The Boy in the Striped Pajamas

I am German, and my background is mischtl. I am Jewish enough that I would have gone to a concentration camp as did all my Jewish relatives in Germany at the time, but not Jewish enough to be welcome in any Jewish house of worship. For my entire life, the "true Jews" I've known have almost without exception acted as if they owned all rights of recompense for suffering, that no one but Jews suffered in World War II, and only Jews are worthy of note and anyone else who suffered deserved it. I almost want to stand up and scream that Germans suffered, too. Thank you for these words of wisdom. Yes, the liberation of one is the liberation of all.

0"not Jewish enough to be welcome in any Jewish house of worship. "

I feel sure that the Reform Synagogues would have welcomed you.

"the "true Jews" I've known have almost without exception acted as if they owned all rights of recompense...I almost want to stand up and scream that Germans suffered, too."

Germans suffered because of The War - a war perpetrated by a regime that enjoyed their overwhelming vocal and material support. Jews suffered because they were the primary objects of hatred in the ideology of the same regime.

I can't help but notice a current fashion in thinking current among Germans today: that all actions are equal, regardless of context. Yes, a German Jew killed in a gas chamber was just as dead as a German non-Jew killed by a bomb. Yes, a Jew who had his home seized by the Nazis and a German who was kicked out of Silesia are both homeless. Yes, both German and Jew are "victims".

Yet are they equally deserving of sympathy? I don't think so. Thus, their descendants do not have equal (or even comparable) moral claims to recompense.

Furthermore, there is the factor of time: many non-Jewish German victims of the war - internal refugees - were assisted by the postwar civilian occupation forces (at least food and fuel) and, afterward, the German governments. Recompense for Jewish refugees was much more difficult: How was a Jew, often only a child at the time, supposed to prove that the sale of his parents' home was forced? How often were the relevant records buried in un-indexed boxes in some dusty government office? How to take matters to court if some relevant parties were dead but no death certificate could be produced? How prove that someone is dead if the evidence is locked up with the excuse that officials are protecting the privacy of the victims? It has been a Kafkaesque nightmare that is taking decades to sort out.

And that was just the experience in the West. Behind the Iron Curtain, the Soviet pretense was simply that Jews weren't singled out at all as victims, and that life started over with the arrival of Soviet "liberators". Returning Jews would sometimes be co-opted as administrators, for almost everybody hates Communism, so the Communist bosses could be sure that the Jews would have no choice but to be loyal to them, rather than their fellow Germans - a factor that encouraged anti-Semitism as much as the employment of Jews as tax-collectors by the local nobility encouraged anti-Semitism in Poland.

Robert, you've visited a few of your local graveyards, right? In some parts of Germany, on Sunday afternoons with nice weather, you see the children and grandchildren of the dead gardening with trowels around their ancestors' gravestones. Everything speaks of German tidiness. Over in the fenced-off area of the Jewish section of the cemetery, everything is unkempt and wild - there are no descendants to take care of those graves.

The fact that the Jewish section is messy while the German section is neat seems, in my very limited experience, to perpetrate resentment of Jews - that is, anti-Semitism - among order-minded Germans. That the context is different for the two different groups - is that not something Germans have buried as deep in their souls as their ancestors under the grassy turf?

I have no problem with the sympathetic portrayal of a German child -- the movie makes the point that it is not just those who are guilty of heinous acts who suffer from them. And after all, at seders we spill drops of wine in memory of the Egyptians who suffered and died in the plagues and in the Red Sea.

But I thought the movie was offensively manipulative and failed as drama and allegory.

Bravo, Rabbi Brad. I saw the movie last night with my 15-year-old daughter (with Down syndrome). Those who are concerned about "sympathy for a German" are forgetting that there is a difference between Germans and Nazis. Just because one is German or German ancestry doesn't make one a Nazi or Nazi-sympathizer. There are, and were, German Jews.