GERMANY’S TROUBLES : The Third Reich Motto ‘Germany For Germans’ is Once Again the Rallying Cry; Foreigners Are the Target. This Time, Can the Hatred Be Stopped?

Fauzi Saado took his family to church that evening as usual. He never liked to miss the Wednesday services, and this night in particular he was looking forward to what the minister would say. It was Oct. 2, 1991, one day away from the anniversary of German unification, and the sermon turned out to be about brotherhood and unity, about learning to get along with your neighbor and working together to build a life full of goodwill and prosperity. Germany was again a single nation, rich, powerful, democratic, full of promise. Sitting in the Evangelical church that night, Fauzi Saado felt a part of it all.

Two years earlier, the Saados had been terrified bystanders in the random, everyday violence of war-torn Beirut, where Fauzi sold fruit and vegetables from a stand in the rubbled streets. Three of Fauzi’s cousins were killed; one was just a teen-ager. A bomb had exploded at his feet as he sat on his front stoop. “That was when I decided I had to get my family out,” he says. “We had heard Germany was a democratic land and that human rights were respected there.” Even better, the asylum process was said to be lax.

By October, 1991, the Saados numbered among some 250,000 foreigners who had poured across Germany’s borders after the Berlin Wall came down. They all had the same elusive goal, to be granted asylum and resettle. Fauzi quickly found out that the odyssey through seas of German red tape could take years and that his chances of success were virtually nil--but at least, he thought, his family was finally safe, away from the bloodshed of Beirut.

On the night of the 2nd, the Saados returned to their modest duplex in the Ruhr valley town of Huenxe about 9 o’clock. There would be no school tomorrow, since Unity Day was a national holiday, and the children were allowed to stay up late. A family friend was also spending the night. “We sat up in the living room watching TV with the kids,” Fauzi now recalls.

Fauzi and his wife, Zubeida, shooed their four oldest children--Mohammed, 4; Salma, 10, and her sisters Zeinab, 8, and Mokadas, 5--off to bed at about 11. Three-year-old Yussef and Ahmad, 1, were tucked in an hour later. By 1 a.m., the household was quiet.

Minutes later, Fauzi was jolted awake. “I heard an explosion, like a bomb going off,” he says, “and the sound of glass breaking.” He raced into the children’s room. What he saw made his heart stop.

“Everything was on fire,” he remembers. “My daughters’ nightgowns were in flames, and everyone was screaming.” He tried to smother the flames with blankets torn from the burning beds and with his bare hands. Her feet on fire, Salma was still able to escape the inferno by herself, hobbling out to the street where she shivered and wept in shock and pain. Zubeida crawled safely through a window with the two babies. Fauzi and his friend bundled out Zeinab and Mokadas. Both girls were severely burned. Little Mohammed was miraculously unscathed. His father had nearly forgotten him in the panic over the girls, until the boy suddenly let out a wail, and Fauzi saw the toddler still in his bed, the blanket atop him ablaze. Fauzi had snatched him up.

Out on the street, Zeinab and Mokadas were conscious, whimpering in agony. Neighbors had heard the explosion, and the Saados remember the curious faces as people came to see what the commotion was. But no one approached the foreigners huddled hurt and sobbing in the street. “Help, help, please!” the father was screaming. “My children, my children!” Fauzi’s hair had been singed off, and his hands were blistered from beating at the flames consuming his children. “The Germans just stood and watched,” he says, disbelief and disgust wrenching the bitter words from his throat a year later. “Nobody called the police. Nobody came to help us. They just kept their distance and watched. Nobody came to help! People were running away.”

Police logs show that a “foreign caller,” most likely the Lebanese neighbors upstairs, rang for help at 1:14 a.m. The first squad cars rolled up seven minutes later, and at 1:27 a.m., the ambulances arrived. United Germany marked its first birthday that same hour.

Parts of Mokadas’ legs, arms and face were blackened and blistered. Zeinab’s burns were even worse, covering 32% of her small body. Her lower legs were charred to the bone. She was immediately flown by helicopter to a special burn clinic in Hamburg, where she fell into a coma and was put on a respirator. Her doctors twice notified the Lebanese embassy that Zeinab was not going to make it, but she finally regained consciousness two weeks later.

It took police only two hours to learn that local skinheads had thrown a drunken party the night of the attack. In Huenxe, as in the rest of Germany, many skinheads--with their trademark buzz cuts, black steel-toed Doc Martens boots, bomber jackets and blue jeans--consider the Third Reich motto “Germany for Germans” a personal license to persecute foreigners. The police quickly zeroed in on three party-goers as suspects. Jens Gehling, 19, Volker Leukel, 18, and Andre Ciecior, 19, could not account for their whereabouts after midnight. They initially denied throwing beer-bottle firebombs into the Saado apartment, but after repeated questioning, they confessed. Four days after the attack, they were formally arrested.

Fauzi thought he had seen the three boys before in the neighborhood. He suspected they were responsible for the nightly phone calls he had been receiving, the ones he says the police had told him were harmless, the ones where the same male voice yelled “Foreigners out!” and “Foreign swine!” before hanging up. They may even have been the same boys he saw outside his apartment an hour before the bombs were thrown. The Saados’ house guest had called Fauzi to the living room window that night. Three skinheads, standing in the shadows, were flicking cigarette lighters on and off, on and off. Fauzi found himself repeating the same platitudes the police had given him: “There is nothing to worry about,” he told his friend. “It’s a holiday. They’re just celebrating.”

When Gehling, Leukel and Ciecior went on trial last April, the court was told the boys sometimes wore iron crosses and banned swastikas. In a television interview, Ciecior’s mother admitted that her ex-husband, Andre’s father, celebrated Hitler’s birthday every year with a beer bash. (“Just a reason to party,” she said.) During the monthlong trial, it also came out that her son and his friends liked to listen to banned recordings of the Fuhrer’s most venomous speeches, and the boys threw a barbecue of their own where a Star of David was purportedly burned to honor Hitler.

The Saados’ tragedy rapidly became a famous case; it was the first time children had been so seriously hurt by extremist violence, and Germany’s most popular daily kept a tabloid death watch on Zeinab. On the opening day of the trial, the Saados trundled their children into the courtroom. Zubeida Saado, pregnant with her seventh child, suddenly stopped in front of the defense table. She tugged the pink sweater from Zeinab’s shoulders to reveal her horrible scars and spat at the accused, who sat there coolly. “The pigs should see what they did!” Fauzi shouted.

Judge Walter Stoy reprimanded the Saados for their outburst. A month later, he sentenced the skinheads as youthful offenders and reduced the charges against them from attempted murder to serious arson and grave bodily harm. Gehling and Leukel each got five years. Ciecior drew 3 1/2; he had thrown his beer-bottle Molotov cocktail at a parked car. Stoy ruled that the youths had been drunk and had not intended to kill anyone. None of the boys ever expressed remorse to the Saaos.

More than a year after the attack, long after the trial, Fauzi Saado’s black eyes flash with a helpless kind of fury when he recounts what happened to his family on Unity Eve or catches sight of the ugly scars his shy daughters will have forever. But even that is not the worst. This is what haunts Fauzi Saado most about that awful night, more than the crackle of fire, more than the anguished screams: the sight of his German neighbors turning their backs and simply walking away as his children lay crying in the street.

DESPITE A CONSTITUTION THAT OUTLAWS NAZISM AND ALL ITS SYMBOLS, DESPITE the society’s acknowledgment of collective guilt and despite constant reminders of the horrors of the Third Reich, right-wing extremism has never been successfully eradicated from the German body politic. Until the Iron Curtain and the Berlin Wall were torn apart piece by piece, however, the ugliest extremes were sporadic, more a low-grade fever than a deadly infection. Jewish cemeteries and Holocaust memorials occasionally were desecrated, foreign “guest workers” were harassed, and every year in West Germany on Hitler’s birthday, small bands of the devoted staged demonstrations.

But starting in 1991, the violence became more widespread and more brutal. In 1990, the year leading up to formal unification, some 375 acts of violence by right-wing extremists were recorded by the Office for Protection of the Constitution, the domestic intelligence agency. (Violence, by official definition, means arson, assault or bodily harm and property damage.) In 1991, the number of right-wing violent acts rose to 1,483, with three people killed. In 1992, 2,285 incidents occurred, with 17 deaths. Seven of the victims were foreigners and another 10 were Germans who fell into some other category deemed offensive by the rightists--homosexuals, derelicts, left-wing extremists. Authorities say there is no evidence of organized cells of rightists planning and executing these attacks; the violence is usually spontaneous, fueled by alcohol and carried out by a handful of youths--most of whom have adopted the trappings of the skinhead style along with an anti-foreigner sentiment.

The rise in violence has matched an undisputed increase in national angst . The euphoria of freeing East Germany from its Communist shackles evaporated quickly, to be replaced by uncertainty, resentment and bitter reality. The costs of rebuilding the decrepit east are staggering--estimates run as high as $610 billion--and this normally prosperous nation of 80 million is now coping with increasing unemployment--7% in western Germany, 14% in the east--and a worrisome recession. At the same time, Germany is also grappling with what everyday Germans refer to as the “asylum question” and what the extreme right describes as the “foreigner problem.”

An extremely liberal political asylum law was part of West Germany’s penance for the sins of the Third Reich. As Nazi hunter Serge Klarsfeld explained recently in the pages of the weekly news magazine Der Spiegel, “When you have burned 12,000 Gypsies in a single night at Auschwitz, then you can indeed pay the price of asylum, even if the Gypsies perhaps don’t pass for clean or annoy you with their noise.”

Germany allows no immigration, but anyone entering the country who asks for asylum--protection from political and religious persecution--is entitled to food, shelter and due process, no matter how obviously fraudulent his or her claim. Donald Trump could flash his U.S. passport and be taken in. “Nowhere else in the world is asylum an individual right,” says Ministry of the Interior spokesman Roland Bachmeier. Other nations offer asylum in accordance with the Geneva Convention. They set up broad criteria that asylum seekers must meet before they can be considered for resettlement. Germany’s criterion is simply political persecution in one’s homeland, but Germany judges every applicant’s situation individually, case by case, and it can take years before all avenues of appeal are exhausted. In the meantime, each asylum seeker costs the government an estimated 15,000 marks--roughly $9,000--annually, which includes the cost of the legal process plus housing, food, clothing and medical expenses, since they are not allowed to work in Germany. The government says that only 5% will ultimately qualify for asylum.

The torrent of asylum seekers hit a record high last year with about 438,000 entering Germany, and the number could approach 1 million this year. Yugoslavs, Romanians and Bulgarians have flooded across Germany’s nine frontiers. Refugees come from as far away as Africa and Asia or, in the case of the Saados, the Middle East. When word spread that some German towns were offering their asylum seekers cash in lieu of vouchers for food and shelter, caravans of Gypsies began descending on even the most obscure communities. (When the handouts stopped, the caravans left.) States have resorted to filling school gymnasiums with foreigners or housing them in anchored ships, army barracks or tents. Even the Oktoberfest grounds in Munich became a refugee tent city.

The volatile combination of right-wing sentiment, economic woes, unification angst and legions of needy asylum seekers reached a flash point in the east German town of Hoyerswerda, outside Dresden. In September, 1991, skinheads stormed a building where asylum seekers were housed. Hundreds of spectators, mostly neighbors, applauded, then joined in, throwing stones at police who tried to protect the terrified foreigners. The riot simmered for five days, until the state of Saxony decided to move the foreigners to another town.

While most Germans saw Hoyerswerda as a humiliating display of rabid xenophobia, for right-wing militants, it was a clear victory: The town was foreigner-free. Emboldened by the unabashed support they found in Hoyerswerda and by small gains by right-wing parties in state elections that year, the militants seemed to interpret their success as a popular mandate. If the Bonn government wouldn’t do anything about the “foreigner problem,” they would. Eleven days later, the Saados’ apartment went up in flames.

SVEN KAYSER CONSIDERS A WEEKEND WITHOUT VIOLENCE A DISAPPOINTMENT, a complete waste, “unless I do something else fun, like get drunk or get laid.” He is 16, a skinhead who has let his blond hair grow in a bit, and he is full of snickering bravado, eager like any teen-ager to prove how cool he is. Sven and his buddies stomp through the narrow streets of their east German village, Erkner, about 45 minutes outside of Berlin, hunting for foreigners to beat up. Finding victims is never hard. There is refugee housing in a neighboring town, and Sven figures any Romanian or Yugoslav or Turk venturing outside those gates is fair game.

“I got robbed at knifepoint by a bunch of Turks,” he claims, perhaps by way of justification. It happened, he says, when he lived in Berlin, in a poor, predominantly Turkish neighborhood that in the old days bordered the western face of the Wall. “They took my leather bomber jacket. It happened twice. It was about three years ago. I got off the subway, and five guys jumped me. The subway, ha! You can’t even go through the train station anymore without seeing some Gypsy shitting in the corner. We pay taxes to support them. They crap on the grass and screw in public. I’ve seen Gypsies driving Mercedes.”

Sven’s father is “maybe” right-leaning, and his mother is apolitical. Her brother married a Turkish woman. Sven acts matter-of-fact about this, but he later admits that he can’t say for sure whether or not he’d feel sorry if a skinhead attacked his aunt. He shrugs. To him, it’s not a question worth pondering.

Sitting in a restaurant in Erkner, his pale face lights up when he talks about his grandfather, who was a Nazi in occupied France. “I’m proud of him,” the boy declares. “He’s 86 years old. He’s proud to be German. That’s what being right-wing is. Being proud to be German.”

Today in Germany, hatred has a disturbingly young face. Authorities estimate that there are 42,500 right-wing extremists activ in the country. They include members of several neo-Nazi parties and a much larger group that has no formal political agenda but is virulently prejudiced against foreigners and anyone considered less than an exemplary German. Those extremists considered dangerous number about 6,500, and more than 70% of them are teen-agers, most of whom have adopted the trappings of skinhead style along with right-wing attitudes. Some skinheads are as young as 13--”Babyskins,” says Hans-Gerd Lange, spokesman for the Office for the Protection of the Constitution. “That name’s deceptively cute,” he adds. “In fact, they’re incredibly brutal.”

Sven’s buddy Thomas Wiegmann, 18, is a handsome cross between James Dean and Tom Cruise. Thomas got into the scene a couple of years ago when he met some west Berlin skinheads at a soccer match. Soccer matches are a good place to get drunk and rowdy, a preliminary to patrolling train stations and subway stops looking for foreigners to attack. Vietnamese guest workers brought over by the defunct East German regime are a favorite target. The Vietnamese, fearful of being deported, are especially reluctant to report assaults.

Thomas is not stupid, but he seems genuinely perplexed when asked why he is so eager to hurt people. “We go to soccer matches for fun, and hunting slopes is fun,” he replies. Just last weekend, he says, he and Sven were at a disco when some men from the nearby refugee hostel walked in.

“Gypsies,” Sven sneers. “Somebody said one of them had stolen a glass, so we all just jumped them.” He can hardly get the words out between guffaws. “It turned out there was no glass,” he snorts. “They hadn’t stolen anything!”

“But it was fun anyway,” Thomas chimes in. “There were five of them and 30 of us, at least. Only about 10 of us were actually rightists; the rest just joined in.”

Thomas has been thinking about joining an organized neo-Nazi party. “There were good things about the Third Reich,” he argues.

“Every German had work,” offers Sven, who lost his own carpentry job after beating up a Turkish co-worker who called him a Nazi pig. Thomas used to work in construction, but he quit “for personal reasons. It was too stressful. The bus took too long to get there.”

Both Sven and Thomas believe the violence in Germany is going to get even worse, that there will be more riots and firebombings and murders. The prospect excites them. “If it solves the foreigner problem,” says Thomas firmly, “I’m for violence 100%.”

There is no typical profile of a violent skinhead or neo-Nazi. They may be the sons of Hitler-worshiping factory workers or socialist college professors. Social workers, psychologists, teachers and police know only that right-wing crimes will probably be committed by teen-agers, overwhelmingly by boys, and often by those whose parents are alcoholic, emotionally or physically abusive or too overwhelmed by their own problems to pay much attention to their kids. The peer group becomes an ersatz family.

“With skins and right-wing militants, there’s a very strong camaraderie,” says Wolfgang Zirk, head of the Berlin police task force on violent youth. “They would share their last nickel with each other.”

Per capita, the violence is more rampant in the formerly communist east, whose downtrodden inhabitants often complain of being treated like second-class citizens by west Germans. “It’s a search for recognition, for someone weaker,” Zirk says. The path leads straight to asylum seekers. And such contempt is reinforced by a fear that the foreigners will take something away from “real” Germans, like jobs or housing. And while the Holocaust all but decimated Germany’s Jewish population, those who remain fear a repeat of history.

The relationship between hatred and self-identity is captured in a sick little ditty social workers overheard in Hamburg. In a singsong voice, an 8-year-old chanted a German rhyme that translates like this: I like skinheads and French fries Jews in Auschwitz Dead Turks on the lawn But most of all, I like myself!

Unlike many of his “comrades” in Erkner, Olaf Waldmann can explain in calm, rational tones the reasons behind his beliefs and behavior. It is not Hitler he considers a hero (“He lost the war, and at some point, he went crazy”) but another infamous Nazi, Gen. Field Marshall Erwin Rommel, the “Desert Fox,” whose African campaigns Olaf regards as a glorious time in German history. Glory is important to Olaf, and Germany’s loss of glory is like a national loss of identity. “I am proud to be German,” he says repeatedly, knowing that patriotism in his country is considered shameful, that expressing it is the ultimate defiance for the postwar babies baptized in collective guilt.

Olaf grew up in East Germany and enthusiastically bought into the communist system, becoming a leader in the party youth organizations. His father was a major in the East German army, and Olaf developed a deep admiration for anything military. When his ninth-grade class read a novel about World War II, the teacher asked the children to name their favorite character. Everyone else voted for the communist resistance fighter. Olaf didn’t hesitate when his turn came. “The Nazi,” he said.

His parents were duly informed, but parents often seem blind to the obvious, convincing themselves it’s just a teen-age fad when their sons come home with shaved heads, jackboots and underground cassettes of racist neo-Nazi music. “I tried to talk to my father, but it was a short discussion,” says Olaf, now a strapping 20-year-old bodybuilder. “He told me to do my own thing.”

When he was 16, he cut off most of his hair, leaving only a short thatch on top. “I got no reaction at home,” he says, sipping coffee at an Erkner youth center. “That was the worst part--no reaction, no talk with my father. I had really expected a discussion. I wanted him to say it was OK. I wanted him to at least show interest in where my life was going and what direction I was headed. I really wanted to tell him what I believed and why.”

He shaved off the rest of his hair and read a copy of “Mein Kampf”; the book is banned in Germany, so he had to buy it on the black market for nearly $150. With the fall of the Berlin Wall, he openly hooked up with a band of three or four other skinheads and began hunting down foreigners. One brawl at a public pool led to a still-pending assault charge.

Olaf has a girlfriend now and claims to be less interested in the drunken violence that used to rule his life, though he says he wouldn’t hesitate to fight if provoked. It will probably be 18 months before the assault case goes to court, and Olaf is not really worried. He knows he can’t be charged as an adult until he’s 21, and juveniles often get off easy.

His history, his tattoos and his bruiser physique all fit the extremist stereotype, but Olaf is much more thoughtful than the average violent skinhead. When his nationalistic logic is challenged, he easily concedes a point or two and seems to tuck the questions away to ponder more closely later. He seems almost embarrassed to admit that “some of my comrades would call me an asshole, but I think we should have asylum for people who genuinely are politically persecuted or are fleeing a war.”

In fact, being a skinhead to Olaf is more an expression of self-identity than hatred of others. “Before, I was proud to be German but I didn’t know how to formulate it. It’s considered bad under any circumstance to say ‘I’m proud to be German.’ If I wear a patch saying that on my jacket, I’m called a Nazi pig,” he complains. “There is no longer such a thing. Nazism is over. Today is another era. It’s so annoying to always pin ‘Germany for Germans’ on that time, and not on today and what is happening today.

“I’m against denying the past. Saying Auschwitz was a lie is utter nonsense. Every country has its dark past--look at America with its slavery. But it’s always the big, bad Germans and the Nazis,” he says.

“Germany has had so much shame that it no longer comes from within. It’s notgenuine. We only say it to shut up the rest of the world. Most of those who had anything to do with the Holocaust are dead. Sure, it should be discussed, and not forgotten.

“But don’t pass the guilt onto your children 10 generations later.”

THE ATTACK ON THE SAADOS TURNED OUT TO BE A MERE PRELUDE TO THE right-wing violence that still bedevils Germany.

Last summer, the staging ground was the east German Baltic port city of Rostock. For a week, skinheads and neo-Nazis rioted in front of a refugee processing center, where about 200 Gypsies awaiting housing assignments were camped on the lawn. Residents in the neighborhood clapped and cheered as youths hurled firebombs and paving stones. The police--easterners who had no experience with mob violence--initially stood by and watched, later claiming they were ill-equipped, insufficiently trained and simply overwhelmed. Critics suspected that they were sympathetic to the right-wing extremists.

Olaf Waldmann saw the rioting on TV. It gave him a real rush. It was as if all those clapping strangers might provide him with the validation his father never did. He made the pilgrimage north. “I thought it was somehow a way to change something,” Olaf says. But again he was disappointed. What he found there wasn’t a right-wing revolution at all; it was just a riot. He threw his share of Molotov cocktails in Rostock, but now Olaf wonders aloud if “maybe we should have thrown them at the Bonn government, instead.”

Rostock triggered a fresh explosion of racist and ethnic attacks, and last September proved to be the worst month yet, with more than 500 separate incidents--beatings, stabbings, rapes, arson. The grisly accounts became as routine as the weather reports on the nightly news.

And more and more often, it seemed, everyday Germans were coming out to cheer. They may have been a minority, but there was no public or official outcry to drown the shameful applause. Government officials privately complained that the foreign media were hyping the whole story, making it sound like the rise of the Fourth Reich.

When 15,000 leftist radicals mustered an anti-fascist counterdemonstration in Rostock during the riots, thousands of police reinforcements from the west were sent to shut down the autobahn and search every car heading toward Rostock. Many of the anarchists and rainbow-haired punks irately pointed out that a similar interest in right-wing militants might have prevented the violence in the first place.

By last fall, a full year after the attack on the Saado family, the German government remained paralyzed. The human-rights group Helsinki Watch issued a report lambasting Bonn for its failure to act and summoning the specter of the Third Reich. But Chancellor Helmut Kohl made no move. He didn’t so much as visit terrorized refugees or join the German citizens who kept vigil outside foreigner housing, serving as a human buffer zone between the extremists and their prey. He was more inclined to speak out about the inadequacies of the asylum law.

Finally, on Nov. 8, the eve of the anniversary that marks both the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Kristallnacht Nazi rampages in 1938, the government organized a rally to protest the wave of attacks against foreigners. Kohl and President Richard von Weizsaecker showed up in Berlin, along with more than 300,000 ordinary Germans. In the end, though, it was impotence, not solidarity, that the rally would come to symbolize. Hundreds of leftist youths, chanting “Hypocrite! Hypocrite,” pelted Von Weizsaecker with eggs, fruit and rocks throughout his speech. Police force was once again turned on those who had come to protest the right-wing violence.

On Nov. 23, the news carried a report about yet another racist attack. Neo-Nazi skinheads had hurled Molotov cocktails into an apartment house. This time the foreigners were Turkish, and most of them had lived in the northern town of Molln, as guest workers, for a generation. A 51-year-old woman and two little girls, ages 10 and 14, were killed. Nine others were injured, including a 9-month-old baby.

The Molln murders finally roused the silent majority and pushed the Bonn government to take substantive action. Within days, the federal government banned a pair of virulent neo-Nazi parties and arrested two leaders for fomenting racial hatred. An emergency task force was formed to coordinate the fight against right-wing extremism. Police in several cities raided “Nazi nests” and took dozens of youths into custody. Weapons, from lead-filled pipes to pistols, were seized. Kohl, his image at home and abroad badly bruised, condemned the racial hatred in a speech that underscored how Germany’s prosperity had been possible only because of the contributions of foreign workers.

More than 1 million Germans took to the streets to show solidarity with the foreigners. In Munich, an astonishing 400,000 people marched through the city in a candlelight vigil. Celebrities appeared in televised public-service announcements against racial and ethnic hatred, and cities sponsored rock concerts, lectures and public rallies to promote the same message. All 18 teams in the German soccer league wore jerseys bearing the slogan, “My friend is a foreigner.”

A 15-year-old Hamburg boy was among the thousands who turned out for a demonstration in Molln. Christian, who asked that his last name not be used, had become a skinhead at 13. He dropped out of the scene after getting beaten up by a Turkish boy. “I was in bad shape, spitting up blood. My mother told me I had it coming and took me to the emergency room,” Christian said.

Now he considers himself a leftist and proudly wears an anti-Nazi patch on his jacket sleeve. “I went to the Molln demo and it made me do a lot of thinking,” he says. “It was so inhumane, to burn people to death or beat them just because of their nationality. Why? How did we get to this point? I never felt sympathy when I was beating them up myself. They weren’t human beings, they were foreigners.”

He still thinks about the grandmother and two little girls who died in Molln. Two neo-Nazis were arrested and reportedly confessed to the crime. After setting the house ablaze, one of them allegedly telephoned the police and gave the address, shouting “Heil Hitler!” before hanging up.

“At times like this,” admits Christian, “I’m ashamed to be German. It’s sad to be born in the same land as such people.”

THE MASSIVE PUBLIC DEMONSTRATIONS, THE GOVERNMENT CRACKDOWN AND cold winter weather all have contributed to a lull in the violence for now. From more than 100 attacks in December, the number dropped to half that in January. But authorities warn against a false sense of security. It’s always been cyclical. The fever will spike again.

Efforts to change the constitution and toughen the asylum law are bogged down in the Bundestag, or lower house of parliament. No one can agree on what limits should be set or how they should be applied to asylum seekers already in the country. No one is eager to conjure ghosts of the Holocaust with mass deportations from Germany. Even if a new law is agreed upon by spring, court challenges and the existing backlog guarantee that the asylum problem is a long way from being resolved.

In 1992, the Saados’ application for asylum was finally rejected, but the family was granted temporary residency on humanitarian grounds. They have moved to a pleasant two-bedroom apartment in a different town, but Fauzi worries that new asylum laws could still result in his family’s deportation. “The worst thing is that I really wanted to leave after this, but now we can’t,” he says. “We’d like to go back to Beirut, but it’s impossible now because I don’t know if Zeinab and Mokadas could get the medical care they need, and even if it were available in Lebanon, I could never afford it. At least it’s free here.”

Zeinab and Mokadas spent more than two months in the hospital and endured excruciating pain. It took four months of intensive therapy before Zeinab could walk again. Thick, mottled scar tissue covers her buttocks and hips, her right shoulder and uppr arm. Her feet are deformed, and her lower legs are little more than scar tissue wrapped grotesquely around bone. Her face was spared, but there’s a bald patch the size of a fist where the back of her scalp was burned. Her sister Mokadas also bears scars on her arms and legs, but plastic surgery has done a remarkable job of concealing the deep burn over her brow.

Zeinab’s and Mokadas’ psychological wounds also run deep. Zeinab is still terrified of the dark. In the hospital, her nurses took turns staying with her till morning. It was a kindness that reminds Fauzi Saado that there are good Germans, too.

Now Zeinab is well enough to attend school most days. She has undergone nine operations, and doctors say she will need regular surgery until she is grown. Two recent operations to straighten her twisted toes may make her limp less severe. She is the only foreigner in her second-grade class, but like all the Saado children, German has become her main language, and she has made many friends. Her scars have made her something of a tragic celebrity.

When Zeinab speaks, her voice is a raw, scraping rasp. “Her throat and esophagus were damaged by the smoke,” her father explains, “so it hurts her to talk. The doctors say her voice will come back, but she has to let it rest and talk as little as possible.”

Zeinab’s dark eyes gaze down at her bandaged legs when she is asked to remember the night of the attack. “I’ll never forget it,” she whispers in flawless German. “I dream it every day.”

Fauzi Saado never hesitates to tell the tale of Oct. 2. “Justice wasn’t done,” he declares. “If the opposite had happened, and a foreigner had attacked a German family this way, they’d get 30 years.” And he has never hidden the truth from the children. He told them some people hate foreigners, and he took them to the trial. They know to cross the street, to hurry away, if they see skinheads.

It took six weeks before Zeinab could even recognize her own parents after the attack. When she could speak, she asked her father, “Why? Why did they do this, Daddy?”

And this is where Fauzi’s eloquence deserts him. He wonders why himself, as he lies in his bed at night unable to sleep, waiting and listening in the darkness for the shattering of glass and the roar of flames and the screams of his children.