No Longer Protected From Anti-Semitism : PERSONAL PERSPECTIVE

My father occasionally talked about his life in Dresden before the war. His family, all well-educated, was extraordinarily privileged and very close. Brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles and cousins lived in a four-story mansion on one of the city’s nicest streets. Suddenly, they all moved away.

In 1937, with Adolf Hitler’s regime spreading into every aspect of German life, my grandparents had packed the family for “a world cruise.” They had already managed to ship out some of their Manets, Monets, antique furniture, the sterling, fine porcelain, crystal and jewels. They were lucky in another way: They didn’t witness the concentration camps.

But I never knew any of this. My father’s family had relinquished their ties to Judaism. I was raised a Protestant in the Los Angeles area. In my house, the words Nazi and Jew were never mentioned. The horrors of the Nazi reign I learned from teachers and from reading textbooks. I never had reason to imagine that my father or his family might have had any firsthand experience.

It was as a teen-ager when I began to sense that something had been deliberately excluded from my family background. When I asked my mother if my father was Jewish, which I increasingly suspected, she tried to avoid answering. Finally, she broke down, explaining that before she had agreed to marry my father, she had extracted a promise: No one was ever to know he was Jewish. “We wanted to protect you from anti-Semitism.”

It was anti-Semitism that dominated my thoughts when I returned to my father’s home in Dresden last month. Our family is among hundreds of thousands making claim to property lost through the Nazi “purification” process. We now have title to the mansion, though its sale remains unfinished and subject to possible taxation. Title to a country estate and a factory remain unresolved.

The reparations policy is controversial, and the Bundestag is considering rescinding it. The unemployment rate in Dresden is 15% to 20%. Restitutions, moreover, are difficult to administer, and distasteful to Germans who fear higher rents if their homes are upgraded by their original owners.

In effect for years in West Germany, restitution policy was expanded to include the former East Germany. To regain title to a property, one must prove previous ownership. But people fleeing for their lives are not inclined to carry voluminous logs and journals.

That we were able to document our claim was something of a fluke. My 83-year-old uncle had researched the matter for more than two years, made numerous international trips and hired three lawyers, two of whom died in the process. Eventually, he learned that another mansion nearby was being restored to its prewar grandeur. The project architect needed documentation. Only because my aunt had saved photographs from inside this mansion, and shared them with the architect, did he help us get access to crucial records in local archives.

Before I began planning for my trip, I dismissed as political rhetoric Chancellor Helmut Kohl’sstatement that “hatred of foreigners and anti-Semitism are shameful for our country.” The warning of Manfred Stolpe, premier of the eastern state of Brandenburg, that “propagating racism and anti-Semitism is the way to Auschwitz” seemed remote and far away.

But two weeks before I was to leave, I felt a shudder of fear when I read about 500 neo-Nazi demonstrators marching through the streets of Dresden, with a man in black reportedly punching Kohl in the stomach.

Once in Dresden, I came face-to-face with neo-Nazi skinheads, wearing black leather jackets and red arm bands. I wondered if they were the ones who set fire to a concentration camp museum on the second anniversary of Germany’s reunification. No longer “protected” from anti-Semitism, and feeling raw and exposed in an icy wind, I avoided looking them in the eye.

While in the city of my father, my family kept a low profile, spending the night in a village near the country house. But even there, we felt the antagonism of being foreigners. When attempting to buy some wooden nutcrackers, a German couple sarcastically noted that we, no doubt, were better Germans than they.

Still, meeting my unknown relatives created a sense of being rooted in something larger than myself, that a near lifetime of slow, self-conscious exploration of my German and Jewish heritage was worth it. In that fleeting moment, I felt the spirit of my father’s family, the bond I was meant to feel, lost to a menacing time. Now, amid today’s ominous reminders of pre-World War II Germany, it is more important than ever not to relinquish these restitutions. They are partial, and largely symbolic, but they offer continuing hope that the past will not return.