Looking back. Looking ahead. 2020-2025

POLITICS AND SOCIETY | SPEECHES   185 At the age of sixty, she had her camp number surgically   removed. Yet the hope of erasing the marks of destruction   was an illusion. Four fates: two non-Jewish, two Jewish. The Jewish survivors could not simply return to their previous lives as if nothing had happened. At least Jack Hamesh returned to his homeland as a victor, like the so-called “Ritchie Boys”. In January, one of them, the literary scholar Guy Stern from Hildesheim, celebrated his hundredth birthday. Persecuted and forced into exile by the Nazis, these young emigrants from Germany and Austria returned home in American uniform. They worked for U.S. Intelligence. They underwent a rigorous training programme at Camp Ritchie and, following the Normandy landings in June 1944, they became a critical weapon in the Allied fight against the Hitler regime. Hans Jonas, a student of Heidegger and philosopher of the “principle of responsibility”, shared the Jewish fate: humili- ation, persecution and murder – his mother was gassed in Auschwitz – followed by survival through flight, emigration, uprooting and starting a new life in a foreign land with a foreign language. In Jerusalem, he shared this experience with figures such as the wandering Else Lasker-Schüler and Gershom Scholem. Later, in America, he shared it with Hannah Arendt, a dear friend from his university days.When he left Germany in 1933, he vowed to return as a soldier in a victorious army. He served in the British Army for five years – from 1944 in the “Jewish Brigade” – fighting not only against the Nazis, but also for his dignity as a Jew. He was united in this struggle with the fighters of theWarsaw Ghetto, who, facing immi- nent deportation to the extermination camps, rose up against the German occupiers on Passover, 19 April 1943. Completely unarmed, they engaged the Germans in fierce battles that lasted for weeks. They held out against the Nazi forces longer than theWehrmacht had needed to conquer Poland. This year, at Passover, another people is fighting for its survival and freedom. Passover, the story of the Exodus, is a narrative of liberation in Jewish liturgy, recounting the escape from Egyp- tian slavery. In theWarsaw Ghetto, they knew their fight was hopeless, yet they chose to die fighting. Only a few survived. To subsequent generations, they remain powerful symbols of resistance. Liberation was a complex, multi-faceted process, reflecting the turmoil of a society in transition. Hitler took his own life on 30 April. By 2 May, the Reich capital had surrendered, shortly after Goebbels had also evaded responsibility through suicide. The “Thousand-Year Reich”may have lasted only twelve years, but it had completely altered the face of Germany and Europe. Its promises had been turned inside out. Germany lay in ruins, and the war had claimed millions of lives worldwide. For the defeated, capitulation meant imprisonment, flight and expul- sion. For five to six million Jews, it came too late. For the few hundred thousand survivors, it meant liberation. This “extreme reversal of fate” (Alexander Kluge) carried within it, as every era does, both its past and its future. Some were left leaderless, frozen in the past. Others set out in search of a future. In Hamburg, Ralph Giordano crawled out of a rat-infest- ed hole. Cordelia Edvardson, like Primo Levi, was liberated from Auschwitz by Russian troops. Cordelia Edvardson, daughter of Elisabeth Langässer, was on the brink of death when the Red Cross brought her to Sweden. She would spend forty years of her life in psychotherapeutic care. The list is endless: Rose Ausländer, Imre Kertész, Nelly Sachs, Viktor Klemperer, Anita Lasker-Walfisch, Marcel Reich-Ranicki… For others, the burden of survival was too great; Primo Levi chose suicide, as did Jean Améry. And though the SS sought to erase all traces of their crimes, personal testimonies and buried manuscripts provide authentic accounts of those who, like millions of others, did not live to see liberation – people like Anne Frank, Etty Hillesum and Adam Czerniakow. They have inscribed the genocide into humanity’s collective memory. Many of those who did live to see liberation, like Ingeborg Bachmann, felt a moment of elation. Yet, having been driven to the brink of starvation, tortured more than the human body can take, and having escaped death marches and the Nazi inferno, they often lacked the strength to truly celebrate freedom. Filip Müller, a member of the Auschwitz Sonderkom- mando responsible for the crematoria, once recalled:“That one moment, on which my hopes and desires had been fixed for three long years, brought me neither joy nor any emotion”. For others, a new beginning was short-lived. I was raised in a displaced persons camp, surrounded by survivors of the Shoah. Their stories of suffering have always been part of my life. They came from everywhere: Lithuania, Poland, Ukraine, Hungary… These camps became a refuge for the remnants of European Jewry – a community pieced together from all corners of the continent. But they all had one thing in common: They were Jews and, as such, deemed “life unworthy of life” by the Nation- al Socialism regime. A decade of propaganda had convinced