“Well,” Kornfeld said, “of course you’re on board with this.” He gave a bitter laugh. “After all, you married one of them.”
3
Rough cut: Fortieth Anniversary Project. Working title: “Survival and Resistance” 28/02/88
[A Displaced Persons camp in Schmilka, 1946. The sky flat white, and hard lines of prefabricated barracks cut across the frame. Out of those huts, young men with bowls and cups for morning coffee. A banner by the coffee urn: “WE ARE HERE!” The frame freezes on a man with light hair and a hard jaw. The image dissolves into interview: a man of sixty, same jaw, lank, white hair. Caption identifies: “Samuel Fieffer, Survivor of Treblinka.”]
We were duped. [Fieffer shakes his head and runs a hand across his face.] We were told we bought this country with our martyrs’ blood.
[More emblematic footage, young men in black and white montage, scrambling for those pairs of boots and dumping out those famous notes. Those notes are scattered in the dirt, and then a wind rises and blows them in the air through a gate where Soviet troops stand guard. Two soldiers lean against a jeep. One of them pulls on a cigarette and laughs.]
How were we supposed to know that we were still in prison, that we’d be in prison for another forty years? Nobody just hands you a country.
[Footage of Stalin, circa 1950, walking across a parade ground, doffing his cap and turning to speak to someone on his right.]
What did he have in mind? Nothing’s in writing. But there were some of us, even then, who’d heard things from the ones who’d seen what Stalin thought of Jews firsthand. Watch out, they said. That yellow star of yours, it’s flying over the biggest concentration camp in Europe.
[Camera focuses on the iconic shot of Stripes and Star rippling in black and white. The images melt into washed- out color, and the camera pans back to a Judenstaat choir in their striped prison uniforms and red bandannas. Caption: “May 14th, ‘Liberation’ Day 1949.” Eisler’s national anthem blares, distorted by its punishing volume.]
[A parade that same year, men and women in camp uniforms below banners marked: “Auschwitz,” “Treblinka,” “Dachau,” “Belsen,” carrying spades across their shoulders through the rubble of Dresden, followed by dignitaries in open cars. Suddenly, they are obscured by a deep shadow as a Soviet fighter plane passes overhead. Cut to interview: a lean, bald man with a ravaged face. Caption: “Lev Margolis, Applicant, Judenstaat Officer Corps.” There is something wrong with his mouth, so that although he speaks German, subtitles are necessary.]
We were told we would be the new officer corps. My comrades and I traveled to Moscow in 1950. You can imagine.
[Footage of jaunty men in leather jackets, heading towards an airplane. A propeller spins.]
I was twenty-three. I’d fought in the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. I was so proud of myself and of our country. My whole life led me here. How could we know where we were really going?
[Mountain peaks, gray sand, round pits, and sound of wind. Caption: “Kolyma Mines, 1951.” Miners working under heavy guard.]
Now there were twenty of us, maybe, who made it through that first winter. I never even knew that Stalin died, just that some of the prisoners were pardoned, but not us. Us, they kept. We were buried alive. They took all of the fight out of me.”
[Old film stock: five young men facing the camera, spades in their hands. One rolls up his sleeve to show the tattoo of a number, then another and another number is revealed. The camera pans in so close that the numbers dissolve into the flesh.]
We could tell you things, you people in Judenstaat. We could tell you things your bones already know. Terror is terror.
[Rolling right over those words, a keening, and some cries in German. Stock-footage montage: army trucks with red stars, rolling down roads made more specific by a flash of the remains of Leipzig’s Saint Thomas Church rising from the smoke. Fire in a field of barley. An open road with tank-treads through the mud and rain. A caption: “1946.” Cut to photographs, a black and white portrait of a frail girl with black braids, sitting on a bench with a kitten. Cut to interview: tight close-up of a middle-aged woman, dark hair, tender-looking eyes. She is not identified.]
I was on my way to school right here, when they found me—three of them. I told my father I’d fallen into a ditch and he scolded me and told me I needed to be careful. But my mother, she knew. She didn’t say a word. After all, they were our liberators. [Pause.] It hurts me to come back here.
[Camera pulls back to reveal a second woman, an older, white-haired Saxon in a housedress. They are both standing in a barren field. She speaks.]
It hurts me too.
[A caption appears: “German and Jewish survivors of Soviet sexual assault.”]
Our house was here. [The Saxon points to a stone foundation broken by weeds.] They took it over and moved us into the barn, my grandmother, mother, father, older sisters. They took her so often, and also my mother and my grandmother. The shame of it broke my father. Nobody talks about it.
[Grainy film stock, pastoral scene, an empty road, high grass. The two women talk together, the older woman limping slightly. She gestures towards a rock.]
I left the baby on that stone. And then we burned the barn and took what we could carry into Brandenburg. Can I tell you what it means to come back to this place?
[Montage: silent figures standing in the street as Soviets tape signs to the door of a tavern, the door of a blacksmith’s shop, silent figures watching the demolition of a church, passing by with bowed heads, a cloud, unnaturally low, over the ruins of Dresden. A voice in English begins, with simultaneous translation.]
The Soviets had a plan.
[Interview: elegant old man sitting in a deck chair by what appears to be a bay; yachts float some distance off. Caption: “Lewis Richmond, U.S. Ambassador to Judenstaat, 1949. Professor Emeritus of International Studies, Amherst.”]
Their interest in Judenstaat was clear. In those years after the war, it would make all the sense in the world for this country to be—on paper—nonaligned, to be a so-called neutral zone the Soviet Union could exploit economically and politically. The analogy with Hong Kong and mainland China is quite instructive. But Judenstaat could serve as something even more pragmatic. Its actions would be legitimized by suffering, acting in its own name, but always in the interests of the Warsaw Pact. Of course, all of that fell apart by ’53.
[More footage of expropriation, though now it is Jewish shops with signs in Yiddish. Soviet soldiers wrap a chain around the double-doors of a Dresden department store. Cut to a long prison train with Cyrillic lettering on its side, passing the Chemnitz station.]