Return to Germany

After more than 70 years, I returned to Germany. It took many counseling sessions for me to be able to make the decision to go. All of this was prompted by Pat’s decision to go to Germany for several days to visit a young couple who were living in Germany while the husband had a post doc position at the university in Braunschweig, a city about an hour and a half north of Berlin. For me it was both a wonderful opportunity and a challenge.

I left Germany as an 8 ½ year old in 1939. Up to now I had always felt that I would never return. I had no desire to go. The circumstances under which I left certainly did not provide any encouragement for me to consider returning. Yet here it is 2012, no longer 1939. I kept that in my mind as the time for going back neared, and all the time I was there.

We flew from Israel to Berlin on El Al Israel Airlines. The plane was filled with Israelis going to Germany on business or for pleasure. A contradiction by itself. We arrived in Berlin and took a taxi to our hotel. My German, long dormant, started coming back to me. I was able to read and understand the signs along the way. I had last been exposed to German as an undergraduate in college. We had not spoken German in our home once we arrived in America.

After checking in to our hotel we took a city circle tour. It was quite a powerful experience seeing the famous sites of Berlin which I remembered from my youth. Berlin had been 80% destroyed by the allied bombings in World War II. Now we were in a clean city with modern glass and steel architecture interspersed with older, traditional structures. We saw remnants of the Berlin Wall which had divided the city between east and west for so many years. Reunification was a major event in the life of the city. Berlin today is modern, active, cosmopolitan, with many hotels, and a thriving tourist industry. It was hard for me to grasp that I could walk freely into a major department store and choose from the many items for sale or stop for coffee and cake at the lavish food court. That was now and real.

The next day we took a tour of Jewish Berlin. This turned out to be a tour of what had been; a tour of a piece of history that the German government and the city did not want to be forgotten. All the memorials we saw that morning, were funded either by the federal or city governments. The memorials were powerful, often overwhelming in their starkness, simplicity, directness. The Jewish community of pre-war Berlin had been decimated and its institutions destroyed. What remains are signs on street lights, the railroad track on which trains carried Jews to concentration camps with dates along the trackside, a room in the city hall filled with pictures along the walls and biographies on shelves of people who had once been “neighbors” but had been taken to be “resettled”, a monument dedicated to the many synagogues that once served the Jews of the city. Now they are but names on metal plaques in rows on a lawn at the site of one of the destroyed synagogues. The most striking monument is a block long installation of grey stone blocks in the shape of coffins, forming columns of varying sizes, standing on uneven ground. The further you walk in, the taller the columns, the smaller you feel. It took my breath away. The whole experience of that tour left me without words. Perhaps silence and/or tears are the only possible response. We were not able to see any of Berlin’s reconstructed synagogues. They are closed; open only for services. I was disappointed.

The next day we spent significant time on Museum Island in the midst of the city where we walked amid displays of ancient archaeological finds, moving in their beauty and size. We ended the day with a visit to Berlin’s Jewish Museum and its striking architecture. Inside is a history of the Jews of Germany and Berlin brought to life through photographs, ritual objects and texts; designed for groups of students of all ages.

Then we traveled by train to Braunschweig where we had three days with a family including a young, three year old Israeli boy who was learning German at day care, whose father speaks to him in Hebrew and whose mother speaks to him in English; he manages to keep them all straight. It was truly a delight to be with them while dad is off in Spain working on his research project. We took trips to a park by a lake; to the foothills of the Harz Mountains; and to an “auto city”, devoted to a history of the automobile, sponsored, of course, by Volkswagen.

Before leaving Germany and returning to Israel, we had one last night in Berlin. Our hotel was a short distance from Berlin’s most fashionable street. We walked for several blocks and found a small, sidewalk restaurant featuring Italian food. We encountered a young waiter who spoke English like an American. It turns out he spent a year in Norfolk, Virginia as an exchange student. It’s a small world.

I was really glad to return to Israel after a moving, sometimes overwhelming, eye-opening experience. I felt as if a curtain has been lifted, a closet door opened. I surprised myself many times how at ease I felt in those surroundings; how available my German was and how comfortable I felt engaging in simple conversations. Yet I did not feel comfortable enough to wear my kippah in public. Somehow, I did not want to call attention to myself. Surprisingly, I am open to the possibility of returning to Germany to see more and perhaps to make some contact with Jews living in today’s Germany.

Frank