A Chosen Few - Mark Kurlansky [106]
In nearby Cologne, on the day before Christmas in 1959, a monument to the victims of Nazism and a synagogue were marked up with Nazi graffiti, the handiwork of two youthful members of Deutsche Reichspartei, or DRP, a postwar extreme right-wing group. Neither was old enough to have had a real wartime Nazi past, although one had joined a Nazi youth group, Deutsche Jungvolk, just before the end of the war. The two had been schoolboy friends and had joined the DRP together the year before the synagogue attack. They later gave as reasons for joining that it was the only party that truly addressed the Jewish question and stood for the ideals of National Socialism. It was Germany's first glimpse of a new generation of Nazis, the neo-Nazis.
The Federal Republic shuddered at the realization that the poison had spread to a new generation. There was even a drop-off in membership in extreme right-wing groups. The DRP was accused of being a resurrection of the old Nazi party. It had to publicly declare itself to be “antifascist,” and even that only gave it a temporary reprieve. Eventually it disappeared, only to be re-formed as the Nationaldemokratische Partei Deutschland, the NPD. This game with names was to become part of the standard procedure of neo-Nazi organizations.
All of West Germany was talking about the rebirth of Nazism. It led to a Nazi graffiti crime wave. In the half-year after the first two youths were arrested, 685 cases of anti-Semitic acts were recorded by law enforcement. In school, a fellow student walked up to Ruwen and simply said with no real fervor, “Heil Hitler.” Ruwen went home and told his father. Aaron immediately went to the school director. The boy's parents, in a refrain that would become commonplace in the 1990s, said that they could not understand why he had said such a thing. They certainly were not Nazis.
A sullen misfit in Moishe's class also adopted Nazi rhetoric. He became conspicuously anti-Semitic and even turned his exam questions into diatribes against the Jews. But for this he got very poor grades, and while Moishe was well-liked by his classmates, this unhappy colleague was an outcast. He was a curious figure for Moishe because for all he had heard about Germans, this friendless boy was the first openly anti-Semitic German he had ever encountered.
The Jewish community in Dusseldorf grew slowly. Romanian and Hungarian Jews, escaping the problems of their own countries, arrived in small numbers. In Budapest, Gyorgy Gado was divorced, and his wife and daughter moved to Dusseldorf. The official Jewish Gommunity was eagerly receiving these new Jews, struggling to build itself up. But the Waks family was actively trying to get Jews to leave. Ruwen and Moishe worked hard for the Zionist Youth Movement. Youth were Israel's future. Too many older people like their grandparents had found Israel to be too difficult a life, but young people could build Israel. Nowhere did Zionists apply more pressure than in Germany, because the idea of Jews staying in Germany was particularly distasteful to them. Yet they were never very successful in Germany. In a good year one or two Jews would move to Israel, but often they would not stay.
Nevertheless, Ruwen and Moishe were trying, and the Community was not happy about their efforts. The Jewish leadership was in a difficult position, because they did not want to say they were opposed to Zionism. They simply didn't want people to leave. Wanting a Jewish community in Dusseldorf does not make you an anti-Zionist, but it does make you unhappy to see Zionists recruiting people in Dusseldorf.
Throughout West Germany the same tension emerged between the Zionists and the Community leaders. In Dusseldorf there was usually no room available at the Jewish Community Center for Zionist meetings. Ruwen and Moishe would sometimes hold their meetings in