Historical Christianity subsequently sought to visit judgment on the world, and judgment on the Jews, in the name of Jesus, without delay! That is, divine justice was replaced by human justice meted out in the name of the Church.
David Neuhaus studies Jesus in the context of Jewish history. You can only obtain an answer to the question of what our Master believed through that approach, proceeding from the Jewish context.
Professor Neuhaus invited me to his home, which I considered a great honor. He has a fine house in an old district of Jerusalem which emigrants from Germany began to build many years ago. It is occupied now by rich people, a lot of university professors, famous doctors and lawyers. It is reminiscent of a comfortable suburb in a South European city. When I went in there was a large hallway, a mirror, a table. Everything very respectable and bourgeois, and in the most prominent place was the statue of a rather fine pig. I immediately asked why he accorded such honor to a despised animal and he explained that he was born in Bohemia. When the Germans occupied Czechoslovakia, they initially gave Jews permission to emigrate. “I applied to emigrate to Palestine, but when I went to obtain the permit, the German officer dealing with the paperwork demanded that I should shout out three times, ‘I am a filthy Jewish pig!’ This beast stands there in commemoration of that event.”
I’ve just seen through the window that the consultant in charge of the department I am in has arrived. I shall go and try to persuade him to discharge me. If he does, I shall go about my business and finish this letter at the first opportunity.
D.
13. November 1990, Freiburg
F
ROM A TALK BY
B
ROTHER
D
ANIEL
S
TEIN TO SCHOOLCHILDREN
The chief of the Belorussian district police, Ivan Semyonovich, took me from the village to the town of Emsk and moved me into his house. He wanted me constantly on call. Semyonovich lived with his young Polish wife, Beata. She surprised me by being completely different from the uncomplicated and primitive Semyonovich. She was very pretty. Educated and aristocratic, even. I later discovered that she was indeed from a very good family. Her father was the headmaster of the Walewicz Grammar School and his elder brother was the local priest.
Ivan had been in love with Beata for many years, but she always refused him and had only married him recently, when he became the chief of police. It was her way of trying to protect her family from persecution. The Polish settlers were more educated than the local Belorussians but they were few in number because most of the Polish intelligentsia had been sent to Siberia when the Russians arrived.
The Nazis did not persecute only Jews. They regarded gypsies, negroes, and Slavs as racially inferior, but the hierarchy was such that Jews were first in line for extermination. I claimed to be a Pole.
The local Poles were well disposed toward me. They had heard I was half-German, half-Polish, and when I registered in Emsk, I registered as a Pole even though I could have put myself down as German. My choice was entirely deliberate. The only document left from my previous life was my school identification booklet which gave no indication of my nationality but indicated the town in which I was studying. The Germans could easily have made enquiries and then I would have been exposed. To the Poles, however, my choice demonstrated unambiguously that I was a Polish patriot. Beata’s family were also patriotic.
I soon got to know them all better. Her father and her sisters, Halina and Marysia, were very pleasant. There was such a warm, homely atmosphere that you were reluctant to leave. Occasionally their priestly uncle would come to the house, but when I met him there I was always tense because I had no idea how a Catholic should behave in the presence of a priest. Luckily he was a well-intentioned man and did not expect any special treatment.
The sisters were roughly my age, Halina a year older and Marysia a year younger. They were the only people I could talk to and relax a little from the constant tension I lived under. I went to see them almost every day and would stay until evening. I played cards with the sisters and we kept ourselves entertained. I told them funny stories, since amusing things did occasionally happen even in the police station.
Socializing with Jews away from my work was out of the question. I would have attracted suspicion immediately, and the Jews themselves, as soon as they saw my black uniform, looked away and tried to become invisible.
Of course, I could never come too close to the Walewicz family. I was always acutely aware of the unbridgeable gulf separating me, a covert Jew, from these dear, likeable and well-educated Christians. I was in love with Marysia and knew she liked me, but I also knew I would never cross the boundary, would never develop a serious relationship because that would subject her to terrible risk. I do not know how my life might have turned out if I had met her in peacetime, in a country at peace. Alas, Marysia and her entire family were soon to die, and I was unable to save any of them.
My duties at work were quite varied. In the first place, I acted as interpreter between the German gendarmerie, the Belorussian police, and the local populace. In the second place, I had to investigate crimes and minor offences and collect testimony. I tried to steer clear of political cases involving investigation of the activities of the former Soviet administration, communists, and the partisans who appeared shortly after the occupation. In particular I wanted to avoid Jewish cases, but that was the most classified part of the work and they did not involve me in it.
At first I lived in Semyonovich’s house, ate at his table, acted as his interpreter, and tried to teach him German, if with little success. In the morning I would saddle the horses and we would ride to the office. In the evening when he might have been able to study, Semyonovich usually got drunk.
He was pleased with my work. My predecessor had been a Pole whose German was poor and was also a drunk. Now Semyonovich lumbered me with all his correspondence and record-keeping and I had to compile the endless idiotic reports demanded by his German superiors. I coped and Semyonovich appreciated that.
Quite a long time later, Beata told me that she had immediately suspected I was Jewish, but had realized her mistake when she saw me on horseback. I sat in the saddle like a real cavalry officer, not like a rural Jew. I really was a good horseman. I loved horses and riding and had even won races on several occasions when I competed against my classmates at the riding school.
Beata thought well of me. I lived in her house, helped her in whatever way I could, and more than once had to help her calm Semyonovich down because, when he was drunk, he could be mean and violent. Every time he had been on a binge he was grateful to me. I could feel that. I would even say he respected me. On one occasion his respect put me in a very difficult situation. He knew, of course, that as a Pole I must be Catholic. Under the hierarchy Semyonovich had established, a Jew was beneath a Belorussian but a Pole was higher. As regards the Aryan race, Semyonovich never doubted its superiority. He was an ideal policeman, his heart untroubled by the anti-Jewish operations he was conducting. During these months, they were destroying Jewish farmsteads and small settlements of thirty to sixty souls, and the operations were at first carried out by the Belorussian police. I cannot imagine why Semyonovich suddenly took it into his head that those policemen who had been born Catholics should go to confession, but one fine day he entrusted me with the task of ensuring that Catholic policemen did so.