A visit to Germany and Hungary

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My father had a lifelong enmity for Germany.

Ben Kepes

While unfortunate, having his own father murdered by the Nazis in 1945 led him to forever connect Naziism with Germanism and to think suspiciously of every German.

Indeed, when I visited Bergen Belsen for the first time in 1993, I couldn’t help but look sideways at the Germans I passed by as I walked through the nearest town, Celle.

Revisiting Germany recently, I was struck by the “niceness” of the northern German towns and villages and how it exudes an almost Scandinavian-like sensibility. I wondered to myself how I would feel visiting Bergen Belsen once again. So I did.

Interestingly, as we entered the commemorative building, I told the staff at the reception desk of my connection to the place – both with the death of my grandfather but also the fact that my mother, aunt and grandmother had survived. The receptionist was very excited and quickly phoned the (non-Jewish and very German) resident historian, who came down and spent the afternoon talking to us before gifting us a pile of books from the bookshop and suggesting a few more places we visit.

Rather than a random incident, this situation occurred again when we visited the museum in the town near where the death train my mother was liberated from finally stopped. Again, the German woman at the reception desk waived the entry fee for us and gave us a pile of books to take home.

Bear in mind that Germany, the country that created Nazis and the horror of the Shoah, has also legislated against reciting the saying “form the river to the sea.”

Either through a sense of guilt for what their country did or perhaps a newly found humanistic perspective upon people, the Germans I interacted with were open and interested, accepting and respectful.

I was contemplating this fact as I walked through Budapest a week later. Budapest is the city that my grandfather left from before being deported to Bergen Belsen. Indeed, there is a plaque with his name on the Dohany Synagogue, the largest synagogue in Europe. Wanting to pay my respects and leave a stone at the plaque, I went to the entry point for the synagogue only to be told that it costs the equivalent of $50 for each person to get into the synagogue – no exceptions.

In the city that lost so many hundreds of thousands of its residents simply because they were Jews. And in a country whose population was decimated by the Shoah, they’re now charging Jews to pay their respects at a house of worship.

Not one to play particularly well by the rules, I decided to take a photo of the plaque in question, which is visible from the outside. As I was doing so, an Israeli security guard ran up and started screaming at me to stop and go away. I quietly explained, in Hebrew in case he thought that I was up to something nefarious, that my saba was one of the names on the plaque, that he perished in Bergen Belsen and that I, one of only three living descendants from his entire family, simply wished to respect his memory. He responded that he didn’t give a f*%$ about my grandfather and that I should go away.

Now I realise that I’m conflating a few data points into something much larger here, and one cannot define any valid “state of the Jewish nation” by these experiences. I also realise that since October 7th, we are all on edge and grasping to find meaning and connection in it all. I’ll avoid the temptation to turn what I saw into a critique of Israeli society in the 21st century.

What I will say, however, is that we Jews are a tiny, tiny global population. I’ve always joked that while the bus driver in Israel is rude, arrogant, unhelpful and not particularly good at driving buses, at least he shares a context with me, and that is worth a lot. And to a point, it is – the shared history, trauma and identity that 3,000 years of persecution bring do deliver a shared context.

But this shared context does not in any way lessen the requirement for us, as Jews, to look out for one another. Yes, we can argue about Talmudic interpretation, and we’ll debate at length everything from whether a four-plait or a six-plait Challah is better to Josef Trumpledor and whether or not it really is a good thing to die for one’s country. But after all of those arguments, we need to remember that if we don’t look out for each other, no one else will.

Would it have hurt for that security guard in Budapest to simply take a photo for me? Would it have been so bad for the synagogue, out of respect for one of its martyred congregants, to let me inside to say Kaddish for my grandfather? And would it really be weak for that bus driver to simply be nice to his co-religionists?

My father would be spinning in his grave at my suggestion, but maybe, just maybe, we could look at the way Germans seem to act in the modern world and take a leaf from their book.

Ben Kepes is a spokesperson for the New Zealand Jewish Council