IN MY LIFE I HAVE MET THOUSANDS, MAYBE EVEN TENS OF thousands of people. Important and ordinary, well-known and anonymous. I remember many of them, and some of them might remember me. I met people who were talented, wealthy, foolish, brilliant, good, strange, wonderful, and bad. In the years when I was an important and powerful person, I didn’t know how to enjoy this wonderful human wealth. In virtually all these meetings I was introverted, defensive. Trying to preserve an imaginary treasure that someone was trying to loot. That life was a large-scale barter bazaar. Sometimes I entered the rooms of others and wanted something from them, and sometimes they came to me and wanted something from me. Either way, I almost never had pure meetings; everything was tainted by interests.
Today I have different meetings. Not only are most of my meetings, contrary to the past, encounters that I want to have, but I am also much more relaxed, less defensive. I have much less to give, and I’m happy to share what I have. I’m much less threatened, and therefore more open and attentive, and thus able to receive more. Today I can also reconstruct many of the previous encounters and derive from them after the fact what I wasn’t able to obtain in real time.
Of all those past encounters, two were doubtless responsible for the organization of my new life. The first became one of my exit points from the tough cynicism of political life, and the second was an entry to new worlds where there is still more darkness than light.
AT THE START OF MY TERM AS KNESSET SPEAKER IN 1999, I received a surprising letter. It contained a description of the sad fate of the contemporary Tibetan nation and a review of the non-violent doctrine of the spiritual leader of all Tibetans, ending with a request: “The Dalai Lama, leader in exile of Tibet, is coming to Israel. Would you agree to meet him?”
The entire letter was written in meek and apologetic language. How can you say “no” to this man? A representative of a small nation facing an aggressive giant, whose spirit, along with the spirit of his people, is far greater than all the spirits of his enemies and oppressors. Is there anything more Jewish than that? This was the most “Jewish” person I knew of—an optimistic exile, tormented but never in despair.
I gave my OK, and my staff started putting in motion the hidden cogwheels that turn a directive into reality. Plans, coordination, agreements, and logistics. Just a few hours after this agreement, the waters were muddied. As always in this life, what’s good for one person is bad for another. I pushed the good button, and someone received a bad and unsettling electric shock on the other end of the Jerusalem halls of power.
“Someone wants to speak to you,” my chief of staff told me.
“Tell him that I’ll call back in the evening.”
“He says it’s really urgent.”
“Put him through.” The director-general of the foreign ministry was on the line.
“I must meet you immediately,” he said.
“Come over.” And he came. At his second sentence I was already sorry that I had agreed to meet him.
“You must cancel the meeting with the Dalai Lama,” he demanded.
“Why not receive the Dalai Lama?” I wondered.
He: “You can’t.”
“Why?” I continued.
“It’s contrary to Israel’s foreign policy.”
“Why?” I asked, pushing back.
“Because the week after the Dalai Lama’s visit, the president of China is arriving in Israel.”
“So what?” I still did not understand.
“The Chinese visitor is threatening to cancel his visit to Israel if you, as Knesset speaker, receive the Tibetan leader.”
It turns out that the Dalai Lama, whose people were slaughtered and expelled by the Chinese communists, travels the world and tries to arrive everywhere ahead of the Chinese president or other senior officials of that superpower. Everywhere he goes, he tries to mobilize public opinion and raise consciousness of the injustice done to his people and homeland. Everywhere, Chinese diplomacy tries, in the name of the billions of Chinese, to threaten the host countries not to provide a platform for the high priest from Tibet. The Knesset podium seemed too big to them, echoing from Jerusalem to Washington.
“You must cancel the invitation,” the man demanded gruffly. I was furious, but, still, I took a deep breath as befitting a person of my position, I counted to ten, and I replied in the calmest demeanor I could muster.
“The visit will take place, and I will try to publicize it as much as possible at home and abroad,” I said. “If Israel’s foreign policy is based on the interests of arms dealers doing business with the murderers of Tiananmen Square, I will not be a part of it. Though I didn’t intend it, I would be the happiest person if the Dalai Lama’s visit with me at the Knesset would open your minds a bit.”
The quarrels and exchanges of letters went on until the last minute, but in the end life is stronger than everything. The Dalai Lama honored the Israeli parliament with his conciliatory and peace-seeking presence, and the international publicity was amazing. A week later the Chinese president visited the Knesset, as planned, and the foreign ministry was flooded by a wave of protests. And lo and behold: what was the official response that Israeli representatives abroad were directed to give to all the critics of the state that had invited the Chinese dictator? Don’t forget to emphasize that a week before the Chinese visit, the Dalai Lama received the highest honor in Israel, a visit to parliament.
I frequently recall that meeting. Outwardly it was a meeting of two politicians, two public servants, one Tibetan and the other Israeli. Inwardly it was a tremendous collision between my Israeli and Jewish sensibilities. There were many people in the room. Parliamentary employees and Knesset members stood outside wanting to catch a glimpse of this iconic figure. I don’t recall the content of the conversation, it was so formal and publicized, and there was no time in it for a heart-to-heart talk. But the atmosphere surprised me.
I expected someone submissive with bowed head, in keeping with his image. But there was no calm at all in the room. There was great aggressiveness, or, more accurately, power. He was well aware of the meaning of the image he projected, he understood the meaning of the visit, as if he had been briefed by the aforementioned director-general of the foreign ministry. He pressed all the buttons he had planned: Jewish history, morals as opposed to interests, he spoke to me and addressed Israeli public opinion. From Jerusalem, he sent ballistic messages to Beijing and Washington. There was a great deal of power in his weakness. A frail deference whose every move projected the same message: “I cannot be broken.” In the intervals between his slow and measured words and those of the translators I was reminded of the annual school trip to Hula Lake, the freshwater lake stemming from one of Jordan’s river sources in the northern part of Israel. Israel’s early pioneers drained it as a “swamp” in 1951 and rechanneled the water to the faraway Negev desert. At the time, it was a fantastic Zionist achievement, which turned out to be a very mixed blessing.
It was in 1964 or so, we were little children, and we were very excited when the nature teacher showed us the cedar of Lebanon. “This is the tree from which the Temple was built,” she said, adding some theology to the botany. “Once there was a swamp here,” she added, piling on Zionist mythology. “But we drained it. The water was taken from here in the national water carrier to the Negev desert. That was Zionism! For generations, since our exile, this land was uncultivated because there were swamps here and the Negev soil went unplowed because there was no water. Then we Zionists came, drained the excess water and transported it there, and both places became a green and flowering paradise.”
No one told that teacher and us that a few years later it would turn out that the frenetic Zionist effort to defeat nature—as well as human nature—would lead to environmental damage that would require generations to overcome. “Here is the lake and here is the reed. Maybe this is the primeval pond. You call it a bulrush. Who can tell me which is stronger: the reed or the cedar?”
“The cedar,” we all replied in a chorus of shouts, as expected.
“Not at all.” The teacher beamed with a smile that was all pedagogy, common sense, and the victory of her knowledge over our childish ignorance.
“Here comes a strong wind, an exceptionally stormy wind. And it blows and sweeps away and uproots everything in its path. And the cedar stands firm. Hardly moving. Stubborn and straight and proud. He is rigid, and the wind blows. Finally, from the heights of its upright position, it topples over, uprooted, and dies. And the reed in the lake, so small, humble, and devoid of arrogance,” she said poetically, “bends in any wind, ordinary or exceptional. And the wind goes to other places, hurrying to meet the cedars that are right for it. And the reed straightens up and goes on with its life as if there had never been a wind in the area. So, who is actually stronger—the reed or the cedar?” And not one of us answered. Certainly not with a shout. “And that,” the teacher said, returning to her favorite theological element, “that is precisely what the prophet asks: ‘Is this the fast I desire? A day for men to starve their bodies? Is it bowing the head like a bulrush and lying in sackcloth and ashes? Do you call that a fast, a day when the Lord is favorable?’”
Oh, what a fine victory for the teacher, nature, and the Bible, so Jewish and also so educational.
In the end, she held a vote in the bus. “Who wants to be a cedar?” she asked, and all hands were raised. “And who wants to be a bulrush?” Not a hand went up. Thus, despite all the explanations and verses, the swaggering Israeli cedar is much more seductive and attractive than the pitiful reed, that diaspora Jew.
Today I’m ready to retroactively renounce some cedar moments in my life for the opportunity to go back and be a bulrush according to the doctrine of the Dalai Lama. “China will be uprooted like a great tree exposed to wind,” he predicted at the meetings, as if we had been together on the school trip in fourth grade. If he had participated in the vote on the bus, he would have likely not voted like everyone else. In one moment of a buttoned-up official meeting I was again exposed to the doctrine of my teacher from my distant childhood days, a doctrine that I then considered ridiculous, and today turns out to be deep and full of hope and faith, strength and power, consistency and change.
THE SECOND MEETING THAT CHANGED MY LIFE WAS IN Berlin, on the eve of Rosh Hashanah in 2009, when I met a man different from anyone I had ever met in my lifetime—so different, but at the same time so remarkably similar to the Dalai Lama. Until now it isn’t clear to me if he was a small reed on the bank of a large lake, or the broken branch of a giant cedar that had collapsed. In the few hours I was with him, I felt again for the second—and so far, the last—time the same sense of a lone man containing power far greater than himself. Just as I had felt with the Tibetan monk.
In this case, I wasn’t limited in time and there weren’t any official representatives to interrupt us. I came specially to Berlin to meet him. We had planned this meeting for a very long time. One day I received a telephone call from a friend who asked whether he could give my email address to someone, an Israeli living in Munich. “Of course,” I replied. After two weeks, I received an email message from him, in which he asked whether he could pass along my email address to a friend of his, also the son of Israelis from Munich. “Of course.” Two weeks later, another email: Can I give your address to my wife? “Certainly.” And two weeks later, from her: Can I give your email address to my father? “Of course.”
One morning I received the following in an email: “Greetings, Mr. Burg. My name is Helmut. My children bought me your book about the Holocaust. And I wanted to thank you very much for your words.”
I answered him with the standard reply I issue to emails of this sort, and at the end added on impulse: “Dear Mr. Helmut, I greatly appreciate the special effort you have made—with your children and their friends—to find my address. I would be very happy if you could tell me a bit about yourself.”
It took a few more days, and the answer that arrived did not surprise me: “I’m an ordinary German, actually I don’t have anything to tell.”
“There’s no such thing,” I responded immediately. “Everyone has something to tell. Every person is a story, and since we don’t know each other, I’m sure that I haven’t yet heard a story like yours.” A few weeks passed and then another email arrived, with his resume attached. He had written it out over many pages by hand, and his daughter Irina translated the text for me from German to English. That reading produced an extended correspondence between us that ended with that meeting in Berlin. For the first time in my life I spoke with a Nazi. I had come for the Nazi, and was left with the great man inside him.
This is what he wrote to me:
My name is Helmut, I was born in 1923 in a village near Nuremburg. I love nature, botany, geology, fossils, classical music, singing, dance, painting and other performing arts. My father was the principal of a school in Heidenheim, the village where I spent my childhood years. He was also my teacher. He became an artist and hated France. He considered France a sworn enemy. He admired the heroes of the First World War and was super strict. My mother was just like him. They both admired militarism and nationalism. We children were educated in a strictly religious spirit. I don’t remember that he ever hugged me or gave me a kiss.
In Heidenheim there was a large Jewish community with a synagogue. Many Jewish children went with me to the same school. I remember names, like Solomon, Rorbach, Weinberg, and Gutman. Especially the Gutman family. We had a special relationship with them. Mrs. Gutman used to visit us, and on Jewish holidays brought us a basket full of Jewish delicacies. We were happy, and to this day, I like matza. When Mrs. Gutman had a son, she asked my mother if she could call him Lothar, the name of one of my brothers who died at a young age.
I remember exotic events from our childhood that were connected to Jews. Their homes were on our street, and the synagogue was on the other side of town. On Jewish Sabbaths and holidays, we children would watch curiously how the elegant Jewish men, with their black hats, would march to the synagogue slowly and with dignity behind the rabbi, who held the Torah with great respect. When they entered the synagogue, we would sneak up behind them, hiding and peering inside, in order to hear their singing and prayer. Oh, Avrum, I loved it so much, the beautiful singing of the cantor.
At the start of the 1930s I started hearing more and more about Hitler. In the family, from guests and other children. The few doubts my parents had about Hitler disappeared fairly quickly. We saw more and more marches of Nazi groups in our streets, and villagers from out of town joined them. Everyone loved him. He was a man. A hero, a fighter, not soft. He stood bravely against everything, everyone was saying. Hitler won the elections. Germany believed that with Hitler all the problems would be solved. Finally we have a leader, and he will bring us a better future.
In the summer of 1933 I was allowed to join the Hitler Youth. Mom sewed me my first “brown shirt,” I was given a nice black scarf to wrap my neck in, and a cap for my head. In 1934, I marched on Nazi Party day in Nuremberg. We cheered Hitler and his colleagues in the leadership of the Nazi party. I loved the Hitler Youth, the friendship and camaraderie, the scouting in nature, the songs, and especially the patriotic songs and stories about the heroes. I wanted to join the army and be a soldier. I loved to identify myself as a fighter, a soldier, a hero. I wanted to die for the homeland as a hero fighting our enemies. To fight the sub-human, the untermenschen who do not deserve to live. We, the Germans were the superior “race.” I was brainwashed. Avrum, my sense of guilt since those days weighs and will weigh on my heart like lead until the day I die. It is the shadow that is with me every day of my life, until the last.
Our high school, the gymnasium, was in Nuremberg. In those years, I was fascinated by airplanes and flight, and in the youth movement I was a young pilot. I learned how to fly gliders and loved it very much, that freedom and quiet in the air. I flew, and my parents officially joined the Nazi party. All our ties with our Jewish friends were broken off. I was forced to ignore them, the sub-humans. I was forbidden from shopping in Jewish stores. In school, we were forbidden to sit next to our former Jewish friends. The brainwashing of the youth movement inculcated with unbelievable power the belief that we are the superior Aryan race. On Kristallnacht in November 1938, synagogues were burned, along with the Jewish school and the shops of many Jews, including the Rorbach family store.
At the start of the 1940s I began working in the film industry in Munich. We documented special events with senior figures from the SS, who told stories from Russia about the inferior, terrible Russians who resembled animals more than people: “When you encounter one of them in battle, kill him immediately. Show no feelings or mercy. He simply doesn’t deserve them.” At Munich’s main train station, I found myself one day at the station gate. The train arrived, and Hitler himself got off the train car, six meters from me, like a demon screaming and shouting. Hitler’s soldiers, his bodyguards and all the teams were so busy that they didn’t notice I was standing there off to the side. I was in shock at the sight of this demon. I never had such images or thoughts about our leader, the führer. Later, when Hitler disappeared, I locked the feelings and shock inside me. At the end of 1941 I enlisted in the army. I fought in Russia and became ill. I returned to Germany, was posted in France, went through officer’s training, and fought de Gaulle’s partisans. I returned again to Germany and was sent from there to the eastern front, to Russia.
In the beginning of June or July 1944 we fought in Minsk. The führer, Hitler, ordered us to defend the city like Stalingrad. But the Red Army captured the city and we were trapped inside. After nine days of heavy fighting, with the battle lines constantly shifting, it was all over. Most of our comrades were killed, many people died. After a few days, I met with my three closest friends. We stuck together for a few days. But during a heavy artillery battle at night I lost contact with them and got lost in a forest. I lost the three of them in a terrible swampy area. The nightmare became reality. I lost them and knew that soon I too would die. I tried to hide in a shallow river. I dived under the water, coming up for air from time to time. When I went back under water I heard voices talking Russian and people approaching the river.… I knew my end was near. Suddenly a hand grabbed me and pulled me out. The partisans beat me to a pulp, with fists, kicks, and rifle butts. Naked without a uniform, barefoot and covered with blood, I lay at the river’s edge. Suddenly the men stopped beating me. A female partisan on a giant horse approached them. She was their commander, and she shouted orders at them to stop hitting me. They obeyed and immediately stopped. She jumped off the horse and leaned over me. She looked at me, knelt next to me, and carefully lifted my head and cradled it. She wore a brown cap, and her blond hair was in two braids. Her head bent over mine so that I couldn’t see the sky, only her face.
She began speaking to me in German in a low and sensitive voice: “War is not a good thing, comrade. What are you doing here? You’ve come to destroy my homeland? Where the hell are you from?”
“From Munich,” I heard myself whispering to her somehow. The partisan continued: “Hmm… it’s a beautiful city, your Munich. Why didn’t you stay there, you German Fascist?” Those words of hers, of that sub-human, hurt me more than all the blows from the men with their rifles, kicks and punches. Her words seared my soul. It was logical, my feelings of guilt.… I have no words to express my feelings in those moments. Here I was, a blue-eyed German, and this sub-human, the untermensch, helping me… to sit. She pulled my wallet out of my uniform pocket and looked at the pictures inside. “Your mother?” she asked. “Your father?” When I nodded my aching head, I heard her say, “Mom is crying if you stay in Russia.” My mouth was completely dry, my lips bleeding. I could barely say a word. One of the partisans brought me a pitcher of tea and bread in a bowl. The partisan leader continued talking to me seriously: “Soon the war—kaput. Hitler—kaput. The Red Army will capture Berlin and the war will end. Everyone will go back home. I am a teacher, I teach schoolchildren the German language. To read German poetry. What beautiful music you have. We love Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, and Strauss, of course. I prefer to dance Strauss’s waltzes than shoot German fascists in Belarus. Comrade, do you know this waltz?” And she began to perfectly whistle the “Blue Danube,” and I cried and cried and cried.
She got up and shouldered her rifle. “Drink more tea and eat more bread,” she told me. After I followed her instructions, she ordered that I be given an old uniform and transferred the next day to the Red Army, which would hold me in a prisoner of war camp. She mounted her horse, and her last words to me were, “The war is over.”
Out of the group of partisans a Russian fellow of Jewish origin was assigned to watch me. He spoke a type of Yiddish. When we stopped for a moment in our long journey, he ordered me to sit next to him on a block of wood by the side of the road. He looked at me, slowly pulled out an SS pistol and pointed it at me. He told me in Yiddish: “So, Fascist, do you know what this is?” and looked at the gun. “Yes,” I replied. And he told me, “So, I can kill you with this weapon. I shot the commander of the Nazi unit and took his gun. But I won’t shoot you. It would be too easy for you.”
After many days with partisans, as a lone German among Russians, some of whom were Yiddish-speaking Jews, I was transferred to the control of the Red Army, and reality became difficult and repugnant. One tank commander shouted at me from the top of the turret, “An immediate execution is taking place. I will kill you near the village fence.” My Russian-Jewish bodyguard translated the sentence to Yiddish. I knew that I was about to die. Here. The villagers, women and children, cried to the soldiers, “The officer does not have to shoot the young German just like that.” The officer refused. He wanted to execute me, he wanted to kill. The officer pushed me to the wall. I stood there. As the officer was getting his gun ready, a young woman came out of the group of villagers that surrounded us. She pushed her body next to mine, raised her hands and shouted to the officer in Russian, “Don’t shoot.” A big commotion started. She shouted again, “Don’t shoot.” I felt how her body was shielding mine. Slowly I also felt that I was losing consciousness. I fainted.
The next thing I felt were strong but gentle slaps on the cheeks and cold water washing over my face. I lay on the ground and saw the blue sky. I’m probably dead, I said to myself. But then I heard the voice of the Jewish partisan, my bodyguard. He looked at my face and kept slapping me. He was so happy, he shook me. The first face I saw after my death was therefore a Jewish face. A Russian Jew who was so happy for me, that I hadn’t been shot to death, and these were his words: “Comrade, you are alive. Comrade, you are alive.” And he kept shaking me, “Everything is alright, you are going to a labor camp. The Red Army is in Berlin. Hitler kaput. When you return home, talk about us. So, comrade, you will never forget that Russian woman!” Where is she, Avrum? From July 13, 1944, until now that has remained my life’s question.
A few days later I arrived at the prisoner of war camp. Tens of thousands of prisoners like me. Days with nothing to eat, and nights of bombardments by the German air force. We were moved from place to place in closed train cars, without water or drink in the sweltering summer days. Then came the Russian winter, and with it diseases and epidemics that killed hundreds and thousands of us. In every moment of my life there, in those horrendous conditions, I didn’t stop saying to myself: that Russian woman did not save you so you could end your life here this way. No, no, no. I must survive in order to return to Germany and tell everyone about it. That sentence became my life’s mantra during the next five and a half years in Russian captivity.
I would like to share with you one personal and intimate memory. Since my conscription and in all the twist and turns I have experienced I never parted with a metal spoon that Mom gave me when I went off to war. “Son,” she told me, “in the war there will only be wooden spoons. Better to eat from a metal spoon.” Many soldiers tried to steal my spoon. But I always managed to keep it. That way, unwittingly, it became what represented my life. The spoon was the only thing that I had left from my mother. I knew that if I lose the spoon, I will never return home. Interesting, in German there’s a saying that goes, “To turn in the spoon,” meaning, to die. The metal spoon was the only thing I took with me all the way to Russia and back to Germany. Avrum, when we meet one day, I will bring you my spoon. I will show it to you.
A simple metal spoon can tell so many unbelievable stories: in winter we had to shovel snow outside the boundaries of the camp. We left for work at first light and returned to the huts at night. The gates of the camp were closed and locked until the next departure at dawn the next day. One snowy evening I returned to the camp and felt my leg, I wanted to feel my spoon in its regular place, on my leg. But alas, the spoon was not there. I was shocked. I shouted hysterically, “My spoon is gone, where is my spoon? It’s gone!” I apparently dropped it outside the camp when we were shoveling snow. “I must go out there! I must look for it!” My comrades grabbed me tight, and one of the guards asked if I had lost my mind, because the minute that the giant camp gates were shut and the fence lighting went on, no one could go out. Certainly not to search for a silly spoon in the snow. I cried and protested. I knew that I would not return home, that I would die in that place if I didn’t find my spoon, the gift of my beloved mother. The chief warden, “the black” we called him, a tall and black-haired Russian Jew, came up to me and asked why I was screaming like that, what was going on? I told him that I had lost my spoon. The tall Jewish guard laughed, “So, no need to shout so much. You’ll get a new spoon.”
“No,” I begged him, “this is not an ordinary spoon. It is a spoon from my mother.” Suddenly he stopped laughing. “What, the spoon was from your mamushka?” With my limited Russian and his broken German, we understood one another completely. “Come with me,” he ordered me. He ordered the guards on the towers not to shoot me. The giant camp gates opened into the stormy night. I was so scared. Honestly, I hadn’t the slightest idea where to look. When the guards called me to come back, all my hopes were dashed. I crawled back. Right next to the gates something shined in the light of the spotlights from one of the piles of snow that we had shoveled in the daylight hours. I retraced my steps, looking for the place where the shine came from. I dug furiously and… my spoon was back in my hand. Unbelievable. I raised it in the air and screamed, “I have it.” When I returned to the camp, the Jewish guard, “the black,” came over to me and asked with curiosity and friendship, “Did you find it?” When I showed him my spoon, he was so happy for me and said: “What a guy. Great. He found the spoon his mother gave him. Fantastic.”
I had other Russian miracles. In the camp I studied Russian, and I especially learned from the children. I worked like that, as a prisoner among these sub-humans. And what did I discover? Goodwill, warm conversations, without harassment, help without any hatred at all. My full return to humanity began there. That’s what I told myself. I want to be friendly, I want to serve and help everywhere that I can.
HELMUT’S LIFE STORY UNFOLDED ACROSS A FEW MORE pages soaked in blood and tears. The journey of a Nazi child from Bavaria to today’s Munich, in which his daughter is married to an Israeli, and they have no children. The upheavals of an entire century on a few translated pages. For many months, I felt that I must meet him. First it was just curiosity. I have met many Germans and Austrians in my lifetime. Some are my friends, real friends. But none of them ever revealed the Nazi side of their families to me. The silent abyss of the past was always spread out at our feet, and I never really succeeded in crossing it and reaching them, hearing firsthand what happens in the family intimacy that comes from this past. Some indeed come from families that were always humane and socialist, and that is one of the roots of our friendship. And others, I have no doubt, were touched with evil. A father or grandfather, an aunt or sister. Someone there was part of the evil system, and a conspiracy of silence envelops them to this very day.
And here, suddenly, a man who is so honest and direct steps into my life. “Yes, I was a Nazi,” he writes me. Between the lines, I think that he wants to meet me, no less than I want to meet him. I so much wanted to meet him, both to touch this experience with my own hands, but also to meet through him parts of myself. I wanted to feel what I really feel facing a genuine Nazi. It was not the Eichmann of my childhood, separated from reality by a glass cage in the courtroom. It was a man of flesh and blood, a small cog in a terrible murderous machine. One of those who made that giant and effective apparatus possible and so awful. Curiosity drew me to him, and I confess that I also had a very deep and existential fear, maybe a victim’s fear of the victimizer, maybe a congenital Jewish trait.
Out of my emotional curiosity more complex thoughts emerged. The profound change he had undergone, with his simple honesty—linked to memories and pains as well as to hopes and responsibility—aroused my intense curiosity. Am I able, I asked myself, to understand Helmut’s story as a key to healing the world? I hoped to find an answer to my wondering. If an individual such as Helmut could change and free himself of the brainwashing that drowned an entire German generation, and was able to turn the rigid legacy of militarism and nationalism of his parents into the inclusive universalism of his children—are societies and cultures able to do it? It’s so “Jewish.” The concept of repentance—regret of the bad past and accepting responsibility for a better future—is the deep inner foundation of Jewish renewal. If he can, so can others. Even I can change and improve. From my inner place I saw an elderly anonymous individual, a member of the previous generation, which I perceived to be ossified, with a key to the lock of part of my future. We set a meeting for late August 2010, and I made a special trip to Berlin. I from Israel, he from Munich, and Berlin, a neutral city between us. He came with his daughter Irina. We sat for hours and talked. In English, German, Hebrew, and anything in between. I recorded the whole conversation with him, and I listen to it often during long trips in Israel and abroad.
When he entered the room, I felt a certain disappointment. So short and fragile. I had expected that a tall, handsome Aryan, like a mythological god, would enter the room, fair-skinned and blue-eyed, who had just emerged from the Black Forest, as in the epic German Nibelung poem. I imagined him tall, strapping, meticulously dressed. Maybe not in uniform, but almost. Instead, a kind grandfather stood before me. Fragile. A great tenderness on his face. His fragility invites you to offer him support. And when we shook hands, a thought went through my head: “His touch, his skin, is not cold and frozen. Not like a poisonous snake. He feels completely human.” And indeed, he was. I touched the Nazi, and nothing bad happened to me. Or more precisely, I touched the former Nazi, and a lot happened to me, for the better.
We went down for lunch. We each ordered, and when the platters arrived, he moved his hand slowly under his jacket, took out the spoon, wiped it gently and hesitantly with the tablecloth and began slowly eating his soup. I choked up, and was transformed.