A Chosen Few - Mark Kurlansky [91]
Although he was an experienced urologist and former hospital director, Mebel was allowed only to do anesthesia. After a time he changed hospitals, but the situation was not much better. Finding that if he worked hard and alone he would at least not be obstructed, he did research in the evenings in an empty laboratory that he was not allowed to use during the days.
Sonja did microbiological research. The head of her section was rumored to have been an important Nazi. That was not supposed to be possible in the GDR, but there he was. Another one of the scientists with whom she worked was a known former Nazi party member. But most of her colleagues were younger than she was, too young to have been Nazis. Soon, it seemed, all the Nazis would be gone. Germany had only to raise a new generation and be patient.
Like the rest of the Soviet bloc, the GDR had flirted with official anti-Semitism at the time of the Slansky trial. It was a relatively brief episode in the GDR. This was Germany, and if it was not a “new” Germany, it was nothing. But at the time, some Jews lost official positions. There were a few trials. A friend of Mia Lehmann, a loyal party militant, was tried for a mythical crime. The Lehmanns were deeply disturbed. Many Jews were more than disturbed. About eight thousand of them migrated to West Germany.
Jews weren't the only ones leaving. Discontent was closely related to economic failure. On June 16, 1953, East Berlin workers protested a ten percent increase in production norms. By the following day it had become an open revolt put down by Soviet troops. About 1,500 people received prison sentences and 109 were killed, including 41 Soviet soldiers executed for refusing to fire on German workers. That year, 300,000 East Germans left. In the subsequent calm, 150,000 was an average yearly figure for emigration. By the late 1950s, the West German economy had grown dramatically and lifted its people from the misery of 1945. East Germans were still digging out, and the economy would not show dramatic improvement until the 1960s.
A guarded border divided the two Germanies, but Berlin was an open city. From East Berlin, West Germany was only a few stops on the S-bahn. The neighborhoods adjacent to Mitte on the western side were in West Berlin, where tall cranes were erecting new buildings; old historic buildings, of which there were far fewer than in Mitte, were being refurbished, and the consumer product deluge of the 1950s, cranked out by the U.S. economy and the Marshall Plan, was beginning to become part of the new lifestyle.
Germans crossed back and forth every day for work and shopping. But many were not coming back. In East Berlin the endemic labor shortage was growing into a serious problem because of peopie migrating West. In a culture that creates a word for everything, the new word for leaving the East was Republikflucht, which in 1957 became a crime. After that, anyone who wanted to leave had to do so without warning anyone. Children would go to school and find their teacher gone. At Moritz Mebel's clinic it became difficult to schedule surgical procedures, because you never knew who was going to show up the next day.
Mia Lehmann's Nazi neighbor who had grown so fond of her daughter suddenly announced that she would have that operation she had been needing. Although she had always flaunted her contacts in the West, she went to an East Berlin hospital. Back from the hospital, she could not say enough about the East German medical service, how nice they were, and free! and so efficient— and free! When she was well enough, she and her husband vanished to the West.
The two-tier economy