THE HOLOCAUST IS OVER WE MUST RISE FROM ITS ASHES

When my initial courtship of Yael came to an end, I decided to invite her to myfamily’s home. I needed to prepare my parents for this historic meeting. I told themthat I had a new girlfriend.My mother smiled, and my father seemed puzzled.“So?” he said.“She will come here tomorrow for the first time. Don’t mess it up,” I begged.I knew my father’s endless curiosity for other people’s backgrounds, andoccupations. At the time I did not understand why he stored so much informationabout the Jews he met, never to be forgotten. I was afraid that my young friendwould be afraid of him and run away from me forever.“Don’t worry,” my mother said, trying to ease my anxiety.“Tell me, who is she?” my father asked.I told them she was French, and that she had emigrated from France not long ago .. .“Nu, nu,” my father concluded, and returned to his business.Yael came over the following day, nervous about meeting my parents for the firsttime, not to mention meeting a minister, a Jewish minister, for the first time in her life.As I feared, my father broke his promise and launched into his usual interrogation:“Who are you?” “Who are your parents?” “Where are you from?” Only the notoriousKGB interrogation lamp was missing in that small room that seemed to grow smallerwith every passing moment.She finally confessed meekly, “I am from Strasbourg.” That was the beginning of agreat friendship between my father and Yael. “Why did you say she’s French?” hesnapped at me, “She’s one of our own; she’s from Alsace. Bismarck gave us backAlsace-Lorraine in the 1870s. Strasbourg is ours!”So spoke the former German Jew, with a sudden burst of national pride. For amoment he relived his German identity, forgetting that it no longer existed.Bismarck’s victory and the repatriation of the Alsace-Lorraine province generatedrhetoric and acts in Germany that may sound familiar to Israelis. Although the landhad belonged briefly to Germany a few hundred years earlier, at the end of thenineteenth century most Alsatians were French. In a parliamentary debate in Berlin,