A Chosen Few - Mark Kurlansky [214]
Among the active Sachsenhausen survivors who were objecting to the proposed monument was Werner Handler. He still felt the obligation of the Sachsenhausen prisoners who had asked him, when he was leaving, to tell the world about what he had seen: “I think these men who said to me in the winter of 1938 look here, tell them that we are going in for a war, I feel that I have their vote.” Using the same direct language with which he confronted people all his life, he said, “The original ovens are still standing there in the Fatherland, so anybody saying there's nothing to it, we can bring them there and lie them on the roaster.”
THE NUMBER OF JEWS in Germany suddenly increased. After reunification there were 30,000, and then the German government approved permission for 25,000 Soviet Jews to be distributed in all the major areas of Germany, welcomed, offered temporary housing and language lessons, and given a home in Germany. But it was not always clear why these Russians had come. When asked their reasons, they consistently said that it was because Berlin had nice weather. No one else had ever thought so.
Boris Kruglikov, 33, had been a railroad engineer until Mikhail Gorbachev came to power. Realizing the opportunities presented by glasnost, he started selling radios and VCRs on the Russian black market. Soon this business became legal. In 1991, on an electronics-buying trip to Germany, he learned about the program for Jews and immigrated to Germany with his wife. He had originally hoped to move on to the United States, but decided to remain in Germany. “The social services are good. I was told they are not good in the United States,” he explained.
Stanislava Mikhalskaia was born in Moscow in 1963. In 1990 she learned that her mother, who had been adopted by a Russian family, was originally the daughter of two Jews. Shortly after that a friend of hers went to Germany and told her about the new law. The Soviet Union had just survived a coup d'etat attempt, and the future was looking uncertain and frightening. Since she now was Jewish, she applied, after first marrying her non-Jewish boyfriend. They both moved to Berlin. In Moscow they had both been suecessful professionals with large apartments, a car, and a country home. In Berlin they moved into a fifty-square-foot room in an immigrant hostel. Eventually, they were able to find a small apartment, and Stanislava hoped to resume her profession as architect in time. But Germany worried her. “Germans are against foreigners, and now I think it is not a good country for Jews.” Still, like most Russian Jews in Germany, she planned to stay. Economic and political problems were steadily worsening in Russia.
Most of the Russian Jews arrived with excellent credentials but no skills. They were engineers, doctors, and scientists—but they somehow did not qualify for any work in the West. Their stories were not always convincing. One who spent time with coffee and cakes at the Kulturverein claimed to be a psychologist researching the creativity of left-handed people. He admitted that he did not exactly have a degree in