My Story
This is the letter I received a few days ago from a friend of 15 years who saw this website and read some of my contributions and those of other people:
"I am very much appalled at your obsession with Israel. You ignore the crimes of Hamas and other Palestinian terrorist groups who have continually attacked Israeli citizens and blame Israel. Israel was given by the world powers as retribution for the Holocaust carried out by the German Nazis. I cannot abide the spreading of your poisonous ideas. I think your views are nothing but your latent anti-semitism coming to consciousness and I abhore it. I cannot be your friend anymore."
Here is my story:
Witnessing, as a 12-year old child, American troops liberating a Concentration Camp and seeing the emaciated inmates in striped prison uniforms stream out of the gates, was the defining event of my life. It ended my childhood. I had started the day as a fully indoctrinated Nazi child, drilled in school and twice-weekly Hitler Youth meetings. I even became a leader of a small group of girls. We were required to chant slogans in unison, such as: “I am nothing – my people are everything!” or “Fuehrer, command us – we will obey you!”, and we saluted often. I had taken in the ideology like any indoctrinated child, no matter what ideology. That is why I, who had never met a Jew in person, hated all Jews with a vengeance. And I hated and despised with the same intensity Russians, Poles, blacks, retarded people, handicapped people - inferior or worthless life, as they were called. I understand what indoctrination does, whether is it by Nazis or Zionists. Ignorance and indoctrination produce fanaticism and a closed mind.
But that afternoon I was standing at the front door, shaking, crying, looking at the endless stream of pitiful humanity, of men hardly able to walk yet supporting others even sicker - dehumanized men who still had the compassion to care about others. What I had considered inferior and worthless life before, I saw now as suffering, broken-down human beings capable of more decency and kindness than anybody I knew, and I swore that, in the future, I would never, ever believe anything anybody told me without checking it out first, that I would never, ever follow any doctrine, political or religious, without making sure that it was based on Truth, and that I would never, ever follow any man without the most critical analysis of his character and message. The Holocaust, the defining event in my own life, extends my concerns to all suppressed and oppressed minorities and therefore also to the fate of the Palestinians. The horrors of such mass brutality must never again happen to Jews, but they must also not happen to people of any other religious, racial, ethnic or national origin. The roots of conflict demand attention.
Starting from this conviction and my later personal experiences in Israel, on a Kibbutz, as a Volunteer for Israel on an Israeli army base cleaning Uzi guns, hitchhiking through the country and immersing myself in its history, culture and people, I moved into awareness of the deeper political realities of the Palestinian question and into the burning need to know why the children of the Holocaust, who had suffered the depth of despair and cruelty themselves, would treat another people with such colonial disregard and lack of compassion.
For many years I carried the burden of the Holocaust on my shoulders, until, on one of my trips to Israel and Palestine, I was sitting at a café in the Old City of Jerusalem and overheard a group of Israelis and Americans, obviously Jews, at the next table speak about Arabs. One of them said: “One should line them all up against the wall and mow them down with submachine guns!” I sat there, ice cold and shaken, and finally got up, went over to their table, identified myself as German and pointed out that my people had actually done to Jews what they were proposing to do to Arabs, and did they really mean it? There was a deep silence, and finally one of them apologized and said he had not been thinking and he was sorry. It was only then that I realized that evil lurks in the souls of people of all nations and religions, and I was finally able to let go of the burden of my guilt. That burden was replaced by the knowledge of sharing in a larger, more universal truth, namely a responsibility for all humanity.