Behind the Headlines ‘the Country with No Jews’

The German Democratic Republic (East Germany) is one of the world’s few countries with no Jewish population, no Jewish memories and no Jewish problem. The Jews have simply disappeared. One can walk for hours in Dresden, Leipzig or East Berlin, where millions of Jews lived for centuries till a generation ago, without even finding a vestige of former days and past glories.

The former Berlin Main Synagogue, burned during Hitler’s “Crystal Night” and then further wrecked during the Allied bombing of 1944, is a ghostly ruin haunted only by stray cats. The former Jewish banks along the Unter den Linden, the Jewish-owned shops and the coffee houses where the elegant Jewish ladies used to come in the afternoon to drink their “kanchen” of coffee and chat are gone. War, Hitler, the bombings and the new Communist regime have wiped out the entire past.

There are today less than 1300 Jews left in East Germany, with an average age running into the late sixties or early seventies. There has not been a single Jewish wedding, a bar mitzvah or a birth for a full generation.

At the Jewish community offices in East Berlin the secretary, a non-Jew, was startled when I walked into the office during my visit here last month. I was apparently the first visitor she had had for weeks. The others were just like myself, foreign Jews on a visit to East Berlin. “Our own Jews (those of East Berlin) are too old and too sick to ever come here,” the secretary explained. “If they need something, a book or the social worker’s visit they phone or usually have someone else ring us up. We practically never see them.”

‘WE JUST DON’T EXIST’

Most of East Berlin’s 823 remaining Jews are old and sick, nearly 200 live permanently in hospitals or old age homes. The rest eke out a miserable existence on the small pensions paid by the East German government.

“Here we have no Jewish dissidents, no Jewish writers, no Jewish activists. The five Jewish Communists who still work for the government have long ago forgotten their Jewish origin. In the early days, just after the war and the Communist take-over, the Jewish Communists were the community’s bitterest enemies–they wanted to be forgiven for their origins. Now, they no longer bother. Even they themselves have forgotten they ever were Jews.”

The man who made this bitter statement is a 71-year-old former Jewish journalist. Once he cooperated with the Communist regime. “I believed it would build a new society and that we need a strong hand to wipe out the vestiges of Hitler’s regime. What made me change my mind was its callous attitude towards the Jews. Here they don’t even hate us. We just don’t exist.”

DYNAMICALLY PRO-ARAB REGIME

East Germany pays no reparations and has made no restitution. It assumes no responsibility for the evils of Hitler’s regime and conducts its pro-Arab policy, far more dynamic than that of all other East European countries, with an easy conscience and no qualms whatsoever.

“Yes, we are in the forefront in the battle for democracy in Africa and the Middle East,” a senior East German official said. “We assume this role because we feel that we owe the world a responsibility to wipe out the effects of fascism wherever it may be.”

Israel, he observed, “is for us part of the American colonialistic enterprise against which Africa and Asia are fighting. No, the fact that Jews live there doesn’t bother us in the least. Not being racists we don’t oppose Israel as a Jewish State but as a colonial power. The fact that the Israelis are Jews doesn’t change our policy a single iota.”

MAIN BASE FOR TERRORIST TRAINING

East Germany has become the main European base for the Arab organizations. Several training camps are being operated near Leipzig. According to Western sources, a special terrorist training center is located near Dresden, where both Arab and African revolutionaries are taught how to operate explosives and plant deadly charges. East German experts, military and civilian alike, are active in Yemen, Iraq and Ethiopia. The East German officials themselves admit “we are second only to Cuba” in the number of experts and the material aid granted to Afro-Asian revolutionary regimes.

Palestine Liberation Organization representatives operate a large bureau in the center of East Berlin and hold regular meetings with East German officials and Communist Party leaders to discuss “further cooperation.” Even a casual visitor to East Berlin can see hundreds of Arabs, permanent officials stationed in the city, or trainees clogging cafes, attending conferences or just shopping in the big super markets in the city’s center. The Arabs also are unaware of the city’s Jewish history and of the role it once played in Jewish culture and civilization.

A Jewish woman, who works as an English-German translator with foreign trade delegations, including those from Arab states, says she herself was surprised how little the Arabs were aware of Berlin’s Jewish past. “They don’t even know Hitler’s name. For them, we (East Germany) are just Eastern Europe’s most dynamic and active state. They seem to ignore the second world war and Nazism.”

SUPPORT GOVERNMENT ON JEWISH QUESTION

Most of the East Germans, though their overwhelming majority watch West German television and privately admit they would like to “cross the wall” and settle in the Federal Republic, support their government on the Jewish question.

Several non-Jewish East Germans, who all were critical of their regime, said they fully approved the government’s decision not to make any restitution or reparation payments. “Why should we pay? Are we responsible for Hitler?” some asked. Others added, “There are practically no second world war Jews left, and, in any case, America pays for them.”

The East German government offered to pay $1 million to surviving German Jews who live in the United States. But even this modest offer, which has not been accepted, is unknown to most East Germans. Even senior officials say they never heard about it and expressed “surprise.” Some said “if we did make this offer, it probably was because we want detente and to improve our commercial relations with the United States, certainly not because of the handful of Jewish survivors who must have all been resettled by now.”

LIMITED JEWISH COMMUNITY ACTIVITIES

The Jewish community has a central organization mainly responsible, however, for welfare. It also publishes a monthly magazine of which only a few hundred copies are circulated occasionally. It organizes a “cultural evening” with records, tea and a guest lecturer.

For the High Holy Days, and for funerals, which are frequent because of the high average age of the community’s members, a rabbi crosses the “wall” from West Berlin. There is a kosher meat shop, with the meat imported from Hungary, but most of the clients are neighboring non-Jews who say “the meat just tastes better. Hungarian beef is the best.”

No more than a dozen Jews attend these “cultural evenings” or go to the kosher shop. Their only regular pilgrimage is to the East Berlin cemetery, one of the largest in the world with its 114,000 graves. By a strange paradox, it is relatively well kept. Six full-time gardeners and a Jewish permanent warden watch over it. The alleys are well paved, the tombs are clear of weeds and many of the area’s local non-Jewish inhabitants come for a stroll on a sunny Sunday afternoon.

As for the Jewish survivors, they usually come on weekdays around noon–old people with a bouquet of cheap flowers. “For us, this is our present and also our future,” says an old man sitting by a grave.