A Chosen Few - Mark Kurlansky [210]
A lean, tall man in a French beret wandered in one day, cautiously saying his name was Fred. He had the look of an old-time American Communist, which was what he was. He said he was from Texas, but his English had so many accents layered on it that it sounded unidentifiable. On the other hand, when he spoke German, he sounded like he was from Texas. His father had been a Silesian Jew and had been arrested by the Germans during World War I for agitating against the war. Fred was born in El Paso, Texas, in 1926, where his father, an active Communist, had raised him not to ask questions and to follow the lead of the Young Communist League. Fred had served in Europe in the Army Corps of Engineers during World War II. In 1950 he was called up again to serve in Korea. Since Austria was under partial Soviet control, he considered fleeing there. But a friend advised him that the Communists were going to lose Austria and he would be better off in East Germany, “It was good advice,” said Fred in his sad-eyed way. “I would have only gotten five years. In Germany I got forty.”
He did not really know what to do in the new Germany. It seemed as if he had wandered into the Kulturverein looking for ideas, and he spent most of an afternoon sipping coffee and talking to whoever was around. “I never thought it would end up like this,” he said. “I thought Communism was the model for the future and everyone would move toward it.” Before he left he said that he had been thinking a lot about El Paso of late. “If I applied for U.S. citizenship, Pm pretty sure I could get it. But I would have to bow my head and say it was the biggest mistake of my life. It was all wrong. And doing that would offend my sense of dignity.
“Well,” he said, adjusting the jaunty angle of his beret, “nice talking to y'all.” And he sadly sauntered to the door, down the dark and tattered stairway, and disappeared into the streets of the former East Berlin.
THE DISTANCE between Ossis and Wessis was even greater in the case of Jews than non-Jews. While Mia Lehmann and Werner Handler had returned to East Germany out of a sense of idealism, trie West Berlin Jews had returned to make money or to enjoy middle-class German materialism. Ron Zuriel had come back to help his father set up a lucrative law practice handling reparation claims. He had never really made a decision to stay in Germany. He had never thought he was capable of living permanently in Germany: “It came about. My son was born here. In my profession you cannot go back and start again where you started. You climb to a perch. And here I had a job morning until night. I worked sixteen hours a day at least. Saturday and Sunday/’ Zuriel was making money and had no illusions that he was doing anything else. Asked if lie had come back to help Jews, he said, “Well, I was helping Jews, and I was helping myself. A lawyer who says he is in the Red Cross is a liar.” The law firm became more and more profitable. In the 1970s the reparation claim business under the West German Wiedergutmachung law started slowing down, and he switched to general civil law. In time his own son became a lawyer and joined the firm.
In 1990 the firm began specializing in the section of the unification law dealing with restitution of nationalized property. According to this law, if a Jew had property confiscated by the Nazis and then the “Aryan” who received the property had it confiscated by the GDR state takeover of private property, the original Jewish claim would supersede that of the later owners. By 1993, there were about two million claims on confiscated GDR property. ZurieFs clients were Jewish and lived mostly in the United States and Canada but also in Israel and Western Europe. Virtually none of these Jews were interested in returning to Germany. They wanted to reclaim the property and then sell it at the plump prices of the postunification real estate market. “They never expected to get their property back,” said Zuriel with an ironic chuckle. For them, it was “a gift from heaven.”
Moishe Waks did come back to help German Jews. After