A Chosen Few - Mark Kurlansky [73]
When Irene started telling her schoolmates that she was Jewish, they paid little attention, except for once, when they came to her with a question. Since she was a Jew, they thought she might know the answer: Why did the Jews kill Jesus?
Irene had no answer. She went home that day with two questions for her father. “Why did the Jews kill Jesus?” and “Who was Jesus?”
One December day in 1951—by coincidence, Stalin's seventy-second birthday—Irene's mother was not home when Irene came back from school. Nor was she home the next day, or the next. Irene was sent to various people's houses to stay. At first, she was mostly aware that she didn't have to go to school. Gradually she came to understand that her mother had died, but she did not learn very much more because her father would not talk about it. In time, she came to understand that her mother had killed herself. Only years later, talking to cousins, did Irene realize how much her mother had disliked being in Germany and how unhappy she had been in Pankow.
IN THE EARLY 1950s, West Germany launched a policy by the name Wiedergutmachung, which means “making it good again,” or setting things right. Israelis always preferred the Hebrew word shilumim, meaning “reparation payments.” Wiedergutmachung was the expansion of a program that had been started under U.S. direction in the American-occupied zone. East Germany refused to participate in this or any other such schemes, insisting that West Germany was the continuation of the Third Reich and thus should pay for its crimes, whereas the German Democratic Republic was a new society that had no predecessor. When the Federal Republic was created in the West, it agreed to pay an individual four marks, which was then worth about one dollar, for every day spent in a Nazi prison or concentration camp. It also made a payment for the loss of career and for loss of life. The payments amounted to billions of dollars. Much of it went abroad. In the Netherlands these payments financed the rebuilding of the Jewish community and remained the economic base of that community's activities.
Israel, facing a desperate economic situation and unable to obtain financing from anywhere else, saw Wiedergutmachung as a last hope. Many Jews in and out of Israel were appalled by the idea that Israel would enter into any kind of relationship with Germany. This was a time when extremists were demanding that Jews who chose to live in Germany should be expelled from Judaism in some way. But the 1952 treaty, signed in the Luxembourg city hall, earned Israel some $700 million in goods, services, and capital annually for the next fourteen years, at a time when tens of thousands of Holocaust victims were living in Israeli tents. For that price, the West German Federal Republic could claim to the world—in spite of what the East Germans were saying—that the Bundesrepublik was a new Germany trying to make up for its past, making it good again.
The reparations created an entirely new German bureaucracy, as millions of claims for individual payments poured into Germany. That was how the Zuckers, who had left Germany for good, ended up back where they started in Berlin. Ron Zuriel was born Werner Zucker in Berlin in 1916 to a family that had immigrated from Poland. The Zuckers, like the Wakses, derived their Jewish identity less from religious practice than from a passionate involvement in Zionism. When Ron joined the Zionist movement at 15, he was firmly committed to the idea of a Jewish state someday in Palestine, but he had no real plans to leave Germany personally. Two years later, Hitler came to power. After two more years the first of the Nuremberg laws were announced. The Zuckers heard Jews discussing whether to leave or stay, whether things would get better or worse. But the Nuremberg laws were all it took for Ron and his father to decide. They were