c. 1997 Religion News Service

BERLIN _ There was a moment amid the haze of cigarettes and the smell of beer when people from both sides of the Holocaust finally connected.

Kolja Kandziora of Berlin had just finished telling Jackie Fishman of Charlotte, N.C., about how his grandmother still denies Hitler’s murder of 6 million Jews and 5 million others during World War II.”If I say the word Holocaust, she says it’s a lie,”said Kandziora, 28, a free-lance journalist.”I say, `Grandma, that’s bull …’ …. It’s something she says to stop communication with me. She knows the younger generation will say, `What did you do?'” Having confessed his family burden, this grandson of a Nazi soldier then expressed the motivation driving him to a conference uniting the children of Nazi perpetrators with the children of Holocaust victims. On this poignant, painful night in the heart of west Berlin, he shared it with a woman whose mother survived two-plus years at Auschwitz.”I want to deal with the history,”he told her.”To deal with it in a personal way … who I am.”

Kandziora and Fishman participated in one of the first conferences of its kind in the nation that spawned the Holocaust.”The Presence of the Holocaust in the Present”brought together some 400 Germans and 50 Jews to hear speeches, sip white wine and share their enduring emotions.

Sponsored by Second Generation Trust in London and the Institute for Comparative History in Berlin, the two-day forum was not meant to stir apologies or forgiveness.”I don’t forgive my father,”said Dirk Kuhl, 56, whose father was head of the Gestapo in the Braunschweig region, where thousands of forced laborers perished in Nazi factories.”Why should others?” Instead of forgiveness, the conference was meant to provoke people from two sides of a deep gulf to take a step toward each other; to stir dialogue between people who have never spoken; to set an example in a world starving for ways to lessen the divide separating people of different religions, races and cultures.

Boston radiologist Samson Munn, 44, whose four grandparents died in the Holocaust, likened it to”watering the soil.”If Germans and Jews can talk in the city where Hitler and his kind hatched the Final Solution, he said, why can’t blacks and whites talk in South Africa? Or in south Boston?

Holocaust survivor Anita Lasker Wallfisch, a native of Wroclaw, Poland, who was forced to play the cello in the Auschwitz Women’s Orchestra, called the conference”an attempt to jump over our own shadows.” Fishman, a high school humanities teacher in Charlotte, a city with just 7,000 Jews, expressed her feelings in an impromptu dialogue with Kuhl. They were sitting in a semicircle with a dozen others wondering what brought everyone together. Her mother, retired college professor Susan Cernyak-Spatz, 74, is one of the Carolinas’ best-known Holocaust speakers.”What do you want?” Fishman asked Kuhl, speaking of his attendance at these long, grueling sessions.”Friendship,”he answered.”What do you tell your kids in school?”asked Fishman, 50, the mother of two.”Break the silence,”he responded.

Then Fishman told him why she decided to fly across the ocean in her own pursuit of the offspring of the people who tortured her mother.”My urgency,”said Fishman,”is to make American kids see the importance of understanding where the lines are in their lives, the lines beyond which they will not go. In Germany, it seemed they didn’t know where the line was.” That struck a nerve in Kuhl.”They knew where the line was,”he answered,”and it did not matter.” The sons and daughters of Nazi perpetrators, an apparent minority who still insist on remembering, clearly carried more emotional baggage to the conference.

A 1990 survey found that 65 percent of Germany’s 80 million residents said it’s time to put the Holocaust behind them.

So while the world deals with revelations of collusion between Nazi Germany and Switzerland and Berlin debates where to put a Holocaust memorial, some of today’s Germans struggle to atone for their fathers’ sins.

Alix Rehlinger, 38, remembers her father issuing a warning before she moved to Philadelphia in the 1980s to work with rape victims. He was a former Nazi soldier who fought in Holland. He told her,”Don’t come back with a Jew.” Today, Rehlinger is a mother and a social worker who helps resettle Palestinian and Bosnian refugees in Germany. She thinks about her father. She thinks about the prejudice aimed at today’s outcasts. She knows what she has to do.”Maybe it’s learning to live with it,”she said.”And making sure it never happens again.” For 55-year-old Renate Roeder, the question she asks herself is far more simple. Her father was an SS commander.”What part of the evil is in me?”she said.

As much as one might have expected tears and anguish, the conference, at the Town Hall of Schoneberg, was marked by dry eyes and deep thought. This was less a time to feel than to understand.”It’s not that I don’t have empathy for people,” said Fishman.”But the lessons are beyond ourselves. It can’t be about one person’s psychological problems.””I don’t want to hug anybody,”she said after one small-group session in which people sat cross-legged in a basement meeting room and shared their feelings.

Later, she sneered a little when participants were instructed to flail their arms and move frantically about to better get in touch with their feelings.”The Auschwitz disco,” she called the exercise.

And so the sessions went.

Munn, of Boston, participated in a forum featuring Holocaust activists from a dozen nations, who told of research and activism continuing in their countries.

Munn also led a small-group session in which a Jew from Germany shared her ambivalence about remaining in the country.

(OPTIONAL TRIM)

Jaacov Naor, 48, son of a Holocaust survivor who lives now in Tel Aviv, Israel, spoke of the need for role-playing and drama to find the hidden feelings. He led the workshop at which Fishman was asked to do those free-form movements.”The words have lost their meaning for me,” he said.

Hanni Lewerenz, 51, of Berlin, reminisced about her bittersweet reason for even being. Before her father went off to fight for the Nazi cause in Czechoslovakia, her parents decided to have a baby.”I was conceived as a possible remembrance,”said Lewerenz.”My mother wanted a child if he didn’t come back.” (END OPTIONAL TRIM)

While the purpose of the conference was to bring people from both sides of the Holocaust together so that the horror of the events will not be forgotten, the meeting was not without irony.

Berlin’s Ernst Muller, 79, who survived 52 months in Auschwitz, roamed the halls of high ceiling and classic watercolors, pleading with these younger people not to forget the elderly survivors who still live. And who still remember the horror.”They are doing things for the second and third generation,”he complained.”But not for the first generation. Nothing at all.” END RNS