A Chosen Few - Mark Kurlansky [74]
After three years as a lawyer in Israel, Ron returned to Berlin for a visit, at his father's request. Ron's father did not seem able to stay away from Germany. At first he had gone back on visits to see old friends. Being an Israeli, he was very aware of the Wiedergutmachung program, and since all his friends were survivors, he urged them to file claims. He would help them do it. Soon he was helping his friends’ friends. Gradually his visits grew longer until, in reality, he was once again living in Berlin, with an office stacked with files for Wiedergutmachung claims and only vague ideas about how to pursue all these cases. His son was now a lawyer, and he needed his help. Ron agreed to come for a visit and try to help him, but neither he nor his Czech Jewish wife wanted to live in Germany. It was a grim and eerie experience just to be there at all.
A photography enthusiast, Ron took pictures of the ruin that used to be their house in the Schoneberg section. The entire neighborhood had been bombed and was now mostly cleared, but he could make out the ruins of his house and the nearby synagogue, which had survived Kristallnacht. No one wanted to touch the synagogue. If it fell down or had to be torn down, it would surely be said that Germans had once again destroyed a synagogue. But there were no Jews around to use it. It just stood in a lot with some rubble and an empty space where the neighborhood had been. Ii was as though his upbringing were a badly fixed photo that was slowly fading. The next time he went to that spot even the synagogue was gone. Then construction began, and soon Schoneberg was a modern neighborhood of new apartment buildings, shopping malls, and wide highways—a place as removed from his childhood as if it were in another country.
Berlin was no longer home to Ron Zuriel, and he returned to Israel. But his father kept gathering more and more cases with which he could not cope, and he continued to ask his son to join him. They could work together, he said—make it a business. In 1956, Ron's father talked him into coming for “three or four years.” Ron was reluctant. His wife was even more reluctant. But Ron's father argued that it would be just for three or four years. They thought perhaps they could stand Berlin for that long. They would live in their own world, Ron would have his work, and it wouldn't really be like living in Germany.
It was a strained existence. They formed a small circle of friends from a community of a few thousand Jews, and Ron worked from early morning until late at night. They avoided contact with non-Jews, but that was unnatural, and after a time they started talking to Germans. The Zuriels could speak with Germans as long as the Germans weren't of their own generation. If a German was Ron's age, he could only think about what this person might have been doing during those years. And just thinking about it, he didn't want to talk. It was actually easy to avoid those people. All Ron really had to do was to make it clear that he was a Jew, since Germans found it difficult to talk to Jews. It was too… awkward. They knew what Jews were thinking about them. Sometimes a conversation would start, and then it would drift to the war years, and then it would inevitably end up with the non-Jew declaring, “I didn't know. I had no idea.” Ron didn't believe them. He kept waiting