The national anthem sounded new again:
Then Hans froze. He slumped forward, crumbled into the podium, and fell down with it.
Germans killed him—angry unrepentant Saxon Nazis who marked him for assassination as a collaborator with the Jewish state. Of course a lot of people hated Hans. Judit hadn’t been there that night, but she knew hundreds of survivors of the camps had picketed the Opera House when Hans had been appointed. Before the murder, there’d been those phone calls, late at night, with thick, strange silence on the other end. After a while, Judit and Hans had let the phone go on ringing, or Hans would pick up and leave it off the hook under a pillow. Could she remember dates and times? Could she remember if there’d been static on the other end? Or other voices in the background? Why hadn’t she and Hans reported those calls to the State Security Police?
Those were the kinds of questions she had to answer during the weeks when she was a public widow, escorted from place to place by a polite Stasi agent who also stood by her bed at night. She was pumped full of so much Valium that there wasn’t a clear distinction between days of interrogation, and nights when she would find herself in a nightgown that she didn’t recognize, and she told them everything she knew and cursed her own precise and nimble memory for detail that persisted even when she was sedated.
Once they found the men who did it, she was left alone. She took to wearing Hans’s old duffle coat. It served as camouflage. Still, she was sometimes invited to memorials, especially on Liberation Day. Judit’s mother, Leonora, took an interest in such things. Last May, she’d dragged Judit to a performance given in Hans’s memory at the Opera House, a choral recital by Saxon children, and she kept whispering to Judit how wonderful it was to see that not all of them hated us, and how important it was to teach them young, before their minds were poisoned by their culture.
“I wouldn’t know, Mom,” Judit said. Why had she agreed to come?
“Well, maybe you and Hans never had children of your own, but these are your children, honestly, Judi, and that’s what matters. Don’t you agree? Aren’t they your children?”
What could Judit do then but stare at the program with its silhouette of Dresden’s restored castle and the Opera House’s dome? Below, in flowing script: “The Fire Returns: A Dresden Season to Remember.”
What was the point of memory? Nothing surprised her. Even now, with the lights switched off, her touch was automatic—drawer open, film into the feeder, and before she even looked down, she knew just what she’d see, the long-shot of workers climbing the scaffolding of that same opera house. It was the first structure rebuilt in ’49. Old news, and worthless.
If she remembered everything, then how could she find—what did it say in that press release about the documentary—explosive footage? She ought to experiment and fumble for a change, move her hand a little to the left. There was an unmarked case.
She slipped the film into the feeder. And what was this? A Soviet production, surely. Hand-held camera, by the look of it. Rubble and ruins, and another one of those eternal flat-bed trucks of camp survivors, and Leopold Stein again. He stood before a crater that was once the site of Dresden’s Great Synagogue. Stein’s mouth was moving, obscured by the beard that gave the footage a date: pre-’47. She knew what he was saying, what they’d written in that declaration, that Germany was Jewish at the root, that if the Jews needed a home it was right under their feet. This was their monument. This was their prayer-house.
Old news. But there was something about those enormous hands of Stein’s, big as boxing gloves, tracing a circle in the air and resting in a bridge below that beard. Old beard. Old bombed-out crater, blurry Soviet liberators with their rifles. She switched off the machine.
“Why stop?”
Judit froze. Her eyes stayed on the empty screen.
“So you don’t like that story?”
It wasn’t Hans’s voice. It wasn’t her intern, Sammy Gluck. It had to be a Stasi agent, but not the one who made regular courtesy visits.
Something creaked, then creaked again deliberately. Judit turned. It was so dark that she could make out no more than something darker. Then, that high, coarse voice again.
“You better like it. You know what I risked to get into this fucking fortress?”
Not Stasi. Without warning, the sharply living presence backed her into the work bench, and he slammed something onto the table and a pile of footage toppled over. So did Judit, nearly. Then he was gone.
He’d left a note. She switched on the viewer. The bulb was dim but steady. The text itself was written in the neat copybook handwriting of a child.
2
AFTER liberation, most refugees pass through Germany and move on, but Jews remain. Some live in Displaced Persons camps near Munich but the greatest number concentrate in the Soviet sector. The German state of Saxony is home to close to a million Jews who survived the concentration camps or sought a temporary home in the Soviet Union through the war and crossed the Czechoslovak and Polish borders. They occupy crude barracks built on the grounds of Saxon spas, or castles expropriated from their German owners.
Although the refugees are under U.N. auspices, the true administrators are the Bundists, the Jewish Socialists and trade unionists who’d spread through Eastern Europe in the years before the war. Most survivors are not interested in politics, but they know where their bread is buttered, and who serves the strongest coffee.
Above a coffee urn, a banner: WE ARE HERE. The credo of the Bund: a refrain taken from the Ghetto Partisans.
The coffee that the Bundists serve is, as Leopold Stein says, “as strong as an ox, as rich as a Rothschild, and as black as the soul of man.” Not that Stein believes in souls, but if history dictates that souls are black, then who is he to argue? Stein lived out the war underground with the Free French in the Rhineland and has emerged with his shirtsleeves rolled up his hairy arms to build a Jewish state in Germany.
Stein has a cloud of ill-kept hair. He is never quite clean-shaven. He’d grown a beard in hiding and it came in gray. In some surviving images, he peers out through all that hair into the camera, embarrassed at his resemblance to a rabbi.
Yet famously, Stein says, “Why pray at all?” He always adds that Moses Mendelssohn was drawn to enter Germany two hundred years ago through the gate reserved for Jews and cattle, and when the guard asked him his trade, he replied, “Reason.” In these unreasonable times, that’s what Jews bring—intolerance of nonsense, pragmatism, deep generosity, and vision.
Stein came of age after the Great War when Jews from Poland flocked to his hometown of Munich. Although it used the Hebrew alphabet, their Yiddish was almost completely German. German burned inside their Yiddish like light refracted in a lantern. Surely, Germany lived inside those Eastern Jews, ancient Ashkenaz where Emperor Charlemagne invited Jews a thousand years ago and where they’d brought their gifts from East and West and flourished until driven into exile.
Those Jews returned. And all the while, the Germany Stein knew, the Social Democratic Germany, receded. He felt a persistent urgency, a wild compulsion that made him travel through the country to form alliances and hone his argument, and even all the way to Vilna for an international conference of Yiddishists and Bundists in 1929. He urged them with all the passion of a man with a fixed idea to build a Jewish state in Germany.