On the night of November 9, 1938, six-year old Charlotte fled though the streets of Munich with her father. One of her father’s clients had repaid an old debt by warning him that a large-scale pogrom was in the offing. “You’re on the list,” her father was told in a short phone call to the family home. Charlotte’s mother, a Christian who had converted to Judaism, had abandoned her husband and daughter two years previously when the Nazis stepped up persecution of Jews following the implementation of the anti-Semitic Nuremberg laws.
Following the phone call Charlotte’s father, realizing he didn’t have much time, took her by the hand and immediately left the house. Charlotte remembers clearly to this day the quick flight down the staircase, the green SS car that had already parked outside her father’s office in the city—where she and her father had hoped to find a hiding place—the visit to one of her father’s Jewish friends, who had been brutally beaten, the shattered windows of the Jewish stores, and the flight on foot to the home of a Christian acquaintance outside the city.
The Nanny’s Role
Throughout the Second World War Christians saved Charlotte’s life. One of the merciful angels was her nanny. After Charlotte’s grandfather was sent to Auschwitz and her father to a concentration camp, the nanny took Charlotte to her village home and told people that Charlotte was the illegitimate daughter she’d given birth to in the city. Only the local minister knew the truth, and though he told the nanny not to risk it, she refused to listen.
Munich’s main synagogue was not destroyed during the pogram that became known as “Kristallnacht.” The magnificent building, located on one of old Munich’s main streets, was the first synagogue destroyed by the Nazis, five months prior to Kristallnacht, in an attempt to “purify” the appearance of the city. Exactly 68 years after Kristallnacht, Charlotte Knobloch, President of the renewed German Jewish community ,will dedicate the city’s new main synagogue. Built in Jakobsplatz in the heart of Munich, the new synagogue is only a few streets away from the original location.
The festive dedication ceremony will be attended by hundreds of high-level guests, but the general atmosphere in Germany is not especially festive: neo-Nazis have been elected to regional houses of parliament, violence by the extreme right is rising sharply, anti-Semitism is prevalent, and Germans are losing faith in democracy.
Nevertheless, Charlotte Knobloch is closing her own circle. “When I took it upon myself to head the Jewish community in the city it was clear to me that the main task facing me would be to rebuild the central synagogue,” she says. “Only three years ago, when we finally laid the synagogue’s cornerstone, did I declare that I’m unpacking my suitcases and feel that I can stay here now.”
Knobloch wanted a Jewish center and Jewish museum as well as a synagogue to provide Munich’s Jews with an active community life and a meeting place for Jews and non-Jews. Both the center and the museum are to open soon. Many non-Jews—including German media magnate Hubert Burda—contributed money to the community center, Germany’s largest, which cost 100 million Euros. Burda gave a million Euros.
Knobloch does not see the establishment of the new community center as a gesture at reconciliation. “I can’t carry out reconciliation in the name of six million people. I can speak only for myself, about myself. We never mentioned the word ‘reconciliation.’ There is still a separation between Jews and non-Jews. There is still sensitivity, and the situation is still worrisome. We must achieve co-existence so that Jews can really feel that the surrounding society accepts them.”
The First Lady
Knobloch is 73, and for the past 20 years has been head of the Munich Jewish community, the country’s second largest, with some 9,000 registered members, about half of them immigrants from the former Soviet Union. Last summer, with the death of community head Paul Spiegel, Knobloch became the first woman to head the community. Her appointment was based largely on her being one of the last witnesses to the Holocaust period among community leaders born in Germany. The Russian majority—some 80,000 of the community’s 120,000 formal members—is already challenging the old leadership. But for now, Knobloch’s selection has stopped the “Russian revolution.”
In contrast to the chaos that has taken over most of Germany’s Jewish communities, which are torn between different interest groups and personal disputes, Knobloch has managed to establish a model autocracy. Known as neither an excellent speaker nor a top-notch intellectual, she has still managed to make many Germans uncomfortable with her sharp, clear statgements that other members of the Jewish community do not always find acceptable. For example, several weeks ago she managed to anger many people by saying, following a string of serious anti-Semitic incidents, that what was happening in Germany was reminiscent of the atmosphere in the country in the 1930s, before the Nazi rise to power.
“I realized that it wasn’t enough to give general warnings, but that I had to describe the situation we’re experiencing in a drastic manner,” she explains. “When Anne Frank’s diary is burned at a public event, when at a demonstration in Munich—during the recent war in Lebanon—a poster is displayed saying that Jews are child killers, it’s not enough just to raise a finger in warning. You have to use drastic words in the hope that they will leave a long-lasting impression.
“Many people view the events as a passing thing, but today’s intensive extreme right activity requires us to realize that this is not necessarily a passing situation. We must do everything so that this situation does not perpetuate itself. The rise of the extreme right must strengthen us and give us the courage to fight the problem, but this is a task not just for us, but for all of German society and for politicians. Only by working together can we defend ourselves from the neo-Nazi team and destroy it.”