From Legacy of Silence (Dan Bar-On, 1989) pp161-3
M: I was interviewed in the early 1970s, when I had just finished my conversion. Already then, I stated that the Holocaust was not a central focus in my move. Perhaps it does constitute some sort of point of departure for my path toward Judaism. That does seem reasonable and likely. I was just five at the end of the war, but later on… in high school, I started to think about what had happened in Germany. I also obtained a certain amount of information in history classes, in books that treated the topic in a free and open way. I had one teacher who was a converted Jew. He did in fact talk about the Nazi period, from 33 to 45. It is clear that any thinking person has to deal with that whole phenomenon. Because the question I asked – and I think it’s quite natural to ask such a question — when I was twelve or thirteen, I started to ask myself: How was it possible for such a thing to happen? And why specifically in Germany? That’s a question for which I don’t know if there is any answer. How did all that happen in the Germany of Goethe, Kant, Beethoven, Mozart – in that Germany? It was a jungle – within the framework of a culture that was so developed. Maybe there is a kind of historical approach to that question: the long development of anti-Jewish religious sentiment, and after that, the more modern phenomenon, namely, racist anti-Semitic opposition to Judaism. It is not surprising that this took place within the context of a Christian world. Christianity from its very inception was rooted in and based on religious opposition to Judaism, such as you find in the New Testament.
B: Do you come from a Christian home?
M: No, basically not. My parents had left the church. Even before the Nazi era, there was no close bond with the church within our fam-iy. Officially, they were no longer members of the church. My father didn’t return to the church after the war either. Only my mother did. One of the elements is the historical legacy of Christian anti-Semitism, Christian anti-Jewish tradition. It is clear that this is very deeply rooted: the notion that the jews murdered the Son of God and that the guilt for having shed his blood is visited upon an the generations. History substantiates this: the Inquisition, the Black Plague. There are those anti-Semitic passages in Luther, for example, in Luther’s infamous tract entitled, “The Jews and Their Lies.” Initially, he intended to try to convert the Jews, and for that reason, he wrote a very positive book about the Jews in the beginning, emphasizing that Jesus had been born a Jew (although the Jews were a “stubborn” people). Anyhow, he wasn’t successful. Later, he wrote the treatise about the Jews that contains all that anti-Jewish theology, and four hundred years later, the Nazi paper Der Stürmer made use of those ideas. Things like that don’t come about overnight. It was a long process of development.
B: Did you speak with your parents about these matters?
M: No. After the war, my father was interned in Siberia for many years. I remember that we’d just about given up all hope. Suddenly a letter came saying that he was on his way home. I was already ten at the time. I must say, my father and I had almost no discussion about that whole topic.
I think that when we did get to talking a bit, well, I’d say that my father had not broken free from his Nazi background. It didn’t just start with Hitler – he grew up in that atmosphere and drank in anti-Semitism as a child drinks his mother’s milk. He was born in 1908, and German culture was permeated with anti-Semitism at that time. Books by men like Eugen Dühring, literature like that even in academic circles. Dühring’s book, Die Judenfrage als Frage der Rassenschäd-lichkeit [The Jewish Question as a Question of Race Malignity]. It was in the air. So, despite the terrible calamity that occurred, I don’t think my father ever became completely free of all that. His views about Jews were always negative.
That was shown not so long ago, in 1969. I had been in Israel on a visit – this was before I came as an immigrant in 1970. I had been studying at the rabbinical academy Merkaz Harav’ in Jerusalem and was on my way back with a friend. He was returning to London, and I was going back to the United States. We stopped off in Germany on the way, and I visited my sister in Düsseldorf. My parents were on a visit elsewhere and were supposed to come to Düsseldorf. I went to the station to meet my father. When he saw that there was someone else with me, someone he recognized as a Jew, he didn’t get off the train but continued on to the next town. That was in 1969. Even before that, when I left Germany to go to the States – I graduated from Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati; that was before my conversion — well, when he learned that I was attending a Jewish institution, it was the end of the world for him.
On the other hand, though, I heard a story from him when I was a child. He told me that there was a Jew by the name of Stern in the neighborhood. My father had learned something about an action the Nazis were going to carry out and he warned Stern. He was apparently the same age as my father. He knew him from the neighborhood. And my father told him to get out for his own good. And he told me this story, although I don’t know its significance …
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