Cold War and Jewish History

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This is our first day of something other than 70 degree and sunny weather. With the proper clothes it’s not so bad. Our Cold War Tour started at 10. I thought it was a 2-hour tour, but it turned out to be a 4-hour tour. I had already booked a 3-hour tour starting at 1 with John from the Topography of Terror tour so I pushed it back. The Cold War Tour started with a visit to one of the last remaining sections of the wall and the Palace of Tears at the train station at which East Berliners caught the train back to the East after a visit to the West. We went down to the subway stops that were taken out of use while the wall was up. The East Germans always had 3 men at each station including 1 married man to ensure that the guards didn’t cross over. Earlier in the week John had talked about how the wall came down. It was not a highly publicized event, but rather a guard at one location thought he had just been diagnosed with cancer so he didn’t feel he could have much to lose whatever he did. He was on a conference call that his substitute boss was having with someone higher in the food chain. The higher up didn’t know the guard was on the call and began joking about him. When the call ended without clear direction, the guard opened the wall and that was the beginning of the end. At the former Stasi station, the guide talked about the excessively high number of secret service men there were relative to the population. When you ended up in the basement of this building, your future was questionable. Just as under Stalin informing was the norm. Teachers would ask school children to draw their favorite TV character. If they drew a picture of a character from Western TV, their parents would get called in for a chat. Life in East Germany was not always horrible and for many years the income per capita was in the top 20 of all countries.

We arranged to meet John for a tour of the once-upon-a-time-before-they-murdered-all the Jews area in Berlin. In Berlin you see small brass plaques in the sidewalk commemorating where specific Jews either lived or worked. In front of the University there are was a long row of plaques because there were so many Jews on the faculty. When you are walking throughout the city the plaques are frequently in clusters of 3 or more for whole families. Each plaque shows the name of the person, their date of birth, the date they were deported and murdered or the date when they fled Germany. Because there was many highly educated Jews in Germany a large percentage of the 170,000 Jews of Berlin survived. It is remarkable to see the buildings for Jewish institutions that were completed in the 30’s before the writing on the wall was clear enough to motivate migration. At what was one a large Jewish orphanage, John explained that several groups of children were smuggled out by the Zionist network before the doors closed and then the rest of the children went to Auschwitz. In front of the former Jewish Girls School we saw an older man being interviewed whose mother had attended the school. The Moses Mendelsohn boys’ school has been reopened and 40% of the students are not Jewish. It is right next to what was the Jewish first cemetery. Only two headstones remain. We couldn’t visit the inside of the Synagogue because it is being renovated. It could seat 3,000 – 3,500 people. Outside the synagogue and at several places in the neighborhood we saw police because the German government is concerned about the rising anti-Semitism. Earlier I noted that a Palestinian wearing a kipa was assaulted. The leaders of the Jewish community recommended that Jews were baseball caps on top of kipas. In response, several hundred people gather for a protest wearing kipas. In a city with X million people a couple of hundred people is insignificant. The article in the NYTimes quoted the Director of the Jewish Museum here. She recounted that a gentleman sitting next to her in the first-class compartment of the train, commented that he’d like to murder all the Jews and Muslims. When talking about murdering minorities is acceptable, then trouble is right around the corner. It was interesting talking to John, a non-Jewish, Oxford educated self-identified member of the Left about anti-Semitism. He commented that in addition to the threat from the right he is disturbed by the anti-Semitism on the Left. I suppose it is reassuring to me that I’m not alone in this fear. When the President of Starbucks consulted the ADL, along with several other groups, regarding sensitivity training, one of the leaders of the Women’s March, she tweeted “The ADL is CONSTANTLY attacking black and brown people.” Not only is this claim false, but it is anti-Semitic. I would expect hate speech about the ADL from the far right, but from the Left????? One of the best things about being with John, was that he was incredibly well read and I could talk about authors I like that I’ve not been able to discuss with anyone previously. He owes me some book recommendations and I’m going to follow-up when I get home and have time to read.

We had dinner at a restaurant that had been recommended to us by good friends. Cookies Cream ended up being a bit too hip for my taste. To begin, you get to the restauarant by walking behind a fancy hotel into the alley with the garbage cans. We had gotten part way into the alley and were figuring we had messed up with an elegantly dressed couple passed us leading us past the garbage to a virtually unmarked entrance. Jack ordered their 3 course dinner with wine. When his first course came the food was good, but the wine tasted like, well I don’t know how to describe it ….maybe spoiled apple jack? He gave me a taste and YUCK. He was going to suffer through so being supportive wife I asked the manager for a replacement which he was happy to provide. It was very nice and the food was very interesting, but liked the dinner at the Yam Yam, a Korean restaurant, better

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