A Chosen Few - Mark Kurlansky [1]
“A Jew is a citizen of no country except Israel.”
“Waarom leefik?” (Why am I alive?)
—three of the comments written in the guest book at the Anne Frank house in Amsterdam
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION 2002
INTRODUCTION 1994
PROLOGUE: The Fifth Son m Berlin
PART ONE
THE BREAD YEARS
1 From Lodz to Paris
2 Liberated Paris
3 Liberated Antwerp
4 Liberated Budapest
5 Liberated Prague
6 Liberated Poland
7 Liberated Amsterdam
PART TWO
BROYGEZ IN THE COLD WAR
8 From Lodz to Dilsseldorf
9 From the Lowlands to Palestine
10 In the New Berlin
11 In Czechoslovakia
12 From Moscow to Warsaw
13 In Budapest
14 From Moscow to Berlin
PART THREE
’68
15 From North Africa
16 In Paris
17 West Germany and the Promised Land
18 Passing in Warsaw
19 Czechoslovakian Summer
PART FOUR
RITE OF PASSAGE
20 East German Autumn
21 In Budapest
22 In Warsaw and Cracow
PART FIVE
THE SILENCE
23 Belgium, On a Bank of the Yser
24 In Antwerp
25 In Paris
PART SIX
EUROPE, NEW AGAIN
26 In Poland
27 In Budapest
28 In the Czech Republic
29 The New Slovak Republic
30 In Antwerp
31 In Paris
32 In Amsterdam
33 In Berlin and the New Bananerepublik
EPILOGUE: Freedom in the Marais
APPENDIX: Jewish Populations in Europe
BIBLIOGRAPHY
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
A READER'S GUIDE
INTRODUCTION, 2002
if they do it for no reason
there's no motive
if they all do it
no one knows who has done it.
—HENRYK GRYNBERG, “The Perfect Crime;’ 1989
Anti-Semitism has proven to be one of the most enduring concepts in European civilization. In a 1927 book called The Wandering Jew about the struggles of poor eastern European Jews, Viennese Jewish novelist Joseph Roth concluded that anti-Semitism would vanish from the world, ended by the Soviet Union. He wrote of anti-Semitism, “In the new Russia, it remains a disgrace. What will ultimately kill it off is public shame.” He noted virulent outbursts in Russia but dismissed them as the death struggles of dinosaurs resisting the inevitable future.
Roth even speculated that “If this process continues, the age of Zionism will have passed, along with the age of anti-Semitism— and perhaps even that of Judaism itself.”
Today the Soviet Union has been gone for a decade but anti-Semitism is still here. So for that matter, is Judaism. “The Jewish question”—I have never been certain what the question is—that Roth predicted would be put to rest with Russian leadership, has endured.
The lesson to be learned from Roth, aside from a warning to writers not to publish predictions in books, is that both Judaism and anti-Semitism have deep and permanent roots in Europe. Though Judaism is a less European idea than anti-Semitism, for many Jews, Jewish culture is European—or was.
Because of the Holocaust, Europe is no longer the most Jewish continent. It may have remained the most anti-Semitic, though Africa and Asia, with their Muslim populations are certainly vying for the title. It is difficult to be certain because anti-Semitism is more difficult to quantify than Judaism. As the nations of the former Soviet bloc struggle for acceptance in the West—admission into Western clubs such as NATO and the European Union— Jewish organizations such as the World Jewish Congress have urged that progress towards democracy in these nations be measured by the way they are treating their Jews. This is not as skewed a perspective as it at first sounds. Anti-Semitism, whether in Hungary, Germany, or France, has usually been tied to undemocratic movements. The growth of anti-Semitism in France, from the Dreyfus case to World War II collaboration, was tied to monarchists, fascists, and other groups that did not support republicanism. The Soviet Union was in principle opposed to anti-Semitism, and even outlawed its outward manifestations. But as that nation grew increasingly repressive, it also became increasingly anti-Semitic. The “anti-zionist campaign” in Poland in the late 1960s was the precursor to general repression.
But a more subtle anti-Semitism is