CHAPTER 9
“Everybody Knew.” “Nobody Knew.”
When people you don’t know, people in whom you have no interest, people whose affairs you have never discussed, move away from your community, you don’t notice that they are going or that they are gone. When, in addition, public opinion (and the government itself) has depreciated them, it is still likelier that you won’t notice their departure or, if you do, that you will forget about it. How many of us whites, in a white neighborhood, are interested in the destination of a Negro neighbor whom we know only by sight and who has moved away? Perhaps he has been forced to move; at least the possibility occurs to us, and, if we are particularly sensitive, and we feel that perhaps a wrong has been done that we can’t rectify, it is comforting to hear that the Negro was also a Communist or that he will be happier wherever he’s gone, “with his own people,” and was even paid a handsome bonus for moving.
Four of my ten Nazi friends—the tailor and his son, the baker, and the bill-collecter—said that the only Jews taken to Kah-Zed, concentration camp, were traitors; the rest were allowed to leave with their property, and, when they had to sell their businesses, “the courts” or “the finance office” paid them the market value. “I’ve heard that the Jews who left late could only take fifty or a hundred Marks with them,” I said to the tailor, who was talking about “the courts.” “I don’t know about that,” he said. “How should I know about that?” He had “known,” a moment before, about “the courts,” but I didn’t remind him. “I’ve heard,” I said to Herr Simon, the bill-collector, who was talking about “the finance office,” “that they could only take part of their property with them.” “Well, why not?” said Herr Simon. “If they wanted to leave, the State had a right to a share. After all, they had made their money here.”
The fact is, I think, that my friends really didn’t know. They didn’t know because they didn’t want to know; but they didn’t know. They could have found out, at the time, only if they had wanted to very badly. Who wanted to? We whites—when the Negro moves away—do we want to find out why or where or with what he moved? The teacher, the student, the cabinetmaker, and the bank clerk, these four at least, suspected the truth of the “market value” myth, and the policeman, to whom you or I would intrust our goods and our chattels without hesitation after five minutes of talk, spoke with contempt of the “weisse Juden,” the “white Jews,” the hawks who fell upon the property that the Jews had to sell in a hurry. Four of my friends suspected the truth, at the time; what should they have done?
“What would you have done, Herr Professor?” Remember: the teacher excepted, nine of my ten friends didn’t know any Jews and didn’t care what happened to them—all this before Nazism. And it was their government, now, which was carrying on this program under law. Merely to inquire meant to attack the government’s justice. It meant risk, large or small, political or social, and it meant risk in behalf of people one didn’t like anyway. Who but an ardent Christian, of the sort that takes Matthew 5 seriously, would undertake the risk of inquiring; who, if injustice were to be discovered by inquiry, would undertake the penalty of protesting? I am sorry to say that none of my friends was that ardent a Christian.
But Cabinetmaker Klingelhöfer, he who remained a vestryman of the church throughout Nazism, was as ardent a Christian as most vestrymen I have met, and his idea of relaxation, during our conversations, was to turn to religious questions. “I know it’s not what you’re interested in, Herr Professor, but I’d like your views.” One day, by way of relaxation, we went through Matthew 24 together. (I didn’t say that I was interested or that I wasn’t, but I did say that reading aloud with a German friend improved my German. ) I read, from the ninth through the thirteenth verses, to improve my German:
“Then shall they deliver you up to be afflicted, and shall kill you: and ye shall be hated of all nations for my sake.
“And then shall many be offended, and shall betray one another.
“And many false prophets shall rise, and shall deceive many.
“And because iniquity shall abound, the love of many shall wax cold.
“But he that shall endure unto the end, the same shall be saved.”
I stopped, looked up, and then looked at Herr Klingelhöfer. His head—this was my ebullient friend, “My life for the Volunteer Fire Department!”—was lowered. I waited. He said, without looking up:
“Das ist schwer, Herr Professor. Das ist kolossal schwer. That’s hard. That’s terribly hard.”
And it is hard. It is said to be hard to be a Christian—or even to want to be—under the most propitious of conditions. The conditions in Nazi Germany were not the most propitious. Just consider:
Jews, because they were in such high proportion in the “free professions,” tended to be the people one owed money to for goods or services already delivered, for merchandise, say, or for medical care. Now I, in America, cannot well pay my doctor’s bill. My doctor is a nice fellow, but his bills, however low they may be, are too high; I didn’t want to be sick in the first place, and, now that I’m well, I wish I hadn’t had to buy the medical care I no longer need. I wish my doctor well, believe me, and my dentist and my merchant and my lawyer and the jeweler who repaired my watch; if any of them are Jews, I still wish them well, because I am not anti-Semitic. (Remember, my Nazi friends were.)
Now let us imagine that the Jews are emigrating from America, as fast as they can. They liquidate their assets, at whatever loss, and collect such debts as are collectable in a week or a month. Small debts they don’t bother with. They may send out a bill with the word “Please” written on it; but I can’t pay it, not this month. What I can’t avoid wondering is whether my Jewish dentist or doctor or shopkeeper is thinking of emigrating, winding up his affairs, closing his office or shop, selling out (I may still have to pay my debt some day, if he is able to sell his uncollected bills), taking his whole family with him, losing his citizenship and his power to pursue me with his bills. Of course, I’m a nice fellow, too, so I say, “I’ll pay when I can.”
But I won’t. I won’t have to. And I know I won’t have to, although in my waking, honorable hours I may not know that I know I won’t have to. But—oh, if that doctor and his bills, that dentist and his bills, only didn’t exist. A Jewish physician in Kronenberg emigrated in 1936. I was able to talk to him after I got back to America, and, when I had asked him what decided his course in 1936 and he had given me the usual good reasons, he added: “I remember the very occasion which fixed my decision. I was in the public telephone room at the Frankfurt railroad station, and I heard the man in the next booth say, ‘Don’t pay him. Just don’t pay him. Don’t argue with him. Don’t call him names. Don’t waste your breath. Be polite. But don’t pay him. Mark my words—in another six months or a year you won’t have to pay at all. Hold him off.’ It was something like that. ‘Jew’ wasn’t mentioned; I don’t know who the man was or even what he was talking about. But that decided me. It took me three, four months, to get a sponsor in America and get everything together. I sent bills out. Some were paid, some in full, some in part. I collected more than half of what was owed me; after all, these people had been my patients, and they were decent people. And 1936 was still early. Later, of course, it was different.”
In 1934 I visited a family of remote relatives of mine in a country village outside Hannover. These Jews were small shopkeepers; they had been there for seven centuries, and there were too few of them to constitute a formal Jewish community. There was no anti-Semitism in Eichdorf. (There was no intermarriage, either.) In those first years of Nazism their non-Jewish friends continued to trade with them openly; later, secretly. Little children—it began with little children—who called them names on the street were taken home and spanked. The villagers, except for a few officials and a few young rowdies, simply would not let Nazism have its way, not in Eichdorf.
Nine years later, in 1943, the Jews of Eichdorf were “sent away.” In such a small community they could not be “sent” unnoticed. After the war one of their neighbors was telling about it: “Everybody knew, but nobody came out on the street. Some looked from behind their curtains, not many.”
“Did you?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Why? What good is it to look?”
Kronenberg was, of course, bigger. None of my ten friends ever saw any Jews leave in a group. It wasn’t required that they see. Only Policeman Hofmeister, of the ten, knew of the details of the departure of the Jews, and he only of their departure, not of their destination. And only Herr Hildebrandt, the teacher, ever corresponded with any Jews afterward or knew what had become of them. Everyone knew that Jews were moving away, from 1933 on. All of my ten friends had heard that these Jews or those were going or gone. A Jewish woman came to Herr Wedekind’s bakery to pay her bill and wanted to make sure that there was nothing left owing him. “You’re leaving?” he said. “Yes,” she said. That was all. Three of my friends heard, during the war, that a bus load of Jews had left the Market Place at dawn one day. That was all.
Shortly after the war began, a group of Jews were seen working on the street, laying blocks in the trolley-car track (Jews were now forbidden any but common labor). Hofmeister waved a greeting to some he knew but didn’t talk to them. Cabinetmaker Klingelhöfer spoke to one he knew, a lawyer, who had been a customer of his. “Did you ask him how he happened to be there?” I said.
“No. I knew.”
“How?”
“Everybody knew.”
“How?”
‘Oh—we just knew.”
“What did you say to him?”
“I asked him how he was, and he said, ‘Fine.’ He looked all right.”
“Did you shake hands with him?”
“No…. One doesn’t shake hands with a man who is busy with both hands, nicht wahr?”
“No, not in America, but you Germans always shake hands so much, I thought maybe—. By the way, Herr Klingelhöfer, do you think you were brave to talk with him on the street?”
“Brave? No, not brave. Maybe, a little. No, not really. My loyalty was known.”
Herr Kessler, the unemployed bank clerk risen to Party speaker and department head in the local Labor Front, saw Stein on the Kronenberg platform waiting, as he himself was, for the northbound train. He had known Stein well, in a business way; Stein, to help him out when he was unemployed, had always hired him to audit the books of his dry-goods store. The Jew was an old man. It was—when was it?—early in 1939. “He pretended not to see me. Maybe he thought it would embarrass me, or just that I wouldn’t want to talk to him. That was wrong; I wasn’t a Fanatikei. Finally I went up to him and shook hands and asked him how he was. He said, ‘Fine.’ I couldn’t ask him how his business was, because I knew he had sold out. Then, when the train was coming, I said, ‘Are you going away, Herr Stein?’ Of course he was going away, or he wouldn’t have been waiting for the train, but a man may go away for a day or forever; I didn’t ask that. I said, ‘Are you going away, Herr Stein?’ He said, ‘Yes,’ and then I said, ‘Well, goodbye,’ and held out my hand, but he had already turned away.”
“Did you both get on the train?”
“Yes.”
“Together?”
“No. He got on the nonsmoker end of the car, and I got on the smoker.”
“Did you smoke?”
“No.”
I did not initiate the discussion of the Jews with any of my ten friends. Somewhere between the beginning of the second conversation and the end of the fourth, each of them introduced the subject, and each of them, except Messrs Hildebrandt, Kessler, and Klingelhöfer, reverted to it continually. I would ask Tailor Schwenke, “Did you like the Program, in ’25?” “The Party Program?” he would say. “Yes, it was very good, very. Take the Jewish question, for instance….” (In a subsequent conversation he said he had never seen the Party Program.)
Of the ten men, only the teacher, Hildebrandt, was not anti-Semitic. The policeman, a fine old man, did not want to be; but he was. The student, young Rupprecht, thought he wasn’t anti-Semitic, but in his case I am not at all sure; he was glib. Kessler and Klingelhöfer, the two deepest-feeling of my friends (except Hildebrandt), were the mildest; their anti-Semitism was not at all “racial” and almost entirely economic, “rational.”
Klingelhöfer’s father, from whom the son had taken his trade as cabinetmaker, had told him that Jews were all right: “They were people, like other people, but you couldn’t trust them in money matters, that was all. If you went to a Jew to do business, that was one thing, but if a Jew came to you to do business, that was another.”
“Why do you suppose that was?” I said.
“I don’t know. I don’t know. I remember my father telling me about Moses, whose leather-shop was in the Bahn-hofstrasse. My father did lots of work for him, and they got along fine. Moses only paid his accounts on Sunday mornings and he always paid a ‘round sum,’ no Pfennige. And he always deducted 3 per cent.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. That was his custom, I guess. So my father always arranged his accounts so that the 3 per cent was already in. You may say ‘cheating the cheater,’ but it wasn’t like that, exactly. Moses was a nice man. My father liked him. But my father always said that you couldn’t trust a Jew in money matters. And he was right.”
“Were you ever cheated by a Jew?”
“No, but that was because I was warned and was careful. If you’re careful, you have no trouble with them.”
“Were you careful with Professor Freudenthal?” (Freu-denthal, who committed suicide in 1933, had been a customer of Herr Klingelhöfer’s and had sent him a wedding present, a piano shawl of which my friend was proud.)
“No. With him you didn’t have to be.”
The former bank clerk’s thinking was much larger than the cabinetmaker’s. The Jews had accumulated too much of the country’s economic power; “they should have been reduced economically to their proper proportion in the population.”
“How should that have been done?”
“That’s what I don’t know, but a way should have been found without depriving them of their citizenship or mistreating them.”
“Did they exercise this power badly?”
“In a way. I suppose anybody would, especially if he was looked down on, like the Jews. But it seemed to be very bad with the Jews.”
“Do you mean that they introduced a ‘Jewish spirit’ into economic life? I have heard other National Socialists say that.”
“Well, that was the propaganda, of course, part of the whole ‘race’ thing, but I wouldn’t say that. There is and there isn’t a ‘Jewish spirit,’ but certainly the aggressiveness and competitiveness of some Jews led to abuses—for instance, to pornography in the press, just to sell papers and magazines.”
“‘Of some Jews,’” I said.
“Oh, yes, of some; not all.”
“And of some non-Jews.”
“Of course. That’s why I don’t like to speak of a ‘Jewish spirit.’ But there were so many more Jews than non-Jews in these things, proportionately. That’s what I mean.”
Not one of my ten friends had changed his attitude toward the Jews since the downfall of National Socialism. The five (or six, if young Rupprecht is included) who were extreme anti-Semites were, I believe, not a bit more or less so now than before. What surprised me, indeed, was that, with the war lost and their lives ruined, they were not more so. Certainly Nazism’s defeat by force would not make Nazis love the Jews more; if anything, less. Nor would their country’s destruction. Nor would the three-quarters of a billion dollars their conquerors compelled them to pay, as restitutive damages, to the Jews of Israel. And the five extremists had never seen the inside of the local Amerika-Haus or any other agency of “re-education” and never would.
They, and, to a degree, even the bank clerk, the cabinetmaker, and the policeman, took the greatest pains to convince me that the Jews were as bad as the Nazis said they were. I sat passively, every so often asking a question which betrayed my simple-mindedness, while my friends pressed their argument. If I diverted them, they came back to it. The one passion they seemed to have left was anti-Semitism, the one fire that warmed them still. I thought, as they went on, of the customary analysis: We have to justify our having injured those we have injured, or we have to persuade others to our guilty view in order to implicate them in our guilt. I thought a little, but I didn’t say much. What could I have said?