A Ghost of the Past

Talk to most ethic groups in New York, and you’ll find a least a little nostalgia for the lands of their forebearers, even if it’s more manufactured than genuine. Caribbean immigrants dream of their island paradise, the Irish sing about the Emerald Isle, the Italians talk about taking a vacation to visit the little town in Sicily or Calabria or Campania where their grandparents used to live. There is one stark exception to this nostalgia: you will never hear a Jew pining away for the memory of Central or Eastern Europe. With good reason.

I had been to Italy and France, countries that had been occupied by the Nazis, but not to the extent that the entire Jewish population was destroyed. In fact, Rome has the oldest continually active Jewish community in Europe, a community that is still fairly active today - despite not being allowed to live outside the confines of the 4-block square ghetto until 1870.

I had also been to the Iberian countries, former centers of a Jewish culture that had been eradicated, and which are virtually devoid of any Jewish community today (Portugal, a country that was once about 20% Jewish, today has about 600 Jews). But half a millennia of time has insulated that period of history to a large degree. Not so with Central Europe.

Being Jewish in Central Europe, even today, even as a young person, was eerie and extremely unnerving. What you know to be alive is said to you to be dead. A culture you are used to experiencing in sounds, smells, and feelings is relegated to tourist shops and museums. And, of course, a heavy dose of security cameras and police officers, as a reminder that despite a near-complete extermination, there are still plenty of people willing to come back to try and destroy what pathetic little there is left.

You feel like a living ghost - that who you are shouldn’t exist. That you have been told in the most brutal way possible that this was no longer your home, that you were no longer welcome here. Despite the changes in Central Europe over the last 60 years, that fact remains that these changes occurred only after the vision of the old ideology had been fulfilled to a unbelievably horrific extent. Politically, the Central Europe of today might not resemble Hitler’s dreams of the future, but in terms of the “Jewish question” the undisputable fact remains that it does - a fact that I could feel in my bones from Austria to Poland.

Somewhat ironically, of the Central European cities I visited I by far felt the most comfortable in Berlin. One has to remember, before the war Berlin was the most anti-Nazi city in the German speaking world, and one of the most liberal and cosmopolitan in all of Europe. And today, Berlin is well along the road of returning to these noble roots. Immigrants from all over the world walk its streets, multitudes of languages are heard in its cafes, gays and lesbians live openly and freely. There is even a small, but growing, Jewish community. I can think of no better historical repudiation of the Nazi ideals than for its imagined racially pure capital of a totalitarian empire to, in fact, become a multinational, liberal, cosmopolitan city - complete with a Jewish presence and culture - embracing the exact values that the Nazis abhorred.