A couple of months ago, skimming through one of the on-line movie services to which we subscribe, I happened upon an Israeli documentary, הדירה - translated as The Flat - as in apartment. The film was made by Arnon Goldfinger, a screen-writer and director. When his 98-year-old grandmother died, something told him to bring his movie camera with him when he and his mother Hannah went to clean out her flat. What unfolded is a remarkable story of the Holocaust, of personal deception, of the power of the truth and, perhaps, of its limits as well.
Growing up in Israel in the 1960’s and 1970’s, his grandmother’s flat was always an exotic place to Arnon. "When I was a kid,” he writes, “I liked to come here. Once a week I’d cross the streets of Tel Aviv, climb up the stairs, and find myself in Berlin. My grandmother lived here for 70 years as if she had never left Germany. Despite her years in the Holy Land, she never mastered Hebrew and I didn’t want to learn German. So we’d sit and chat in English over apple strudel and Swiss chocolate.”
Already, of course, Arnon’s story is curious. How can refugees from Nazi Germany maintain a Germanic home and a Germanic lifestyle after being forced to flee for their lives? But the story quickly becomes even more curious when we learn that Arnon’s grandparents, whose names were Kurt and Gerda Tuchler, originally travelled to Palestine in the company of an SS officer named Leopold von Mildenstein. In the effort to make Germany Judenrein - that is to say, Jew free- von Mildenstein advocated the mass immigration of Germany’s Jews to Palestine. In 1933, he and his wife would set off to tour the land in the company of Arnon Goldfinger’s grandparents.
As Arnon and his family dig through his grandmother’s collected belongings, he finds copies of one of the most virulent Nazi newspapers, Der Angriff - The Attack. The papers contain a series of articles by von Mildenstein about his travels in Palestine. Their purpose is to glorify the rebuilding of the Jewish homeland as a way of enticing Jews to leave Germany. As Arnon keeps digging, he finds a photo album containing pictures of his grandparents and the von Mildensteins travelling through Palestine together.
Arnon confronts his mother Hannah with the newspaper articles and the photos of her parents with this Nazi couple. Embarrassed by it all, she admits she knows nothing about this event in their past. As he continues to question her, she becomes more sullen. This von Mildenstein apparently had more knowledge about Jews than any other Nazi, and his source of information was her parents. Didn’t this interest her? “Its interesting,” she says quietly, “but again I am not going to start looking into it. If I happen upon it, fine. What good will it do me?” she continues. “Will it make me see them differently? I had the burden of living with them. I don’t really care what happened years ago.”
Its moments like this that make Arnon’s movie so fascinating to me. He has his mother cornered. Here her parents were escorting Nazis around Palestine and she claims no great interest. How is this possible? What child is not interested in the great and distinctive details of their parents’ lives? As you watch Hannah’s face, you understand that the lack of interest she is expressing is really a cover for her fear. She’s afraid to know this part of her parents lives. And honestly, who among us wouldn’t be?
But Arnon’s story gets far more curious than this. His grandparents, Kurt and Gerda, would spend the war in the safety of Palestine. But Gerda’s mother would stay in Berlin and be murdered by the Nazis in 1942. Oddly, Gerda would tell her daughter Hannah nothing about the fate of her grandmother. Even more oddly, Gerda and Kurt would, after the war and in spite of her mother’s murder, frequently return to Germany and to Berlin where they would continue to socialize and maintain a friendship with the Nazi von Mildenstein and his wife.
Finding a phone number for Mrs. von Mildenstein among his grandmother’s belongings, Arnon calls it on a whim and winds up talking to her daughter. Trying to understand why his grandparents would maintain this relationship even after the war, Arnon travels to Germany to meet with the daughter - Edda Miltz and her husband Harald. Edda, of course, sees nothing odd in the idea that a Jewish couple that had fled Germany would stay in touch with such wonderful, intelligent, educated and sophisticated people as her parents. Arnon struggles with how to bring up her father’s past, but Edda has her own narrative. Her father’s Nazi activities took place in the early 1930’s and consisted mainly of trying to encourage Jews to emigrate to Palestine.
The truth about Leopold von Mildenstein, however, is far more sordid. He joined the Nazi party in 1929 and joined the SS in 1932. In 1933 he indeed travelled to Palestine in the company of Arnon’s grandparents and, upon returning, was placed in charge of the SS’s department on Jewish affairs. From there he advocated the solution to the Jewish question through mass emigration to Palestine - a position that fell out of favor when the SS realized it could not take place fast enough. Von Mildenstein was replaced as head of the SS’s Jewish department in 1936, and, some time later, was succeeded by a man he brought into the department, Adolf Eichmann. He served out the war working in the propaganda ministry of Josef Goebbels.
Just as Arnon’s mother Hannah carefully avoided prying too much into her parents’ continuing association with Nazis, so too did Edda Miltz von Mildenstein avoid prying too much into her father’s Nazi past. As he learns the details of that past, Arnon confronts Edda with them, just as he confronted his mother. The results are even more painful to watch. When told that he has uncovered evidence of her father’s continued Nazi affiliation, Edda denies it is even possible. “He was not in Berlin,” she says. Like a prosecutor, Arnon shows her her father’s handwritten resume where he himself documents his continued Nazi affiliation throughout the war. Trying to deny the document’s significance she says “that is like a skeleton… If I find the pieces I can patch them to that. But not more than that.” “Don’t you want to know the past?” he asks her. Edda, trying hard to maintain her composure responds, “I want to learn around it. But I’d like to , preferably, see different sides of it as well, if that is possible.” She pauses and then, as if scared of what will happen next, she asks Arnon “Anything else?” and then lowers her eyes as if to avoid what might be the next blow.
This, for me, is the most uncomfortable part of the film. In trying to understand his grandparents, Arnon stumbls across Edda and foists himself into her life - with a movie camera trailing him, no less. She responds graciously to his inquiries and now, in return, he takes it upon himself to rewrite her personal narrative of her family in a most unpleasant and indeed shameful way. He does so in the name of truth, but I find myself wondering whether the truth is worth it.
Long before Al Gore popularized the term, most of us learned that the truth is often inconvenient, and sometimes embarrassing and even painful. But we learn too that truth is extraordinarily powerful and to deny it to yourself or someone else is to rob that person of the ability to be an agent of change in his or her own life. Looking critically at my own life, I find that my willingness to foil the truth through out-and-out lying is not what it used to be. Usually I find that admitting to a fault is less costly than being caught in a lie. And when that isn’t the case, I find the prospect of dealing with my own guilty conscience scary enough to keep me honest.
No, nowadays, my preferred method of foiling the truth is to avoid facing it. I too often put off dealing with problems in the hope that they will go away before they go nuclear. I do this now especially when I know how much the truth will hurt others. In my days as a businessman, I would try to convince myself that I hadn’t given the under-performing employee enough of a chance, or that I was misjudging the situation, or that he had talents that were equally useful to the ones his job really required - anything to avoid having to fire him. These days I try to convince myself that that pain will just go away by itself, or that the negative numbers on the financial report will turn around next month.
Intellectually I know that the truth - be it inconvenient, or embarrassing or even shameful - has a power all its own that cannot be permanently suppressed. Best to deal with it sooner rather than later. Sometimes I live up to this ideal, and sometimes I do not. But I never view my own efforts to avoid the truth as anything other than failure on my part. Indeed I see the High Holy Days as the last reasonable chance of owning up to those failures and confronting the truth.
That said, I have come to view the Holocaust as such a singular event that I am not sure which, if any, of the normal rules of life apply to it. At one point in his film, Arnon visits with his grandmother’s last living friend, a woman named Gertrude Kino. He asks her what she makes of Gerda never telling her own daughter about the murder of her mother. Gertrude answers the question with a question: “Why do only third generation Germans ask questions? The second generation didn’t ask what happened.” She stares at him and then adds, sympathetically, “You don’t understand, and I’m glad you don’t understand.”
What doesn’t Arnon understand? What don’t we, who are even further separated from the Holocaust understand? Just as the peak of Mount Everest stands at the utmost limits of human survival, I suspect the Holocaust exists at the utmost limits of human understanding. As the event fades from immediate memory, those of us who try to understand do so in our normal way: we investigate, we apply reason, we ask questions, we seek the truth. Indeed, we believe we should seek the truth no matter how painful that truth might be. And yet, as we try to seek the truth from those generations closer to the event than we, we find that truth can not only be embarrassing and painful, it can be as cruel as the original act itself. Thus it is with perhaps the most painful question the Holocaust has left in its wake: why didn’t more of us fight back? The only answer possible - at least for now - is that what happened in the ghettos and in the transports and in the camps was of such singular moment that the normal rules of life don’t apply.
Looking at Hannah’s face and at Edda’s face as Arnon confronts them with their parents’ past, I see something being shattered. Deep down, and without Arnon telling her, Hannah knows and is ashamed that her parents continued to see themselves as German - and protect their German identity - even after the Holocaust. Deep down, and without Arnon telling her, Edda knows that her father was a Nazi through-and-through. Has Arnon liberated these women by exposing what they knew deep down, or has he stripped from them that last fig leaf that allowed them to keep faith with their past? Was it, perhaps, their fate to live their lives both haunted and in denial, or has he given them a chance to reclaim something their parents’ had stolen from them? I, for one, don’t know.
על חטא שחטאנו לפניך בכחש ובכזב - For the sin that we have sinned against You by lying and by deceit. על חטא שחטאנו לפניך בזלזול הורים ומורים - For the sin that we have sinned against You by disrespecting parents and teachers. These confessional prayers that we have offered this evening are also the heritage of Hannah Goldfinger, born in Berlin to Kurt and Gerda Tuchler, mother of Israeli film maker Arnon Goldfinger. To the extent that these confessions capture universal human failings, they must also be, in some way, the possession of Edda Miltz von Mildenstein, daughter of a dedicated SS officer and Nazi propagandist. Perhaps this is what the Torah means when it says it will visit the sins of the parents upon the children to the third and fourth generation: that the nature of those parental sins will deny their children the sense of שלמות - the sense of wholeness - that comes from being able to confess all your sins, rather than being forced to choose among them. For indeed, that is how I have come to see Hannah and Edda - as women forced to choose between respecting their parents’ memories and the truth.
For those of us who have come here tonight seeking that sense of שלמות that comes through confrontation with our past and confession of our failings, let us add to our prayers a word of הודיה, of thankfullness, for being able to find such peace. Inconvenient, embarrassing, painful and even shameful as we may find confronting the truth, at least it offers us a chance to heal. May we, on this day, through our fast, through our prayers and through our reflections, find such healing. And may we feel grateful that for us, the truth knows no limits.
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