About a week ago, a German tried to shoot the Jews attending a synagogue service on Yom Kippur in the small city of Halle, Germany. Apparently, the terrorist was not Muslim, and was a lone-wolf, neo-Nazi. The video of him shooting at the building from his automobile showed his determination, and hatred, and murderous intent. It brought back many memories to me.
I had to think about the past when news from Europe was reported. Decades ago I taught English in Europe, and our part of the university was the building Anglistik-Americanistik. One day walking on the small street toward the building I passed a small wall with a metal thing atop. But as I walked past, I realized it suddenly became a star of David. I stopped a second. Moved slowly, and the image disintegrated from a side view. Directly from the front, it was a Mogen David. When I asked a colleague, she informed me that that had been the front to the space of the synagogue, which had been destroyed by the Nazis. This street and this building had been part of the old ghetto in Halle (as der Saale). I asked if there were a synagogue then in existence, and she said no, as I recall, but she may not have known either way. At another time, I recall walking with another teacher, very nice, and we passed a sign of the Kultur Klub Anne Frank. I said, "Oh look, Anne Frank!" She replied, "Who is that?" I was too shocked that a name so well known in the US was unknown by a university teacher in Germany.
When in Halle, I lived in an efficiency flat in the Hochhaus, a 10-story structure. An elderly neighbor in the building was Jan Koplowitz, whose mother was Jewish. father was Czech. She and her sisters each owned a series of small hotels near the Czech border. He was an activist in the late 1920s and tried to organized the workers in his mom's hotel. He was kicked out of the family as a result. He was KPD. a member of the Communist Party of Germany.
Soon after Hitler came to power, he was rounded up, not as a Jew, but as a communist, and he helped to build the first KZ, Dachau, outside of Munich. "Helped build" as a prisoner of the concentration camp. He escaped to Prag and remained red. At some point, perhaps 1937 or 38, his mother was allowed to visit him in the Czech capital. He thought that the Nazis wanted her to remain away so they could confiscate her hotel. He wanted her to stay, as he feared things would get worse. "What would I do here, wash dishes?" So she returned to the Reich. Later in 1938 there was the crisis of the German minority in Czechoslovakia, and as a result of the compromise at Munich, German troops moved into parts of Cz. - the German speaking area called the Sudetenland.
As German troops marched through the border area moving into Czechoslovakia, on the front of his mother's hotel, someone place a photo of Hitler. She was worried that it covered a smaller sign that indicated hers was a Jewish hotel. She moved the picture of Der Fuehrer slightly so that people could realize hers was a Jewish hotel (one that had done well economically, because the Nazis fired many Jews from government service, and they retired to a place like hers where there would be fewer problems. But now, some saw the 2 signs, and thought she was trying to say Hitler was Jewish. They fined her the amount of the hotel; in effect her hotel was confiscated.. She could not get out of Germany any longer, so had to survive, she washed dishes in Berlin. Until she was rounded up and ...
When the Germans invaded the rest of Cz and Prag, Jan fled to Poland, and somehow made it to England, where he was interned during the war as an enemy alien. He remained CP. With victory, the Brits did not want professionals to go to the eastern part of Germany. He went anyway. Became a writer and songwriter.
One of my colleagues was English. He was born a Jew but was CP. After the war, he was stationed in the British section of Germany, married a German woman who had been married and had a child by a German soldier, but he was dead. They married and moved from the west to the east Germany Remember that Angela Merkel, the present German Kanzler, came from a West German family that also moved to the east. While over 3 million moved from east to west, about half a million moved from west to east. Len was English and taught British English at the university in Halle, the Martin Luther University. He was staunch CP. I recall some of his Jewish relatives came for a visit, but unlike their other relatives who would visit Israel, they were anti-Zionist, purposely not going there and instead would vacation in Egypt. Bottom line, even if Halle then had a synagogue, I doubt if either Len or Jan would have gone. Len and Kate had 2 children of their own, but I doubt if they identified at all as Jews. One son was given a very unGerman name of Keith, very English.
I recall meeting Frau Kuchinsky, daughter of a prominent KPD intellectual of the 1920s. She was sharp, and allowed to get the NY Review of Books. Perfect English.
Back in NYC, I was then involved with the Irish movement and was selling newspapers concerning events in Northern Ireland and its civil rights movement, one Sunday morning. Police said I could not sell the papers in front of St Pat's so I moved across the street to Rockefeller Center. One person walked by and chose to buy one, 25cents. He was Mike, who was planning to study at Princeton; he was from Germany. More we talked more interesting. His parents were Jews from Vienna. When Hitler took Austria, they made it to the US. He was born in Ohio. Parents were CP. During the McCarthy era, they fled back to Europe, first Vienna, then E Berlin. He was a baby, and was told they stayed in the remnants of the famous Hotel Adlon where he slept on a pillow in a drawer. In school, he excelled in math. To come to Princeton, it was during the VN war, he had to renounce his American citizenship, as he did not want to be drafted - his parents had taken him out of the US when he was a baby.
A few years later I stayed with him at his parents home in a pleasant suburb of E Berlin. Their neighbors were the W German ambassador. His mother was a judge, and his dad a leader of the academy of scientists organization in E Germany. Each of his brothers had different citizenships, because as foreigners they could travel more easily outside East Germany. Mike Rappaport is now a prominent mathematician today.
One of my students had a Jewish connexion, but I may have forgotten details. Her father had left Germany before Hitler came to power. He lived in the UK. During the war, he fought on the side of the British in the RAF against his Vaterland. When his plane was shot, he was not treated as a pow, but as a traitor and sent to a KZ. He weighed under 100 pounds at war's end. I think he married a Jewish woman and they went to east Germany. They divorced, and he returned to Britain. His daughter was an excellent student, but somehow there was a 2nd marriage, and I forgot all the details.
Anyway Halle, and Martin Luther U. where I taught there, brought back many memories.,
HUGH MURRAY
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