Ignatz Bubis, the chairman of the Jewish federation in Germany, was the subject of a 30-minute documentary film that was broadcast on German television Wednesday night.
Titled “48 Hours in the Life of Ignatz Bubis,” the camera follows the Jewish activist as he meets with Jewish legislators and with Chancellor Helmut Kohl and his political opponent Rudolf Scharping of the Social Democrats.
In the documentary, Bubis says he respects Kohl, “although I did not forget his visit to Bitburg,” the cemetery where SS soldiers are buried and where they were honored by Kohl and U.S. President Ronald Reagan in April 1985.
Bubis tells the interviewer that he lives with guilt for having survived the Holocaust while his father was killed at the Treblinka death camp. For this reason, he says, he refused for years to talk about his past.
One of the most physically protected people in Germany, Bubis says he lost his fear in 1943, when the Holocaust eclipsed all other fears, and he says he finds the bodyguard detail assigned to him “exaggerated.”
JTA has documented Jewish history in real-time for over a century. Keep our journalism strong by joining us in supporting independent, award-winning reporting.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
