A Chosen Few - Mark Kurlansky [105]
One of the leaders of the student movement was Daniel Cohn-Bendit, a German Jew whose parents had returned to Frankfurt in 1949. He was called Dany the Red both for his politics and for his very unsemitic-looking red hair. A kind of folk hero in France, for years afterward French journalists would look him up in Frankfurt and ask him how he became a student radical. “What was the turning point in your life?” asked Andre Harris and Alain de Sedouy, the team who had written the celebrated 1970 Max Ophuls film on French collaboration, The Sorrow and the Pity.
“It was the war,” said Cohn-Bendit.
“World War II?”
“No, no… “
“The Algerian war?”
Finally he had to tell them. It was the Middle East Six-Day War. The Palestinian cry, “Drive them to the sea” had rallied him too. It had stuck in his mind. Another thing that stuck in his mind was something said to him when he was arrested in the police crackdown in Paris. Taken to one of the infamous French police commissariats, a policeman said to him, “You're going to be sorry that your parents weren't roasted at Auschwitz.”
17
West Germany
and the
Promised Land
ONE THING THAT RUWEN WAKS CAME TO UNDERSTAND growing up in DP camps was that beyond the camp was Germany, and the people who lived there were Nazis. This was the general impression of the entire Waks family, and when they settled in Dtisseldorf, their world was to be the 400 to 600 other Jewish people who had also settled there. They had learned German, but the first language of the family remained Yiddish. It was the kind of Jewish life more typical of Jews in their native Poland than of German Jews.
In the beginning Lea was afraid. She did not want to walk on the street. They were all Nazis out there. Aaron felt that he knew how to deal with these Germans. If there was a disagreement—over a price, over the right of way while turning a corner, anything at all—he would angrily glare at the German and shout, “You Nazi!” One day, he had an encounter with a policeman and he called him a Nazi and angrily walked away. The policeman was stunned. He had been a small child during the war. Why did this man, who seemed to be a Jew, a survivor of some kind, think he was a Nazi? Because the Jews, especially the foreign Jews, were few and stayed together in Dusseldorf, the policeman was able to find out who Aaron was and locate his apartment. Once he found Aaron, he asked him, “Why did you think I was a Nazi?” For the policeman to live his life as a German of his age, it was essential to understand why this survivor was accusing him of this terrible thing. They talked, and in time the policeman became a close friend of the Waks family. Then they understood that there was at least one German who was not a Nazi.
Aaron and Lea continued to work with Zionist organizations, and their sons started working with the Zionist Youth Movement. Ruwen and Moishe were sent to school to learn Hebrew in preparation for their move to Israel. As for Lodz or the war or what happened in Poland or what happened to relatives, this remained a mystery to the children. The Waks family shouted about Nazis, but they did not discuss the Holocaust.
Lea's parents continued their nomadic life, now returning to Dusseldorf and then going back to Israel. Then they settled near Dusseldorf, in Dortmund. Then back to Israel. When they were in Israel, they said that life was too hard. When they were in Germany—Germany was German. They moved almost once a year for the remainder of their lives. Lea's mother died in Israel. Her father died in Germany.
The five-year age difference between Ruwen and Moishe reflected the change in West German society. When Ruwen was in school, the East German accusation that West German schools were full of Nazi teachers had been true. Ruwen's history teacher had been a Nazi, but he had been a little Nazi. If he was careful about what he said in class, he could keep his job. And so in the busy year-long curriculum, there simply was never any