Good news, bad news

Sometimes the news we receive on a daily basis can be quite depressing. How should we respond? Should we absorb it all and prepare for the worst? Should we shrug it off and ignore it, focusing on the better side of life? Or is the true answer to say "it all depends on the circumstances"?  Our member George Moschytz offers us a real-life case study and invites us to draw our own conclusions. 

Good News, Bad News

I was talking to a friend recently and he proudly told me that he does not listen to the news or read the newspaper because “there’s nothing but bad news—and who needs that?”  He told me that a journalist friend of his once tried an experiment. For several weeks he would try to print only good news—and the sale of his paper plummeted. Why is it that people only want to read bad news, he asked? The question intrigued me. I answered that it could be as a safety mechanism to be aware of ‘trouble' when it arises and, by being prepared, to be able to react to it as sensibly as possible. I illustrated my point by telling him the following true story of a Jewish family during World War II.

The father, a successful medical practitioner, lived with his wife and four children in a peaceful university town in South Germany. He had grown up in Berlin, “a city in which he did not experience any antisemitism”; she in Leipzig where she had experienced a lot. They married in the late 1920s, just a few years before Adolph Hitler came to power. Besides being a strictly orthodox Jew, the father was thoroughly familiar with, and appreciative of, the German culture of Goethe and Schiller. He was convinced that this Germany, for whose army he had unquestioningly volunteered in the first world war and had been badly wounded several times—as well as receiving the Iron Cross for bravery—would throw out this lunatic Nazi regime within half a year.

The mother, who had never trusted the country of her birth, was fascinated by the up-and-coming Zionist movement, and automatically belonged to the religious Zionist ‘Blau Weiss’ youth movement (Mizrachi). She followed the ominously gathering clouds of antisemitism in Germany closely and took them very seriously. The father, being thoroughly absorbed in his work as a highly regarded medical practitioner and with the health of his patients, remained optimistic about Germany’s democratic future, and somehow remained unaware of the slowly progressing catastrophe of the growing Nazi regime. Furthermore, he relied on his patriotic army service during WWI and on his being honored with the Iron Cross. Besides, as a war hero and an invalid, he was convinced that the regime would not touch him, nor his family. Thus he ignored the increasingly bad news, assuming that it would surely turn into good news within a matter of months. The mother, being the housewife of Herr Doktor, and joining other Frau Doktors at a weekly Kaffeeklatsch (tea party), was all too aware of the goings-on outside the bubble that the father had built for himself and his family. This awareness was all the sharper  after she was abruptly left out of the invitation to the weekly Kaffeeklatch. To the father she was only “listening to the bad news”; to the mother, he was either not listening or if indeed he was, he was picking out the increasingly rare remnants of “good news”.

In early October 1938, the mother’s gnawing intuition, fed by her consistent pursuit of the increasingly bad news, left no doubt in her mind. Somehow, she was convinced that‘something terrible was about to happen, and that when it did, it would hit the men first. So she urged her husband to go to Switzerland, to the place where he had been treated for his war-time wounds, and pretend that he was going there for a medical checkup. Despite his reservations, he reluctantly went, leaving his 37 year old wife and their four children ages 9, 7, 4, and 2, behind.

Sure enough, on the night of Thursday, 9 November, 1938 (28 Cheshvan, 5700) two Gestapo officers (Geheime STAatsPOlizei, or Secret State Police) banged furiously on the front door of their    apartment, screaming “Aufmachen!” (“Open!”). The feared and ruthless Gestapo were looking for her husband! She calmly told them that her husband was in Switzerland for a medical check-up for the wounds he had sustained during the war. The Gestapo rampaged through the apartment, frantically looking for her husband in every room, corner, and cupboard, ignoring her claim that he was in Switzerland. She, a frail and somewhat timid lady, bravely stood in front of the door of one room and fearlessly said: “you are not going into this room, my children are sleeping in there!”.  Miraculously, they did not go in, thus avoiding what would have been a traumatic experience for the children. Thanks to the mother’s premonition and courage, the family had just survived the first nationwide pogrom in Germany, later known as the Kristallnacht, or Night of Broken Glass. The latter refers to the radical and deliberate shattering of home-windows, storefront-windows and any other breakable objects reachable by the Nazi maniacal mobs (Kristallnacht can be considered the beginning of the German-inspired Holocaust. In a way, it saved the life of this family and of thousands of other Jewish families who had refused to read the bad news earlier on. Kristallnacht finally drove home the severity of the situation for Jews in Germany and in the surrounding similarly ‘inspired’ countries).

However, this was not the end for this family. The mother immediately sent the nine-year-old son and his seven-year-old sister with their non-Jewish maid to the German-Swiss border, where they were received by the father. For money one could still obtain reluctant ‘favors’ from some non-Jewish Germans, especially because whatever was left behind was eagerly grabbed by the neighbors, maids, and whoever else could lay their hands on whatever was left behind. The mother stayed behind with their four-year-old little boy and two-year-old baby girl. She hurriedly scrambled to gather whatever she could in terms of papers, belongings, and valuables, without rousing the attention of the officials, it being forbidden for Jews to try to leave Germany after Kristallnacht at the risk of immediate imprisonment or worse. One obvious reason for this was to prevent Jews from describing to the outside world the murderous regime and its restrictions for, and persecution of, any and every Jew in Germany.

Several weeks later the mother locked the front door of her fully and comfortably furnished apartment, as well as of the completely and functionally installed doctor’s office, never to see a shred of any of it again in her lifetime. By a stroke of luck her still valid German passport did not show her Jewish identity by the large red letter ‘J’ stamped on the front passport page of every Jew. Nor did she have the name ‘Sarah’ that was handwritten over the name of every Jewish female—as was the name ‘Israel’ handwritten over the name of every Jewish male—on the front page of their respective passports. If omitted and caught, this too was severely punishable by imprisonment, or worse (with the onset of the war the passports of all German Jews were automatically declared invalid, making them stateless at the stroke of a pen! The insane order with regard to the Sarah and Israel names for all Jews was decreed by the murderous government of a nation whose hatred of the Jewish people knew no bounds, and had lost complete control of all reason).

The mother left her locked-up and permanently abandoned German home with the two young children, all dressed as if going to Switzerland for a winter vacation. Based on her non-besmirched German passport, she had obtained a legitimate family visa for herself and the two small children. She took with her a suitcase filled with winter vacation clothes on top, and stuffed with Shabbat candles, some other silverware, and a few other personal belongings underneath. Thus she arrived in Switzerland to join up with her husband and the two older children, united “for a family vacation in Switzerland”. All too soon the Swiss visa expired, and the Swiss officials informed the mother that she must immediately return to from wherever she had come—to Germany. The father could stay, they said, because he was an invalid and had procured a doctor’s letter saying that he still needed more medical care.

The family had obtained an affidavit from an uncle in America in which he guaranteed their financial upkeep and, with it, their unlimited permission to move to the USA. However, there was a problem. The father’s mother was still in Germany— in Berlin. The father said that he could not leave for America till his mother was safely out of Germany. But his mother had no intention of leaving Germany! She read only ‘good news’—or none—adding “‘I am an old woman in her seventies, and the Germans will not harm me’” In the meantime, the Swiss authorities were relentlessly pressing the mother to leave with the children according to her visa instructions.

The parents decided that the father would stay in Switzerland till his mother could finally be convinced to join him there. He would then feel free to leave Switzerland with her, join up with the rest of the family, and then travel together to America. But where would the mother with the four children go in the meantime? Obviously not back to Germany, as was by now evident to all. Germany was out of the question, and the mother was not about to leave for America without her husband

They were faced with a terrible dilemma! But a solution suddenly presented itself. Most of the mother’s family had followed the bad news in Germany (they had also lived in more antisemitic regions in Germany than had the father’s family) and had some years earlier already left Germany. Most of them had fled to England where the mother’s brother-in-law, a successful Jewish British businessman, had vouched for them all. He would do the same for the mother and the children until the father and his mother would join them in England to leave for America. So, with the voucher from the brother-in-law in hand, the mother with the four children arrived in England and waited for the husband to arrive there with his mother. Reunited, they would all take a ship to America and settle down there as so many other family members had done before them.

The father’s mother was finally induced to visit her son in Switzerland (“Your son is severely ill and you must come to visit him immediately!”) She arrived in Switzerland two weeks before the outbreak of the war.! By then, the British permitted no ‘enemy aliens’, such as German refugees, into the country, be they Jewish or not. The mother and her four children were stranded in England. They were virtually penniless and, due to the diabolic German regulations, stateless, being without a passport of any kind. As he had guaranteed, but hardly expected, the mother’s brother-in-law took full responsibility for the upkeep of the whole family.

Ten years later, after two brief two-week visits to England by the father, the mother and her English- speaking children (the mother had not dared to speak the enemy language with them), she and her four children—now ranging in age from twelve to nineteen—were reunited in Switzerland with their father and his mother. The children were estranged from their German speaking father. There had been no communication, written or otherwise, beyond the borders of neutral Switzerland and its surrounding Nazi-held neighbors. A slow, and not unpainful, re-bonding process of several years began for the family. The price of not listening to “bad news” ten years earlier was a terrible one!

So, is my friend wrong for not following the present-day news because it is all bad? Not really! Stories like the one above have been repeated in the diaspora for Jewish families in a thousand different ways throughout the last two thousand years. There is hardly a country in Europe that has not, at one time or another, and in one way or another, thrown out its defenseless Jewish citizens—and with outcomes all too often far worse than the one described above. For the first time in two thousand years we live in a country— our country—that will defend our security and freedom. We can trust its government that it will never throw us out, whether we voted for this one or another. We can be sure of this, whether we like the government or not, and whether the news is good or bad. So yes, we can now afford not to listen to the news, good or bad!

Oh, and by the way, the family in the story above is my family— I was the four-year-old boy at its beginning…