Echoes on a Good Day
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I love the perkiness of “Mimi,” the optimism and energy of those 4 letters bouncing around without the weight of the past, the Jewish past of Miriam to drag me down. I’m reinvented as Mimi, set loose to define myself, unshackled….
It was part of a nonfiction workshop I gave (four times to twenty people each) on factual and emotional truths, and I’ve used this passage often in the States as a prompt to get others writing. But never has anyone, let alone three people, come up to tell me how brave I am. We are Jewish, they whispered, but would never be so public about it. Not in Geneva. Or Paris. Or Zugg. Their emotional truths as European Jews were clearly not what I, an American (who isn’t particularly brave), imagined when I announced who I was.
Ten days later, I am at the opening of an exhibition called Ort der Zuflucht und Verheissung (Place of Refuge and Promise) in a little German village at the edge of the Black Forest, where my father was born in 1898. And where, in 1938, a group of Jews fled Hitler together to start a new village in Palestine. The exhibition is meant to tell their story —and of the effort to reconnect with them through a bridge of goodwill that was destroyed seventy years ago. In fact today’s opening is on the exact date, February 10th , when the group left to resettle on 600 dunams of land north of the Crusader town of Acco, bought from a Turkish prince with big gambling debts.
Filled with photographs, video interviews, and narratives about former Jewish neighbors, the exhibition is set up in the old synagogue that is now the Protestant Evangelical Church. I expected to see maybe sixty people, but over four hundred have come from all over the region for this day of ceremonies.
The local church choir sings Hatikvah. Three German politicians speak. A rabbi from Stuttgart speaks (there are no Jews in the village now). A professional actor reads from a diary about the early hardships in the new village. I speak, representing America, and because I wrote a book about the villagers. An Israeli speaks, representing the twenty-five who came here from Israel: the children and grandchildren of those who left in 1938.
More moving than the official ceremony is what happens in the Jewish cemetery tucked into the woods above the village. Surrounded by a thousand old graves, 1645-1942, forty of us, Jews and Christians, stand together before the stone memorial built for “Those who died during the Nazi persecution, 1932-1942.”
I have been in these woods many times before—always struck by the silence that moves between the graves, floating up through the trees and over the village. But today there is singing: the Hatikvah again; then a modern, Hebrew song full of sadness and hope; then the Kaddish. Today there are stones of remembrance on many gravestones visited for the first time in years. And stones piled high on the memorial to the eighty-seven village Jews who did not escape the Nazis. And stones for each of the murdered, their names painted two years ago by those in the village who needed more than anonymous Jews to remember.
The paint is fading, but the voices echo through the trees. They bear witness that Jews survived in the new village in what became a new country: Israel. One of the original village pioneers, the only one still strong enough to return to his former homeland, told one of the German organizers, “So few are giving a helping hand to us today. We are grateful for yours, reaching out to ours.” And their hands clasped each other.
I couldn’t help thinking about this man’s cousin, whom I had interviewed in Israel before he died. He’d told me, “Everyone knew we had escaped hell and so a great hope lay ahead…. In Germany everything was take away: our swords and guns and civil rights. Here we at least could defend ourselves.” He had been the last Jew to have a bar mitzvah in the village before he left on a Kindertransport through Europe to Haifa. His grandparents didn’t make it, their names painted on the stones.
Today his cousin is singing, as am I, deep in the woods on a day of reconciliation that is good, worth celebrating—even in a village that has no Jews, in a Europe where I am called brave, in a world with the state of Israel, without which there could be reconnection on a good day like this.
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