A Chosen Few - Mark Kurlansky [68]
Handler and his wife, Helle, were among those who went back to build this new anti-Nazi socialist Germany. Helle had come from an old Sephardic family in a town near the Dutch border. She had left Germany to try to get to South Africa, where her father's older brother ran a hotel. But she had not been able to get farther than England. After the war her South African uncle went to England to convince her and her new husband, Werner, to take over his hotel. But Werner and Helle wanted to fight racism, and they reasoned that in South Africa they would be in constant trouble. In the new Germany they had an opportunity to change things. Most of their fellow German Jews were not as enthusiastic as they were about the promise of the new Germany and regularly urged both of them not to go back. Of the more than eight thousand refugees in the Free German Youth movement in England, only a few hundred returned to Germany. They did not return as Jews, and they did not expect to lead a Jewish life. Werner Handler, one of the few German Jews of his generation to grow up in a kosher household, had concluded, “I am broygez with my God.” Broygez is a Yiddish word for when you quarrel, become angry, and stop speaking to each other.
In 1946, Handler stopped off to say good-bye to Barrister Gillis. “I have always had a bad conscience about your parents,” Gillis said. “But we couldn't know what was happening. Not the truth of what the Germans were doing.”
Handler understood. Before he had gone to Sachsenhausen, he v/ould never have believed what the Germans were doing either. In fact, for most of the war he had hoped his parents would survive. Then in 1944, Russian troops had liberated Maidanek. When Handler read an account by a Russian writer of this death factory that operated day and night, he scoffed, “Why is he telling us this? Does he think we don't hate the Nazis enough already?” For an entire week he dismissed the story. Then he started thinking about what he had seen in Sachsenhausen and how afterward people in England had patted him on the back very kindly and said, “It's all right, my boy.” He realized that the account was probably true and that he would never see his parents again. “Since then,” he said, “I have known that the unimaginable can be true.”
THE LEHMANNS WENT to Berlin in 1946. The mountains of rubble had been mostly cleared from the thoroughfares, but there were still entire neighborhoods without a single building or even a wall—blocks of brick and stone heaps, with claws of twisted pipe reaching up. Mia's husband was a Berlin Jew from Charlottenburg, a suburb to the West. The first commuter train in Berlin had run between the center of Berlin and Charlottenburg. Now Berlin was not a center with suburbs, but four zones. The old center was the Russian zone, and Charlottenburg was the British zone. The Lehmanns believed that with the help of the Soviets a new democratic Communist Germany would be built, and that this bold new experiment would in time so outshine anything else that it would be adopted as the model for all of Germany.
They moved to the Soviet sector, to Prenzlauer Berg, an area of three-story tile-roofed, vine-covered buildings in the stylishly severe Berlin design. It had no windows left, no heat and no hot water, but it still had its geometric bas relief friezes—little touches of detail on the gray, early-twentieth-century facades. Compared to most of Berlin, Prenzlauer Berg was in good condition. From Alex-anderplatz, which had been the center, they could see little but rubble in all directions. Many people were still living in the basements of collapsed buildings.
They used rolls of plastic to cover the empty window frames, and they had a little coal-burning stove for the winter. In 1948, Mia, who was almost 40, became pregnant