A Chosen Few - Mark Kurlansky [125]
Irene started having informal meetings to which non-Jews were not invited. She called her group Uns fur Unsere, We for Ourselves. For four years they had monthly meetings, a small group of Jews who discovered that they all had the same background. They had been born in the United States, France, England, or Australia, wherever their parents had found shelter from Hitler. They had all been brought back to Germany when young and had never felt completely German but had never given much thought to being Jewish either, because they were all from good Communist households. They became like archeologists brushing off the rocks of their lives, looking for clues to a bygone civilization. Irene arranged lectures on Jewish law, on holidays, on Israel. She started arranging for Lubavitch rabbis from the West to come for holidays.
MOST OF THE EAST BERLIN JEWS had other things on their mind. Their religion was the new socialist Germany, but it was getting harder to stay a believer. When Brezhnev decided to invade Czechoslovakia in 1968, he meant to send a message to people throughout the Soviet bloc. The event marked the beginning of a slow decline in which idealism turned to disillusionment. It made loyal Communists wonder about the entire system. If East Germany went its own way and reformed its errors, which was what many loyal Communists were hoping would happen, would not the Soviets treat them the way they had the Czechoslovakians? The Warsaw Pact was for mutual defense, and a central concept was that the USSR was not supposed to intervene in the internal affairs of its members. But obviously the Soviets would intervene.
When the Soviets invaded Czechoslovakia, in East Germany it was mainly the intelligentsia who were upset. But as the economy failed to perform year after year, discontent spread. East Germans grew a little angrier every year, and as the Stasi accurately reported on growing discontent, the regime grew more repressive and distrustful. “There was not physical repression but mental,” said an East German journalist of Jewish background, “I mean people were never afraid to voice their opinions, especially in factories. They voiced their opinions very openly, but of course the state authorities didn't like it and the people were deprived of fundamental freedoms like travel, to read what they want. I mean, they could see television, they could listen to the radio, but if you wanted to read The New York Times or he Figaro, you couldn't, unless you were a privileged person like I was, who was working as a journalist. Of course we had everything, but that was only a privileged smaller group—writers and journalists/’
Mia Lehmann and her husband often talked about how things were not going well. They had understood the need for the Berlin Wall as a temporary measure, but not as a permanent policy. By the time of her husband's death in 1963, he had become extremely critical of the GDR system. Mia knew that the dream—the new egalitarian Germany—was drifting far off course. As a trade union official, she earned her living doing what she did best. She spent her days in factories asking people why they were unhappy. “I had to deal with people in the factory. I knew what the economic side was. And it went down and down.”
While the average East German was worried about the economy, the Communist elite, like Mia Lehmann,