Varieties of Pain and Tragedy in Cross-section of Berlin Jews

######tinuing business? Are your children submitting to becoming citizens of an inferior grade?”

THOUGHTS TURN TO PALESTINE

“No”, he retuned resolutely, “but now I can do nothing. I cannot liquidate anything. Perhaps in four or five years I shall manage to transfer myself and family to France or England, or maybe to Palestine. Some say it’s a country with prospects. But I know nothing about it as I was never a Zionist.”

Later, on the same day, I met a young doctor. He was a bright-faced young man of a clean and athletic build. Before Hitlerism became a real menace to Jewish peace, he had given a great deal of his time to Jewish activities, Zionism, a Jewish athletic club, and a Jewish student organization. He was one of the comparatively few native Germans who did not need a Hitler to awaken him to his Jewishness. In his profession, his work was devoted mainly to the Krankenkassen, the German national health insurance under which some seventy percent of the population is insured for sick benefit.

HE LOSES HIS PLACE

The fact that the workers’ health insurance is a state affair, has made it only too easy for the Nazi administration to “purge” scores of municipal hospitals of Jewish doctors.

My informant was one of the first to lose his post. He had, at first, regarded himself as safe, as he was engaged in a private sanitorium. He had overlooked the fact, however, that many private sanitoria derived a considerable part of their income from payments made to them by the Krankenkassen on behalf of insured patients. The sanitorium authorities had been presented with the alternative of dismissing him or having the sanitorium struck off the list of institutions entitled to treat patients insured under the Krankenkassen. He was now unemployed with no prospect of private practice.

I left him and made my way to the Grenadierstrasse, the Jewish quarter crowded with East European Jews and poor native-born German Jews. Here the numerous vacant shops and the empty streets showed at a glance that it was not the old animated Grenadierstrasse of four or five years ago. Young men hurried through the street with their heads bent low, not daring to pass so much as a glance at the armletted Brown Shirts infesting the neighborhood. There were also many vacant apartments in tenement houses, evidence of the fact that many had found it unsafe to

######range for the payment of their weekly salaries so long as the firm was unable to re-engage them.

My host had been unemployed since April 1. There had been no unemployment pay for him as he is a Jew. Like many thousands of other, he was now dependent upon Jewish relief for the subsistence of himself and family. He had made an effort, during the previous week to peddle in the Berlin markets. But on the very first day Nazi Brown Shirts had warned him to make himself scarce. Thereafter he had discovered that even peddling was to be exclusively Aryan in the new Germany.

While I was speaking to him, his wife sat in a corner, silent. But when I rose to leave she crossed the room and burst into a fit of weeping as she bid me good-bye. “The worst of the whole affair,” she said, “is that there is no future for our children. In some of the schools Jewish children are humiliated by their school teachers and mocked and stoned by their fellow-pupils. The time has come when we German Jews envy the poor Polish Jews who have the protection of a consul. We can turn nowhere. We just sit and wait for a new Nazi law or a new Nazi raid.”

In the same neighborhood I visited a small synagogue frequented by Polish Jews and which had been the scene of a raid by members of the Nazi Storm Troopers.

Of an old greybeard who sat poring over a Hebrew book I asked how the new prohibition against the kosher slaughter of animals was working. His reply was characteristic: “In days gone by when Jews were subjected to brutal decrees, they foreswore meat and all luxuries, they fasted and prayed. We should not have waited until Hitler imposed our traditions on us.” He was one of the old resolute believers, one of those staunch rocks which had withstood similar persecutions in other days and, protected by the power of their faith, had emerged unscathed.

APOSTATE FINDS HE’S JEW

One of my strangest interviews was with an apostate. He had been described as an example of one of the Jewish converts to Christianity whom Hitler had forced back into the ranks of Israel.

He had been for so long separated from Jewish society that he still found difficulty in regarding himself as other than a German Christian. He owns four cigar stores and all were promptly picketed on April 1 by Brown Shirts and customers.

######tonic head whose Jewishness was revealed only by the telltale dark eyebrows. But this malice was promptly dissipated in face of the stark reality. I found a sallow-complexioned man of about sixty in a well-appointed house, tastefully furnished with evidences of luxury and refinement in the Charlottenburg district.

I asked him point-blank, “What is your grievance?

“I have thought a great deal about this whole affair,” he said. “Maybe we German converts and the fathers who converted us are just as much responsible for Hitlerism as are the Nazis themselves. I was never in the true sense a Jew, as I was deliberately kept away from Jewish connections. But I am beginning to realize that when my father converted me, he was surrendering to a spirit which demanded conversion at the price of safety and assured prosperity.

“When I continued my father’s practice and deliberately abstained even from prying into the Jewishness about which I was really curious, I, too, was surrendering to the same spirit. But the fact remains,” he added, “that I cannot so suddenly throw in my lot with a people and a faith from which I am so remote.”

“What of the future?” I asked him.

Of all the blank replies that came to me in the course of my questionings in Germany, his was the blankest. He had not yet grasped the true significance of his new position. All he realized at this stage was that he was neither German nor Jew.

He looked back at me with a pathetic stare, lifted his shoulders and threw out his hands helplessly. Little did he know that this gesture was the most Jewish of all Jewish replies.