A Chosen Few - Mark Kurlansky [10]
Wherever possible, I have tried to verify facts, and while most of the stories seemed truthful, there were a few rare interviews that I eliminated because the stories did not check out. Though some of the material in this book is derived from my own eyewit-nessing in the late 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, most of the stories here are of people's lives as they told them to me. It is true that all people tend to remember their lives in selective and self-serving ways; nevertheless, I have confidence in their essential truth. Where there is dialogue, I was either present or I reproduced it as it was related to me by a participant. Scenes that I did not witness were described to me by those who did.
I avoided people who would not let me use their names, although I respected some requests to leave out the names of or information about certain relatives.
Verifying stories and probing for truth was particularly difficult with camp survivors, who often went into tremendous but selective detail about their camp experiences, even though I did not ask them. Survivors often have a despairing sense that no one can possibly understand them, and I think that to some extent they are right. The more I learn about the Holocaust, the less I understand it. When radio correspondent Edward R. Murrow was reporting on the liberation of Buchenwald, one of the emaciated survivors went up to him and asked him if he intended to write about what he saw. The survivor, a Frenchman who had formerly worked for the news agency Havas, told him, “To write about this, you must have been here at least two years, and after that… you don't want to write anymore.”
But people did continue with their lives—damaged people whose psyches were wounded in ways that go beyond the comprehension of the rest of us had the strength and courage to rebuild, remarry, and raise children. Because of them, Jewry today has a future in Europe, and Hitler, at last, has been defeated.
Paris, October 1994
P R O L O G U E
The Fifth Son in Berlin
“Afterward Moses and Aaron went and said to Pharaoh
Thus says the Lord, the God of Israel: Let my people go
that they may celebrate a festival for me in the wilderness”
-EXODUS 5:1
A loud thumping noise at the head table shook the plastic wine cups but failed to silence the die-hard old Communists. It was a rabbinical gesture—a long fluid arm motion resembling the straightening of an egret's neck, ending in a palm-down whack on the table. Orthodox rabbis do this at the reading stand when they want to silence the synagogue. Irene Runge had been accused of numerous things in the past year, but being an Orthodox rabbi was not one of them. Still, having seen the gesture, she thought she would give it a try. As former East Berlin drifted in the post-Communist era, there was something enviable about the authority wielded by an Orthodox rabbi.
In East Berlin the Passover dinner, the seder, was being offered in a government-subsidized cultural center off the Oranienburger-strasse for fifteen marks per person—a bargain, considering that the official Jewish Community over in West Berlin was charging fifty marks. The East Berlin seder was strictly kosher—to the satisfaction of Irene, the hostess. A lifelong Communist, she had lost her position at Humboldt University after the collapse of the Communist state for having ties to the East German secret police, the infamous Stasi. The seder was to be supervised by a religious leader, long-bearded and behatted, a virulent anti-Communist religious traditionalist from the ultra-Orthodox Lubavitcher sect. He was to bring together fifty atheists—a blend of committed German Communists and Russian immigrants who had never been exposed to any religion—in the recitation of praise to God, while outside in the cool spring night, a dozen prostitutes stood in tights and glittery