Special Interview a Special Homecoming

For Stephen Tencer, his return last weekend to the site of the concentration camp at Bergen-Belsen that after liberation 40 years ago by the allied forces served as his home for three years as a displaced persons camp, “was a very important homecoming for me.”

“It was bad enough to go to Bergen-Belsen under any circumstances then to go in this circumstance–of trying to rectify a horror that was done to those who are buried there,” said Tencer, chairman of the Second Generation Council of New Jersey.

The horror, according to Tencer and a delegation of 51 other American members of the International Network of Children of Jewish Holocaust Survivors, was President Reagan’s visit to the site of the death camp at which thousands of men, women and children were slaughtered, followed by his visit to the German military cemetery at Bitburg where some 50 SS soldiers are buried among the 2,000 war dead.

CITES A MORE PERSONAL MISSION

In an interview with the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, Tencer also said he had another, more personal mission, besides participating in a protest at Bergen-Belsen. “I also had this personal mission I was on which I guess I didn’t think much about, and that was going back to my hometown,” Tencer said.

It was his first visit to West Germany and the hospital in Celler where he was born. Celler is located outside Bergen-Belsen’s former displaced persons camp that he called home. The site of the former DP camp is now used as a base for a British military unit attached to NATO.

In Celler, however, where he visited briefly with a friend, he said he found a “negative reaction” to the controversy that surrounded Reagan’s visit to the military cemetery Sunday, a visit that drew intense outrage for weeks from Jewish groups, war veterans and the Congress.

“I don’t know whether you could say it was a small town mentality, anti-Americanism or anti-Semitism,” Tencer said. He recalled that one hotel owner informed him that there were only two “good” American Presidents — John Kennedy for his “Ich bin ein Berliner” speech at the Berlin Wall, and President Reagan for his visit to Bitburg.

Joining Tencer in the JTA interview were three other members of the Network who just returned from West Germany: Menachem Rosensaft, founding chairman of the International Network of Children of Jewish Holocaust Survivors; Eva Fogelman, chairperson of the Network’s psycho-social committee; and Jerzy Warman, the Network’s president.

Each participated in the ceremony at Bergen-Belsen, which began some 20 minutes after Reagan and West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl left the site. They had requested from the Bonn government permission to protest at the gates of the site of Bergen-Belsen, but, according to Rosensaft, were refused permission to demonstrate, just a day before Reagan’s visit, by the United States personnel responsible for security arrangements.

“The President of the United States,” Rosensaft declared in the interview, “was able to accomplish in Germany what he could never have accomplished in the United States — to prevent an orderly, peaceful protest against the visit.”

After the President left the camp site, the delegation entered it to say Kaddish, and to “reconsecrate” the mass graves of thousands of victims of the Holocaust who are buried there. “What we mean by reconsecration is not that we have any religious authority to confer holiness on one place or another,” Warman explained.

“But, rather by a symbolic statement that although what happened, happened, we still want to assure survivors … that the memory of the victims that lie buried there will be preserved.”

‘COLLECTIVE MEMORY NEEDS TO BE DEVELOPED’

All four indicated that they had no problem with efforts at U.S.-German reconciliation, the stated purpose of Reagan’s visit to Bitburg. But as Fogelman stressed, “We felt that the message of reconciliation that Reagan was giving is not the message of reconciliation that we as children of survivors and Jews want the Germans to know.”

“We feel that the act of reconciliation needs to include both memory and commemoration,” Fogelman said. “A collective memory needs to be developed of what had happened and the message that Reagan is giving people is that, in fact, there is no difference between the victims and the perpetrators.”

Rosensaft, an outspoken critic of Reagan’s Bitburg cemetery visit where he laid a wreath during a brief ceremony, said, “We support and are in favor of reconciliation with the Germany of the past 40 years meaning the Germany that has tried to create a new image for itself and to reject all of the attributes of the Third Reich. We will not accept any reconciliation with Nazism and we will not accept any type of rehabilitation of the SS.

“This is the first time in 40 years that an event took place at Bergen-Belsen in opposition to the wishes of the entire Jewish community,” he added. “You had the travesty of a religious ceremony at Bergen-Belsen in which only priests and ministers — Christians — spoke in the name of the Trinity at a cemetery and at mass graves which are more than 90 percent Jewish. This was an absolute and utter desecration.”

CONCERN OVER PUBLIC OPINION POLLS

The four children of Jewish Holocaust survivors expressed some concern over public opinion polls conducted before the Bitburg visit which indicated that a slim majority of Americans disapproved of the cemetery visit. Warman attributed the public opinion view to the power of the Americans disapproved of the cemetery visit. Warman attributed the public opinion view to the power of the White House to “manage events” and diffuse controversy. (A New York Times/CBS News poll taken Monday showed the American public equally divided over Reagan’s Bitburg visit. See separate story.)

Tencer viewed the public opinion split on the Bitburg visit as a result of general American support for the actions of the President. On the other hand, he said he attributed the results of the opinion poll to the lack of knowledge among most Americans of the events of World War II, and particularly the Holocaust.

Fogelman suggested that despite the poll’s results, there was exhibited among the many who opposed the Bitburg visit a strong consensus against it, and that group made their voices heard in the media and among the general public. Rosensaft added that he felt many Americans were not concerned about the Bitburg visit.

Overall, however, all four of those interviewed expressed the view that some good may come from the controversy — perhaps as Fogelman suggested, an increase in Holocaust education and a general awareness of the plight of Jews under the Nazis.