A Chosen Few - Mark Kurlansky [65]
ANTWERP WAS ABOUT TO LOSE its first postwar Jewish couple. After more than a year of traveling between Israel and Antwerp, Sam Perl and Anna had bought an apartment in Tel Aviv. In 1950 they shipped their furniture and prepared to move there. But they never went. Sam wanted to raise his children in a traditional Jewish world. He didn't like the religious schools in Israel and the schools in Antwerp were getting good again—the very schools in the very buildings that he had gone to before the war. Antwerp still seemed to be his home. He never knew exactly why he didn't leave. “Maybe I lost the guts,” he sometimes speculated.
Many Jews did leave Antwerp in 1950. Europe was once again looking dangerous. The old wartime alliance had broken up, and the world was dividing into the Soviet and Western sides. In 1947, General George Marshall gave a commencement address at Harvard about a new policy directed “against hunger, poverty, desperation, and chaos.” The Marshall Plan promised to rebuild Holland at a point when the Dutch were becoming desperate. Shortly before Marshall's address, the Dutch government, faced with continued shortages of food and basic materials, had been developing wild contingency plans for survival. One such plan called for people to sleep longer and spend more of the day in bed.
The Soviet bloc chose not to participate in the Marshall Plan, however, and from 1947 on there were two Europes. While people in the eastern bloc continued to struggle for basic materials, the western bloc after a few years began to experience spectacular growth under the Marshall Plan. Soon, used tires were no longer in demand in Amsterdam, and Mauritz Auerhaan, the Bucharest piano player turned Amsterdam tire salesman, switched to importing used West German televisions. The new West Germany was developing so quickly that it was far ahead of the old European Allies in new industries such as televisions.
The creation of the State of Israel was one of the last things the old Allies did together. It was with the enthusiastic backing of the Soviet Union along with France and the United States that the close UN vote was carried. With the Soviets’ backing, Czechoslovakia trained pilots and devoted an entire airfield to sending weapons to the new Israeli Army, playing a critical role in Israel's survival in 1948. But that same year, the joint occupation of Germany began to break down. In 1949, with tensions mounting and Soviet and Western foreign ministers no longer even meeting, the West created a separate Federal Republic with a capital in Bonn. The Soviets responded by establishing the German Democratic Republic with its capital in Berlin.
The following year, the first East-West shooting war broke out in Korea. This drove the West to do what had been up to then unthinkable: It rearmed the Germans. West Germany, which had been banned from military activity, was now once again to have an army, though only to operate on German soil. The Soviets responded by doing the same with East Germany. Meanwhile, the Korean War was causing such economic instability in Europe — inflation and shortages—that it threatened to undo all the progress of the Marshall Plan.
Many Jews thought a new war was coming, once again brought on by economic chaos and a rearmed Germany. It was all happening again. Thousands of Jews, many of Eastern European origin, decided to leave Antwerp, for the United States and Canada. They sold off their property and abandoned the diamond trade, which, as the world grew less secure, was rallying. In Paris there was a great deal of talk in the Pletzl about the new war and about moving again to safety. Most of the Jews there were still alive because they had left when the