The Shame Factor

"We had to wear yellow stars. I had to turn in my bike. I couldn't go to a Dutch school any more. I couldn't go to the movies or ride in an automobile or even on a streetcar, and a million other things. But somehow we children still managed to have fun . . ."

More than all the heaped bones in all the charnel camps of Hitler's Germany, such uncomplicated words as these from the diary of a sensitive little Jewish girl named Anne Frank are making many Germans conscious of the enormity of the crimes they once condoned. Her poignant, posthumously published and dramatized diary became a hit play in scores of German cities as well as in the U.S. She herself, dead at 15, lies buried in a mass grave at Belsen, 50 miles south of Hamburg, where some 25,000 of her fellow Jews died in the last two years of Hitler's war. In the cold drizzle of a wintry Sunday morning last week, some 1,500 young Germans journeyed out to Belsen to lay flowers on her grave. A Hamburg jazz club emptied its cash box so that 80 members could charter a bus; another 300 young people pedaled on bikes to the camp. "We older people," said a government official, "have had the Jews on our consciences ever since the war, and now our children are inheriting that guilt."

The evil genius who organized the systematic slaughter of Anne Frank and her kind did his job well. Of the 600,000 Jews who once lived in Germany, only a mere 15,000 were left after the war. An estimated 300,000 fled to safety; the rest were either deported or killed. Today, official Jewish community listings number only 17,000 Jews in West Germany although there are perhaps another 15,000 in the country. Because most of them are either very old or very young, the number increases by only 1,000 or so each year. In all Berlin, where the pre-Hitler Jewish community numbered some 180,000, there is not a single kosher restaurant left.

Though pockets of prejudice remain, the West German government has labored to atone for the dead by its treatment of the living: by helping to finance the building of synagogues to replace the 300 burned down by the Nazis; by paying every Jew who was in a concentration camp 150 Deutsche mark ($36) for every month he spent in camp; by paying 6,000 DM to any Jew who returns to Germany and helping him to find housing and a job; by providing him with preferences in government loans and contracts if he sets up in business. In addition, Germany agreed to deliver $822 million in goods and services to Israel over a twelve-year period; and individual indemnifications to Nazi victims may total $1.5 billion. No one argues that this is payment in full. But Jewish organizations agree that "the shame factor" is widespread. "The local railroad-ticket seller," said one embarrassed young man in Bonn last week, "knows I am a Jew and fairly leaps to take care of me first when I'm standing in line. I guess he was a guard in a concentration camp once."

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