that lined the streets of Prenzlauer Berg at methodically spaced intervals turned green again and birds nested in them. The Lehmanns felt as if they were part of an exciting experiment, working together with their old comrades who had fought and suffered and escaped and now were back to rebuild and this time make it work. They were not looking for Jewish life. Jewish life had ended for Mia Lehmann on that Yom Kippur morning in the Romanian Bucovina, when she found her mother sitting on the ground. They had other things in their life now. Mia had a whole city of people with troubled stories to listen to. Except that she knew that too many of those people had been Nazis.
The couple who lived below them had been Nazis—not major figures, but what came to be known as “little Nazis.” They had been Nazi party snitches on the block. Mia avoided them, but one day she was walking with her baby girl, and the woman came up and peeked into the baby carriage. Her face rumpled into a goofy smile. “What a nice baby! What a lovely baby!” she cooed, while Mia stood in silence thinking that only three years earlier this same woman would not have allowed this baby to live.
After that Mia and the woman talked almost every day, although they never discussed anything of substance. The other woman didn't seem to mind Mia's reserve. How was she to know that Mia was normally a very different kind of person? The woman loved the Lehmann baby. When Mia had to go out, especially when the weather was bad and she didn't want to take her outside, she would leave the baby with her new neighbor. The neighbor would always visit on their daughter's birthday and bring chocolate, which was hard to get in the Soviet zone after 1949. She had contacts in the West.
WHEN WERNER AND HELLE HANDLER returned to Germany to begin their great task, they had nowhere to go. The Polish German border had been redrawn again, and the town Werner's family had adopted because it was in Germany, was now also in Poland. His only living relatives had escaped to South America. Helle's family, whose books traced their lineage back to the Spanish expulsion of 1492, was also gone. Her mother had last been seen in Minsk, and her father, she now learned, had been taken out in front of the inmates of Buchenwald and beaten to death. But that Germany was defeated and in ruins. They would help build the new one, a Germany that completely broke with its past.
They arrived in Hamburg, and Werner's only skill was as a woodworker. Surely, they reasoned, Germany would welcome dedicated young people who were ready to build the new Germany. Handler wrote to the Northwest German Radio station that he had returned to Germany to do something useful and that he had heard they were offering training in radio. I am back with no qualifications; will you train me? That was all he had to say. They took him immediately. There was a great demand for Germans who had never been Nazis.
With his tough, direct manner, Handler felt the ice of the cold war early. He was not a political sophisticate like Mia Lehmann, who had been active in the Communist party for more than fifteen years, or her husband, who had been thrown out of school in 1934 for forming a Marxist cell among his classmates. Handler was not even a member of the Communist party. He was simply an angry Hamburg radio journalist with a sense of mission, preaching the new socialist democratic anti-Nazi Germany when and wherever he had a chance. In late 1947 he was one of a number of journalists who were fired in what seemed to be a general housecleaning in western-sector media.
Shortly after that he was offered a job with Berliner Rundfunk, or Berlin Radio, the Soviet-controlled German radio station for Berlin, Hamburg, and Cologne. The Handlers moved to an apartment in the British sector of Berlin, where the radio station was located. To them there was nothing political about the sectors—it was all occupied Germany. But in 1948, after their first daughter was born at the Jewish Hospital, separate currencies were established for East and West. The money Werner earned no longer had value in the sector where he lived, so they moved to the East, where their second daughter was born.
When separate currencies were established for East and West, the Lehmanns understood what was about to happen and they were worried about it. The scenario was supposed to be a slow evolution toward a democratic socialist state. But if East and West split, the East would instantly be declared the new socialist democratic Germany. Both of the Lehmanns agreed that the Germans were not ready for this. Just a few years earlier, many of them had been Nazis. Now they would be socialists, and for the same reason—it was what the existing power told them to be. But how many of them understood socialism and were really prepared in their minds to embrace a totally new kind of society?
There had never been an East and West Germany. Linguistically and culturally, the division had always been between north and south. But although both sides were Germany, both peoples were German, and the division of East and West was artificial, a mentality of “us” and “them” very quickly took hold on both sides. Contributing to this frame of mind was an 858-mile border that followed no regional lines, no cultural patterns, and lacked all historical logic. Rather, it was defined by guards, barbed wire, and minefields. Still, the small group of Jews who had returned to build the new Germany felt that their German Democratic Republic had a new vision, while the Federal Republic in the West was simply a deplorable continuation of the old Germany—the part that refused to go along with progress.
One East German Jew, expressing a widespread point of view, said, “In West Germany the judges, the police, the civil service, the criminal police, and, once they started rebuilding it, the officers of the Army, were all people who had big jobs in the Nazi party, in the civil service, in the government.” The only inaccurate part of that observation was the word “all.” As the old alliance broke up and the West increasingly came to see the Soviet Union as its principle enemy, it treated Germany's Nazi past with an ever-increasing leniency. The first Bundestag election revealed a significant presence of extreme right-wing voters and political organizations. The American policy of “denazification” had been dropped in preparation for the creation of the West German state. Once created, that state in 1950 declared an amnesty for low-level Nazis. The Soviets had fired 85 percent of the almost 2,500 judges, prosecutors, and lawyers in their sector, and most of them went to the West, where they usually qualified for the 1950 amnesty. Of 11,500 West German judges, an estimated 5,000 had been involved in courts under the Third Reich. In the East, Nazis were also purged from the schools, the railroad, and the post office, and many of these ousted personnel found homes and jobs in the West as well. This fact was given enormous publicity in the East. Then there was the Globke case.
Hans Globke was West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer's state secretary of the Chancellery. He had been known as an efficient, loyal administrator both in the Weimar government and in the Third Reich. At the 1935 Nuremberg rally Hitler had announced a new series of laws that gradually stripped Jews of their German citizenship, their right to own shops, their right to attend schools, and their right to mix with non-Jews. It was an important step in the dehumanizing of Jews that would lead to their being hauled off in cattle cars. To give legitimacy to these new laws, legal opinions had to be written, as they would for any other German law. These legal commentaries had been Hans Globke's contribution. Later, still serving in Hitler's government, Globke had proposed forcing all German Jews to take the middle name of Israel or Sarah. The East Germans denounced the Adenauer government for the presence of this. Third Reich figure, but when Globke offered his resignation, Adenauer refused it. The East Germans demanded that Globke stand trial and eventually tried him in absentia and sentenced him to life imprisonment. In the ten years he served Adenauer, Globke offered his resignation five times, but Adenauer insisted that his aide had done nothing wrong in simply writing “an objective interpretation of the racial laws.”
Werner Handler had become the Bonn correspondent for Berliner Rundfunk, and he covered the Globke affair. He also covered the organized extreme right, which reached a level in 1950s West Germany that it would not reach again until the reunification of Germany decades later. In 1954 there were almost fifty extreme right-wing organizations in the new West Germany, with an estimated 78,000 members. Expelled Nazis from the East, former targets of denazification in the western zones, and some who had been quiet for a time were now regrouping. Handler thought the West Germans were at best soft on Nazis. While he was in East Berlin in 1948, someone painted a swastika on the Berliner Rundfunk building, and when Handler and others protested, the station director called a meeting and said, “There is one thing you should know. We don't have discussions with Nazis. If we catch one, we beat it out of him. We don't discuss it.”
THE FIRST TIME Irene Runge saw Europe, in 1949, she was a seven-year-old New Yorker, her ship had just pulled into Gdansk, and she wanted to jump and swim back all the way to Washington Heights. Her father was a German Jew who might have been destined for the family's business in Mannheim. But when Hitler came to power, he went to Paris with his non-Jewish girlfriend and lived the leftist intellectual life of the days of the Popular Front, changing his name from Alexander Kupermann to Georges Alexan, which he deemed a fashionable nom de plume. He wrote articles and pondered larger works that he was never to write, but he did manage to use his base in Paris to get his entire family out of Germany.
When the Germans invaded France, he fled to Palestine, where he convinced his girlfriend to convert to Judaism before they married. Then they moved to the United States, settling in the Washington Heights area of upper Manhattan, west of the Broadway trolley. It was a Jewish neighborhood with a concentration of Austrian and German refugees. He opened a shop in the vast, dark labyrinth of the Times Square subway station, where he sold books and art. The shop became a hangout for German refugees, who drifted in and out all day, were served coffee, and passed hours arguing and debating in German.
Their only child, Irene, was born in 1942. After the war, the family did not go back to Germany. Irene's father still enjoyed his shop and his German intellectual life in Manhattan, and her mother liked living in the boom town that was postwar New York. But then came the cold war, and some of their friends—the crowd that passed through his shop—were called for questioning by the U.S. Congress on their leftist activities. In 1949, with the same quick instincts that had saved him from Nazi Germany, Irene's father told his wife and daughter to pack because they were moving to the newly formed German Democratic Republic. Over the protests of his wife and the whining of his daughter, they were soon living in Pankow, an East Berlin neighborhood just north of Prenz-lauer Berg. Pankow had not been bombed, and so many of the East German ruling elite lived there that Westerners often sneeringly referred to the East German government as “the Pankow government.”
Back in Washington Heights, little Irene's only notion of a place called Germany had been that she would see her parents and neighbors putting together packages, and she was always told it was to help the poor people in Germany. They would joke about putting her in the box and shipping her off. And now here they were, off to that miserable place where the poor people waited for packages. But she was told that her friend Johnny, with whom she played in Washington Heights, would be there too. He was. In fact, she grew up in Pankow around the same kind of people, and in some cases the same people, as she had in Washington Heights.
She grew up with the idea that East Germany was a place where Jewish intellectuals speaking a variety of languages had little houses with housekeepers. That was Pankow. Most of the people had fought the Nazis one way or another. There were no Nazis here. She never met one. She only met anti-Nazis. The Nazis must have been in the West, she thought.
As the cold war progressed, Irene learned to speak more and more German, because Americans and their language were not well liked. An American was an “Ami,” and the look she saw in other children's eyes when they said to her “Ami go home” was enough to convince her to speak German. But she never did quite fit in. She learned to speak flawless colloquial Berliner, but she never thought of the language, the culture, or the idea of German-ness as being who she was. She was a Pankow Jew. Religion did not exist in Pankow and Irene did not exactly know what a Jew was—to her, a Jew was a Communist. But then, she did not have a clear idea of what a Communist was, either. To her, a Communist was a Jew. In her world all the Communists she met were Jewish, and all the Jews she met were Communists. Irene and her friends in their Pankow Jewish immigrant community had chewing gum and wore blue jeans. Some people said these things were symbols of imperialist culture, an idea she could not quite grasp. But her parents understood, and in time they stopped dressing her that way. Her mother never seemed to fit in, either. This life had been her father's grand scheme, and he lived happily in this neighborhood full of important builders of the new Germany and he talked with them and he thought and he wrote. But for her mother, it was an isolated life. There was nothing in Pankow for her. She was not building a new Germany and had been happy to be away from the old one.
Irene's childhood dream was to be a guerrilla fighter—a Soviet guerrilla fighter, popping out of the forest and attacking the Nazis. Her childhood literature contained many stories about the good Russians fighting the evil Nazis. Her father had very definite ideas about what children could read. He encouraged them to read the great German literature, but he strictly forbade German children's fables and folk tales. The old Germans had been raised on those dark myths. Mickey Mouse, on the other hand, was allowed.
Irene knew that the families in the Pankow colony were not the same as Germans. One of the ways they were different was that they were not supposed to eat pork. Also, if meat and dairy were served on the same dish, several minutes of fleishig-milchig jokes, most of which she didn't get, would follow.
When Irene's parents had dinner guests, which was very often, the meat was a great topic of conversation. In Germany most meat turns out to be pork. Irene's mother had a special recipe where the pork was cut in thin strips and then marinated, breaded, and fried. The guests would take a bite and murmur that it was chicken, that it tasted like chicken, what good chicken it was. Then someone would whisper, “Yeah, but it's really pork, you know.” There would be a lot of whispering around the table, and finally someone would ask Irene's mother how she got the pork to look and taste like chicken. Her mother would explain the recipe, the cutting, the marinating, and the seasoning. It was called “ko-shering the pork.”
Another peculiarity of Irene's secular childhood was her father's hat. Her father spent his days reading and studying, and as he did so, he wore a strange brimless hat. It was not a yarmulke. It was his own idea of a hat. But when people came over who were not in his regular circle, he would quickly remove it. He always said that he wore it because of a draft.
One of the Jewish writers from New York who visited the family told Irene that she was Jewish, which she thought was a great idea. The writer gave her a children's book teaching the Hebrew alphabet. To her father's chagrin, Irene loved this notion of being Jewish, because if you were Jewish, you got a completely different alphabet, like a secret language. She could be a Jewish Soviet guerrilla fighter with a special language that nobody understood.
When Irene started telling her schoolmates that she was Jewish, they paid little attention, except for once, when they came to her with a question. Since she was a Jew, they thought she might know the answer: Why did the Jews kill Jesus?
Irene had no answer. She went home that day with two questions for her father. “Why did the Jews kill Jesus?” and “Who was Jesus?”
One December day in 1951—by coincidence, Stalin's seventy-second birthday—Irene's mother was not home when Irene came back from school. Nor was she home the next day, or the next. Irene was sent to various people's houses to stay. At first, she was mostly aware that she didn't have to go to school. Gradually she came to understand that her mother had died, but she did not learn very much more because her father would not talk about it. In time, she came to understand that her mother had killed herself. Only years later, talking to cousins, did Irene realize how much her mother had disliked being in Germany and how unhappy she had been in Pankow.
IN THE EARLY 1950s, West Germany launched a policy by the name Wiedergutmachung, which means “making it good again,” or setting things right. Israelis always preferred the Hebrew word shilumim, meaning “reparation payments.” Wiedergutmachung was the expansion of a program that had been started under U.S. direction in the American-occupied zone. East Germany refused to participate in this or any other such schemes, insisting that West Germany was the continuation of the Third Reich and thus should pay for its crimes, whereas the German Democratic Republic was a new society that had no predecessor. When the Federal Republic was created in the West, it agreed to pay an individual four marks, which was then worth about one dollar, for every day spent in a Nazi prison or concentration camp. It also made a payment for the loss of career and for loss of life. The payments amounted to billions of dollars. Much of it went abroad. In the Netherlands these payments financed the rebuilding of the Jewish community and remained the economic base of that community's activities.
Israel, facing a desperate economic situation and unable to obtain financing from anywhere else, saw Wiedergutmachung as a last hope. Many Jews in and out of Israel were appalled by the idea that Israel would enter into any kind of relationship with Germany. This was a time when extremists were demanding that Jews who chose to live in Germany should be expelled from Judaism in some way. But the 1952 treaty, signed in the Luxembourg city hall, earned Israel some $700 million in goods, services, and capital annually for the next fourteen years, at a time when tens of thousands of Holocaust victims were living in Israeli tents. For that price, the West German Federal Republic could claim to the world—in spite of what the East Germans were saying—that the Bundesrepublik was a new Germany trying to make up for its past, making it good again.
The reparations created an entirely new German bureaucracy, as millions of claims for individual payments poured into Germany. That was how the Zuckers, who had left Germany for good, ended up back where they started in Berlin. Ron Zuriel was born Werner Zucker in Berlin in 1916 to a family that had immigrated from Poland. The Zuckers, like the Wakses, derived their Jewish identity less from religious practice than from a passionate involvement in Zionism. When Ron joined the Zionist movement at 15, he was firmly committed to the idea of a Jewish state someday in Palestine, but he had no real plans to leave Germany personally. Two years later, Hitler came to power. After two more years the first of the Nuremberg laws were announced. The Zuckers heard Jews discussing whether to leave or stay, whether things would get better or worse. But the Nuremberg laws were all it took for Ron and his father to decide. They were not going to live in a country where Ron's father had to give up his textile business because he was a Jew. Ron was not going to live in a country where the law forbade him to date a non-Jew. Now Zionism gained a new meaning for the Zuckers. The following year, Ron and his father (his mother had died years earlier) emigrated to Palestine. Soon Ron went to England to study law, but two wars interrupted his education. First he went back to Palestine to serve in World War II. Then, soon after resuming his education in England, he went back to Palestine to fight in the 1948 Arab-Israeli war. During this war he changed his name from Werner Zucker to Ron Zuriel. In 1950 he was at last ready to open a law practice in Israel.
After three years as a lawyer in Israel, Ron returned to Berlin for a visit, at his father's request. Ron's father did not seem able to stay away from Germany. At first he had gone back on visits to see old friends. Being an Israeli, he was very aware of the Wiedergutmachung program, and since all his friends were survivors, he urged them to file claims. He would help them do it. Soon he was helping his friends’ friends. Gradually his visits grew longer until, in reality, he was once again living in Berlin, with an office stacked with files for Wiedergutmachung claims and only vague ideas about how to pursue all these cases. His son was now a lawyer, and he needed his help. Ron agreed to come for a visit and try to help him, but neither he nor his Czech Jewish wife wanted to live in Germany. It was a grim and eerie experience just to be there at all.
A photography enthusiast, Ron took pictures of the ruin that used to be their house in the Schoneberg section. The entire neighborhood had been bombed and was now mostly cleared, but he could make out the ruins of his house and the nearby synagogue, which had survived Kristallnacht.No one wanted to touch the synagogue. If it fell down or had to be torn down, it would surely be said that Germans had once again destroyed a synagogue. But there were no Jews around to use it. It just stood in a lot with some rubble and an empty space where the neighborhood had been. Ii was as though his upbringing were a badly fixed photo that was slowly fading. The next time he went to that spot even the synagogue was gone. Then construction began, and soon Schoneberg was a modern neighborhood of new apartment buildings, shopping malls, and wide highways—a place as removed from his childhood as if it were in another country.
Berlin was no longer home to Ron Zuriel, and he returned to Israel. But his father kept gathering more and more cases with which he could not cope, and he continued to ask his son to join him. They could work together, he said—make it a business. In 1956, Ron's father talked him into coming for “three or four years.” Ron was reluctant. His wife was even more reluctant. But Ron's father argued that it would be just for three or four years. They thought perhaps they could stand Berlin for that long. They would live in their own world, Ron would have his work, and it wouldn't really be like living in Germany.
It was a strained existence. They formed a small circle of friends from a community of a few thousand Jews, and Ron worked from early morning until late at night. They avoided contact with non-Jews, but that was unnatural, and after a time they started talking to Germans. The Zuriels could speak with Germans as long as the Germans weren't of their own generation. If a German was Ron's age, he could only think about what this person might have been doing during those years. And just thinking about it, he didn't want to talk. It was actually easy to avoid those people. All Ron really had to do was to make it clear that he was a Jew, since Germans found it difficult to talk to Jews. It was too… awkward. They knew what Jews were thinking about them. Sometimes a conversation would start, and then it would drift to the war years, and then it would inevitably end up with the non-Jew declaring, “I didn't know. I had no idea.” Ron didn't believe them. He kept waiting for just one German of his generation to say, “I knew. It was terrible, and I could do nothing.” He would have accepted that. But he never heard it, and the rage pulsated through his body as he stood in silence, his, face expressionless, his eyes cast toward the floor, and listened to these people politely explaining that they didn't know, as though they just happened to have been out shopping during the twelve years when his world was being annihilated.