A Chosen Few - Mark Kurlansky [90]
Mebel was in love with a German Jewish microbiologist, Sonja, whose family had also fled Germany when Hitler came to power. She was eight years old at the time, and unlike Moritz, she did not remember Nazi Germany. Sonja worked in the Microbiology Institute in Moscow. Of the five hundred qualified microbiologists, doctors, and chemists there, she had the lowest position, and she was convinced that this was due to the combination of being a Jew and a German.
Sonja reached a conclusion that many Jews before her had also reached: Even if she could not advance, she could learn. She was in an excellent department headed by a distinguished professional, a Spaniard who had been chief medical officer for the Republican Army. She worked for a renowned expert in her field. “The most important thing for me is knowledge, because nobody can take it away from me,” she said.
Unlike the Mebels, Sonja's family had always intended to return to Germany. Since the day they fled it had been their dream that someday the Nazis would be defeated and they would go back. But when the Nazis were defeated, Sonja's mother was seriously ill, and the family stayed in Moscow until she died at the age of 46 in 1948. By then, Stalin had closed the borders and they could not leave.
In 1957, Sonja moved to Berlin with her family, although the following year she returned to Moscow to marry Moritz Mebel. Then the two of them moved to Berlin. Moritz had never thought he would go back to Germany. He had been a Soviet citizen for more than twenty years. But he felt that the new GDR wanted him and the Soviet Union no longer did. He, too, felt certain that he was not going back to the old Germany but to a new Germany to which he could make a contribution. The Soviet Union seemed to have no role for him anymore. In an odd way he felt as though he were coming home. But he was not sure he liked the feeling.
He worked at the Charite Hospital in East Berlin, in Mitte, the old historic center of the city where the government had been, and the university and the opera, and famous cabarets. It did not look very different from the last time he had seen it while serving in the Red Army at the end of the war. The Reichstag was still burned black and peppered with bullet holes and shrapnel gashes. The great museums and government buildings of the wide Unter den Linden were also still war-scarred. The tight bullet patterns on the fronts of dark buildings reminded him of those days of house-to-house fighting when you would realize that someone was shooting from above somewhere, and you would just raise your weapon in a cold sweat and unload everything at the building overhead, hoping to stop whoever was up there.
Mitte was left standing, but with hardly a flat, untouched surface in the neighborhood. A few missing blocks had been cleared. Some buildings still weren't inhabitable. But none of this was upsetting to Mebel. Restoring buildings was not a priority for the new East Germany. Education, social service, and health care were. The Charite was a good hospital. But it was there that he found something he had not expected in this new society: He found the old Germany. The rest of the staff was acutely aware that he had been an officer in the Red Army. He certainly would never hide that fact. On the contrary, as a Jew in the Soviet Union he had become accustomed to defensively asserting his war record. He had served