Who Might Have Predicted It?

Jews are returning to Germany in droves. A country whose focus at one time under the Nazi regime was to hunt down, torment, imprison and murder Jews. Where the deliberate, well-planned and executed experiment to rid the world once and for all of that very ethnic group that so bedevilled and puzzled people the world over with its insistence upon its exceptional status as the conscience of god, its firm dedication to the Judaic tradition, eschewing the idols of false religions, traditions and ideologies throughout world history to the present day.

If someone could accurately pinpoint what it is about Jews in general that so irritates so many other groups of people, we might learn a great deal of the mysteries of mass psychosis, in coming to grips with the antipathy so many civilizations from differing centuries, geographies and countries of the world experienced historically when gauging the impact of Jews upon their societies. Jews who settled in Germany, though, were prepared to give up much of their external "Jewishness" for full acceptance into the social, intellectual and religious life of the country.

This would render them immune, they felt, to prejudice; they would be fully recognized as sharing in the grand cultural tradition of German art and sciences with a full appreciation of their contributions to same, not as Jews, but primarily as Germans. With their stiff formality - exploitation of social salons, full intellectual life of pompous intelligence, their exalted military exploits for the country - their belief in their superiority over the rabble as full-fledged Germans they felt would carry them through anything.

But the well-springs of discrimination reside deep in the darkest recesses of the human soul, and anti-Semitism needed scant encouragement to flare in the population, thanks to the evil genius of one such as Hitler. The silent majority of ethnic German, acquiesced to the sacrifice of Jews posing as Germans, lumping them in holus-bolus with all those other hook-nosed and miserly money-lenders; all destined to receive their societal due as cast-offs destined for a final solution.

Jews who survived the death camps told their horrific stories of emotional and physical deprivations. The greater bulk of the death camp inmates were silent. Evidence of their having once lived among the greater society f mankind were seen here and there; in lampshades made of human skin, in the collections of hair used to stuff pillows, in the gold melted down from dental fillings, in the photographs and concise record-keeping of the Third Reich.

But here and now, some 70 years later, we have a renaissance occurring; Jews feeling that future economic prosperity awaits them in emigration from the former Soviet bloc countries and Israel itself to now-prosperous and repentant Germany. Berlin, where once synagogues were smashed and worshippers publicly humiliated, beaten and murdered, now boasts ten synagogues with a growing number of community centres and schools and kosher restaurants and shops catering to an ever-growing Jewish clientele.

How soon we forget the unforgettable.