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No, she couldn’t pursue this openly. She had other sources: what Kornfeld called her “regional field trips.” Loschwitz was worth a try.

* * *

The Stasi had no jurisdiction in Loschwitz. Those people had their own laws and their own courts. There were no street signs, only Yiddish pashkevils in Hebrew script reporting births, deaths, and feuds between rabbis. Sometimes there’d be a pashkevil in German to address outsiders: “Women: Be Modest” or more jarringly, in some shop window: “Bundists are not Jews.” Tucked between synagogues were shops that sold black-market goods or exchanged Judenmarks for foreign currency. Rumor had it that a girl who got into trouble could bypass the state clinic for an abortion in a room above a kosher butcher shop.

When Judit went to Loschwitz, she took care to cover her head with a beret and wear a calf-length skirt and stockings. The disguise was worth the trouble because it was in Loschwitz that Judit found a junk shop, never in the same place twice, but always carrying the same inventory: plastic bowls and tarnished flatware, magazines from Judenstaat’s deep past, some in yellowed slipcases, and others half-chewed and unreadable.

The owner had a long, thin beard and wore a skull-cap, and he never met Judit’s eyes, but he took care to push a certain bin in her direction. The film canisters and photographs in that bin had all been marked DISCARD in red, and when she sorted through it, they proved to be from Judenstaat’s earliest years.

She asked, “How much?”

He answered in the high-pitched Yiddish of the black-hats. “Three zloty.

She gave the man ten Judenmarks, which he did not reject. The next time she managed to find the shop, he asked for fifteen dollars, and the third and fourth time, twenty Deutsche marks. In every case, he took what Judit offered. In every case, she went straight back to her archive and spent the night viewing and sorting until her eyes gave out and her legs gave way.

She’d never been sure why some footage was discarded. The images of Stephen Weiss were hot stuff, sure, but then there were other reels that seemed harmless enough, though certainly unfiltered: American- or Soviet-made. She kept the Loschwitz footage in a separate drawer and never included it in her formal catalogue; she kept its contents in her head:

A newsreel from 1950: six young Ghetto Fighters waving across an airfield. Leather jackets slung over their shoulders. The propeller hums, and a Soviet pilot urges them on board. They’re headed for Moscow, where they will become the officer corps of Judenstaat’s defense force.

Grainy footage of three slender Americans in well-tailored raincoats, walking beside Leopold Stein as they survey the sandstone foundation of Judenstaat’s new Parliament. 1949. One of the Americans whispers something to Stein, who turns his head away.

A carnival in a Displaced Persons camp in ’47, Churban survivors pitching pennies next to girlfriends who are dolled up for the evening, looking proud in their high heels. Why was this one discarded? Were they too happy? How vulnerable they seem, as they flick American pennies into those bowls, neat as sharpshooters.

Stein and Weiss and the flag. Weiss at Yalta, half-buried in a fur coat with his glasses flashing. Weiss standing by the ruins where the Great Synagogue of Dresden once stood, obscured by smoke. No, the film she’d screened a few days ago was not Stephen Weiss at the ruins of the Great Synagogue. It was Stein, pre-1947.

That’s what she’d been watching the day that man broke in. Stein with his mouth moving through that full beard, his hands making that round, half-shrugging gesture. So you don’t like that story? Then she knew: she’d never seen that film before.

They lied about the murder.

That stranger—she could just make out the shape of him. He was not the black-hat from the junk shop. He wasn’t lean and frail. He’d shouted in coarse German and he’d slammed that note down with a force that shook the table.

Judit held that note in her hand, and then that hand began to shake as she inferred another meaning. What if Hans was still alive?

8

From Helena Sokolov’s Inaugural Address: January 1986. Released in special video edition from the National Museum, November 1987.

[Sokolov enters the Grand Hall. Standing ovation as she walks down the center aisle and shakes hands with representatives. She moves forward before turning back to wave at Anton Steinsaltz, on whom the camera lingers. She is at least a head shorter than everybody else, and once behind the podium, only her face and trademark ink-black pageboy are visible. She adjusts the microphone and waits for the applause to end, waving and gesturing happily, then raising her hand for silence.]

I come to you as a true outsider. You knew this when you chose me, and I make no secret of my past. I am young, not much older than this country. I come from a foreign land, Birobidjan, that region on the border of Manchuria that has become a desolate wilderness. And I am a woman. How many women have ever sat in Parliament? I say to you that when a girl like me can stand before this body and tell the truth, everything is possible.

Moreover, I am the leader of a party that breaks with tradition by its very nature, the Neustadt Party, that group of young upstarts from the Polytechnic’s School of Economics which itself was only created ten years ago. There was once a rule that no member of the Neustadt Party could be over forty. Then, two of us turned forty. [Some laughter.] Once, Anton Steinsaltz said that we would never be taken seriously until at least one of us had gray hair. I told him that if he joined, he would have enough gray hair for all of us. [More laughter. Camera briefly cuts to Steinsaltz, who isn’t looking at it. Scattered applause.]

And why did you choose me? I know there are some among us who say that tradition is the very foundation of the Jewish state. I also know that there are some who fear that to break with tradition is to break a sacred covenant that binds us as a people and a land. What I will carry forward as we begin our work together is perhaps the greatest of our traditions. I speak now of the need to let go of fear, to embrace possibility, to chance an opportunity. I declare to the world: Judenstaat is a nation of opportunists.

Have Jews not, in our long history, embraced opportunity? Did we not embrace it when we planted deep roots in this land so long ago? And have we not taken this greatest of opportunities, a return to our own land? Here at last, we can live out our destiny, we can be safe, we can be free. [Applause.]

Who are we, citizens of Judenstaat? We are Jews. We are Saxons. We are united under one flag. [Scattered applause.] As I stand here before the Stripes and Star, I think of my first glimpse of the flag many years ago, when we crossed three borders with the help of Czechs and Poles, and, of course, Germans. Many are times I’ve praised these Righteous Gentiles—[From the floor: “The fascists have their own damned flag! That’s why we build the wall!” This is followed by silence, and a moment when Sokolov lets the echo disperse before continuing.]

My family were opportunists. After we came to Judenstaat, my mother got her diploma from a Dresden secondary school at the age of forty-five. We took the opportunity to work. My father made use of what he’d learned in a Soviet forced labor camp and joined the Saxons in the local gravel pit. My mother scrubbed floors in a Chabad House. We had no family here. But the more opportunities we took, the more it bound us to our neighbors. The more we felt invested in this country. The more we felt at home.