2010-01-10: Sonnstag in Deutschland

It seems odd to be writing a little something about Chiune Sugihara while working here in Germany, and about whom I just learned in reading the second of the two Hark! A Vagrant!comics on this page. “Japan’s Schindler” went unnoticed and unsung back in his native Japan, after having risked his career (and possibly his life) to save anywhere from 6,000 to 10,000 Jews by granting them transit visas as a vice-consul in Lithuania.

Had I known to look for the monument in his honor in Vilnius, and the other one in Little Tokyo in Los Angeles, I would have done so.

Sugihara puts me in mind of Hamburg’s golden paving stones (Stolperstein), sprinkled here and there in the sidewalks (usually in front of apartment buildings), and inscribed with the names and fates of the deported Jews who had lived in those places. Some apartment buildings were torn down, of course, and stores and markets put up in the spaces, but the paving stones remain, seemingly unnoticed by the hundreds of customers and passers-by.

I tried to notice.

I have not noticed any comparable tiles or stones or plaques in Heidelberg, though thousands of Jews were deported from here, and two synagogues were burned during the infamous Kristallnacht. 

During one of my stays here, my landlady showed me a book of their family’s genealogy, including a photo of an ancestor in a Wehrmacht officer’s uniform. I did not ask her where he had been stationed nor what his duties had been. I am told that the rising generation in particular is taught and re-taught all about the atrocities of the Nazi era in public school, supposedly to the point of being thoroughly bored and sick to death of it all. I have to wonder about that; on the other hand, I do not recall having the greatest sins of America’s past (e.g., slavery, genocide of indigenous peoples) taught and re-taught when I was in school — but granted, I was in school rather a long time back and talking about such things, or feeling it appropriate to do so in public school, was only beginning to catch on.

Do German kids say, “Yeah, yeah, the Nazis, yeah, yeah, they were bad, they did horrible things, but that was a long time ago’? My landlords’ grown (and almost-grown) kids say yes. To which I have to reply (at least in my mind): maybe they’re not teaching the Holocaust in the right way.

I remember when Ingrid’s dad came to our seminary class to talk to us about what it was like to be part of the Hitler Youth and then conscripted into the army in his mid-teens in the waning days of the Third Reich. I remember the German army vet who was missing an arm and with whom I regularly played ping-pong at Skipper Steimle’s Pine View Lodge near Lake Arrowhead, CA. He was a good player, that one, with just a flap of his deltoid muscle remaining that would flex as he played. I never asked him how he lost his arm; I assume now as then that he lost it in the war. And I remember meeting a few Jewish survivors of the concentration camps, including some who had numbers (badly) tattooed on their forearms. Most of the camp survivors are now dead, and most of those who were part of the Nazi war machine (willingly or unwillingly) are dead as well.

It is too much to say that we as a species haven’t learned anything from the Holocaust, but given the continued slaughter of innocents in so many countries, the prolonged episodes of ethnic cleansing in many parts of the world, the best I can proffer is that perhaps things would have been worse without at least some people having taken to heart the horrors that Hitler unleashed on such a massive scale such a relatively short time ago. That is cold comfort, however, and as the world’s population continues to grow unabated, and as water and food shortages loom on an increasingly closer horizon, we may yet experience things even worse than those suffered by the targets of Hitler’s paranoia and wrath.

God forbid.