Inside was Walter’s business card and two photos: one of the couple dressed in their finest, the other of a young, sweet-faced boy wearing shorts and a large round hat.
The Blumenthals were deported to the concentration camp Terezin and later murdered. The neighbor’s family kept the wallet and often told the tale of Walter’s final desperate attempt to be remembered. I saw the billfold and its contents on a recent afternoon in Berlin’s new Jewish Museum. It was my first trip to Germany since 1983, when I had accompanied my mother to the places where she and her parents were born and lived before fleeing the Nazis. On this trip, I wanted to see how the story of Germany’s Jews was being presented at the museum–and how Germany had changed in the past two decades.
An astonishing 850,000 visitors have been exposed to two millennia of German Jewish history in the 14 months since the Jewish Museum opened to wide acclaim. I stopped about a dozen people who were wandering through the eye-catching, interactive exhibits to ask why they were there. Marcos, a 31-year-old heavy-metal rock musician, said he and his purple-haired girlfriend came because they’d heard it was “really cool.”
“I also saw many Holocaust films in the 1980s,” he added, “so I know how the Jews died.”
“And now you’re learning how they lived?” I asked.
Marcos nodded. “Exactly.”
A stylish 60-year-old woman had a different reason. “I’m an observant Christian,” said Eveline, “and we should know more about our origins in Judaism. It’s also good for us to confront our history.”
I had already confronted my family’s difficult history on our previous journey, when many of my mother’s former neighbors were still alive and able to tell us what they remembered of “that filthy time,” as one put it. I was surprised this time to again find residents who knew the family. Just as I arrived in my grandfather’s hometown, three women in their late 80s strolled by the spot where his childhood house had stood.
“You’re Bachenheimer’s grandson?” one asked. “He lived right here with his mother.”
“And how did you all get along before the war?” I ventured.
“We had no problems. We grew up together and were fine with the Jews,” one of the women replied. I glanced over at the nearby community house where in 1943, the remaining Jews of the area had been rounded up before deportation.
There was a pause, and suddenly the second woman said, “Wir haben nichts getan”–“We didn’t do anything.”
I later mentioned the curious, unsolicited remark to a young German named Andreas, who explained, “The old people, even if they didn’t do anything bad, still feel guilty that they didn’t do anything good.” I climbed to the village’s hilltop Jewish cemetery, which was desecrated during the Third Reich, later restored and is now protected by the townspeople. After leaving stones that I’d brought from my Long Island garden on the graves of my great-grandparents and great-great-grandparents, a Jewish tradition, I proceeded to nearby Kirchhain, my mother’s childhood hometown. On Kristallnacht, the November 1938 night of brutality in which Jews were murdered and their synagogues attacked, the Gothic-style temple there had been torched and half the graceful structure destroyed.
During our 1983 visit, we were infuriated to see a furniture factory attached to the remnant of the synagogue, which had been converted into a luxury flat for the factory owner’s son. Nowhere was there any mention that this building had been the heart of the Jewish community. But after five years of contentious correspondence with the mayor, he had informed us a sign would be erected to mark the 50th anniversary of what Germans now call the “Reich Pogrom Night.”
And there it was: a metal plaque with a symbolic menorah reading: “In memory of our hunted, deported and murdered Jewish fellow citizens; until November 1938, this was their synagogue, their place of worship.”
I was overcome with emotion at the heartfelt, dignified, albeit belated tribute, another physical indication that despite continuing, disturbing echoes of anti-Semitism, there have apparently been profound changes in German society. This year in particular has seen an alarming rise in anti-Semitic incidents, coupled with shocking comments about Jews and Israel from the controversial German politician Juergen Moellemann. But some young Germans are making valiant efforts to counter any resurgence of racial or ethnic hatred. Patrik, a 25-year-old poet from the city of Konstanz, told me how a longtime friend of his remarked that Moellemann’s statements were justified. “I was so outraged to hear her say that, and to discover that she voted for his party,” Patrik said. “I told her, if you do not take that back, I’m walking out this door right now, and it’s the last time you’ll see me. She refused, and our friendship was over.”
I heard similar sentiments during my stay in Germany, where an institutionalization of the memory of the Jews combines with a thirst for knowledge about their pre-Holocaust life. I walked the streets of Cologne with a German friend, Rudolf, who has an entire bookcase in his home devoted to volumes with Jewish themes. He pointed out a number of small gold squares embedded in the sidewalks outside various shops and apartment buildings. In the past few years, a local artist, supported by a government grant, has created a tile for each Jew who resided at that address: “Here lived Elsa Blaser, deported to Lodz in March 1942” reads one; “Here lived Hans Rosenzweig, deported to Riga in 1943” proclaims another. Each description ends with the presumed date of the person’s death.
I was born after the Holocaust; I have no memories, as my mother does, of Nazi gangs attacking my home. Visiting her birthplace is not an exercise in nostalgia; it’s a return to the scene of the crime. I did not suffer the murders, as did my paternal grandfather, of two sisters and their nine children. I am not a sociologist, and I cannot say whether the stain of anti-Semitism remains ingrained in the German psyche, as some claim. But it seems clear that many good-hearted young Germans, free from the guilt that burdened previous generations, are doing their best to atone for a horrific past for which they bear no responsibility. At the same time, they’re making sincere efforts to learn about the enormous Jewish contributions to German life and culture. Back at Berlin’s Jewish Museum, Nina, a college student from Hamburg, told me, “I don’t know any Jews. We don’t have them as neighbors anymore, so this is important for me.”
We were speaking near an exhibit depicting Joseph Goebbels’ 1943 declaration that Berlin was now “Judenrein,” free of Jews. Standing in the once-again German capital in 2002, I was proud to prove Goebbels wrong. And down the hall, as I watched people gather around Walter’s wallet, I silently addressed him: “Your wish has been granted, Herr Blumenthal; you have not been forgotten.”
