German youth fights ghosts of the Holocaust

By Jennie Rothenberg
Special to the Tribune
December 17, 2001

It's the night of the annual Hanukkah party at the Selfhelp Home for the Aged. Inside the North Chicago retirement home, 12 menorahs blaze on a tabletop. A cheerful man sings Hebrew songs and show tunes, while hundreds of audience members laugh and clap along.

In the back of the room, a young volunteer named Markus Hagemann is watching the Thursday night celebration when an elderly resident approaches him to introduce some visiting friends. One of the visitors greets Markus with a question: "Sprechen Sie deutsch?"

Hagemann flushes. "Ja," he replies in German, "ich bin aus Berlin. Yes, I am from Berlin."

After they leave, Hagemann hangs his head. "I never know what to do when people ask me that," he says. "I don't know their background, I don't know how they'll react to me."

He has reason to wonder. The visitors, like most of the Selfhelp residents, are German Jews who fled the Nazis more than 60 years ago.

Hagemann is a young German whose grandfathers served in the army of the Third Reich.

A tall, thoughtful 20-year-old, Hagemann volunteers full time at Selfhelp, a retirement home founded in 1938 by German Jews. His work is a government-approved alternative to the short military service required in Germany, as in most European countries. "I don't know yet if I'm a pacifist," Hagemann says. "I just knew I didn't want to hold a gun. In my mind, the army was never a possibility."

His feelings are not unusual in Germany, a country where more than 50 percent of the young men choose 10 months of civil service over eight months in the army. But Hagemann chose a third, longer option: 18 months of volunteer service through an organization called Action Reconciliation/Service for Peace.

Hagemann thought service abroad would be more interesting and meaningful than civil service at home. "I'd already spent a year in America, in a small Tennessee town [as a 16-year-old foreign-exchange student]," he says. "While I was there, a 10-year-old boy ran over and called me `Hitler.' I realized, `Oh, no, there are people here who still believe Germany is the way it was back then!'"

Action Reconciliation offered a chance to change those perceptions. The group began in 1958 when Lothar Kreyssig, a German judge, asked his young countrymen to perform acts of goodwill in countries damaged by Nazis. "We Germans began World War II," Kreyssig says. "We are guilty for bringing immeasurable suffering to humankind."

Now hundreds of young German men and women enter Action Reconciliation's competitive application process each year. Service might include repairing an English church damaged by German bombing in World War II, counseling drug addicts in the Netherlands or working on a kibbutz in Israel. Emphasis is given to the Jewish community, whose members, Kreyssig says, were murdered by Germans "in an outrageous rebellion against God."

Hagemann now lives in an apartment on Sheridan Road in Chicago. He rides his bicycle near the lake each morning, enjoying the view. He has gotten to know the city, joining the cycling activist group Critical Mass and a neighborhood Mexican soccer team. Most of all, he has gotten to know the Selfhelp residents.

With his blond ponytail, flannel shirts and quiet sense of humor, Hagemann has become a familiar sight at Selfhelp.

"He's very pleasing," says Edith Schuster, a 92-year-old Frankfurt native. "When you can walk and do what you want, you don't know how it is when you're so handicapped. And he helps us."

On a given day, Hagemann will take residents' mail to the post office, lead them on walks, challenge them to chess and teach them to use the Internet. He has created a monthly newsletter called "The Selfhelper." He enjoys drinking coffee with members of the "Shalom Group," a program for residents with fading mental clarity. "The people there are just a little `vermischt,'" Hagemann grins, using the Yiddish expression for "confused."

At 6-foot-5, Hagemann is especially useful at holiday times. He spent the days before Selfhelp's Hanukkah party decorating the ceiling with shiny foil dreidels and six-pointed stars. "Look at Markus," teased one white-haired lady, wheeling through on a walker. "He's becoming Jewish already!"

Hagemann knew very little about Judaism before coming to Chicago. Now he spends each day with elderly Jews, most of them one-time refugees from his country. They sit with him at meals, explaining kosher food and Jewish holidays.

Residents also tell him their personal stories. "Edith Stern is the most amazing," he says. "She's so lively and relaxed, nothing I expected from a Holocaust survivor."

Stern, a Vienna-born 80-year-old, was Selfhelp's director for eight years. Now she's a resident and gift shop volunteer. The locket around her neck holds a faded photo of herself and her father. "I always keep him with me," she says. Her parents and first husband all died in the Holocaust.

While Stern was in the Terezin concentration camp, she was forced to appear in a Nazi propaganda film called "The Fuhrer Gives a Town to the Jews." German guards made her don a bathing suit, sit at a false cafe and step onto a dance floor, all to imply concentration camps were happy Jewish towns. Afterward, Stern returned to the brutal reality of slave labor and starvation.

"When we started out, between my family and my husband's, there were 11 of us," Stern says simply. "In the end, I was the only one left."

Stern still feels uncomfortable around Germans her age. But she says young volunteers like Hagemann bring her nothing but pleasure. "Those who were born after the war, it wasn't their fault," she says firmly. "I don't believe in hatred. The only difference is between good and bad people."

She remains close with Selfhelp's first Action Reconciliation volunteer, Jan Schultheiss, who stayed on in Chicago after his service. "We speak every day," Stern says proudly. "Jan is my adopted son." She says Schultheiss, who came in 1998, broke the ice for future volunteers. "People found out we were going to have a young German, and they fought it all the way," Stern says. "But then they fell in love with him."

Hagemann says some residents still seem uncomfortable with non-Jewish Germans. When asked, no one had anything but praise for the young volunteer. "But it's not an open thing," he says carefully. "It's a feeling they give you, that you're German and it's still a problem." He pauses reflectively. "It's natural, I guess," he says.

The past 30 years have been a period of soul-searching in German media and schools. "It's pretty well taught, the Holocaust in Germany," Hagemann says. He remembers his first visit to a concentration camp site in a Polish forest. "There was snow on the ground," he recalls. "The whole place was empty and deserted. We had an opportunity to study, to discuss how we coped with it."

The prevailing feeling was not guilt, he says. Born in 1981, Hagemann barely remembers the Berlin Wall, much less the Nazi era. But Action Reconciliation helps young people address some deeper questions. The group's German name, Aktion Suehnezeichen, literally means "Action as a Sign of Atonement." "Young people ask, `How can I atone for something I haven't done?'" says Johannes Zerger, the group's recruitment chair. "We say, `Nobody thinks you are guilty. But it's important to learn.'"

Hagemann's friend Asareel Kriener volunteers at Chicago's Jewish Council on Urban Affairs. "Being here makes you aware of what it means to be German," he says.

Kriener has given a lot of thought to why the Holocaust happened in his country. "There is a German thing of just doing what you're told," he says. "Do what your parents tell you, don't question anything. You're supposed to look up to the next person on the ladder."

Attitudes have changed, Kriener says, but he still sees room for improvement. "A lot of guys aren't that interested in the Holocaust," he says. "They're not anti-Semitic, they just think, `I have my soccer club, I have my girlfriend, I have other things to think about.' They all know about the six million and the camps and the trains. But they see how it ended without asking how it could begin."

A third volunteer, Jan Vestermann, works at the Holocaust Memorial Foundation of Illinois. The foundation was created after Neo-Nazis won the right to march en masse through Skokie in the late 1970s. "Neo-Nazis are a worldwide problem," Vestermann says. "They are in France, they are in Britain, they are in the U.S." But, he says, Germany, the country that caused the Holocaust, has a special teaching role. "It's important for American students to hear these things from a German," he says.

At Selfhelp, Hagemann's work is less about issues than relationships. One of his closest friends is Hella Gerson, a 90-year-old woman with large blue eyes. Gerson left her German homeland to come to Chicago in 1936, but she still loves Germanic culture. Her living room features a colorful poster from Mozart's opera "Die Zauberfloete ("The Magic Flute.") "I am an American," she says softly. "But inside, I am still German."

When Hagemann thinks about modern politics, he often reflects on the choices his grandparents made. His great-grandfather, a strong Catholic, actually spent time in a concentration camp for denouncing Nazis. His grandfathers, though, served in Hitler's army. His grandmother stayed home, where her house was bombed to the ground. "I think my grandmother felt so powerless herself that she didn't do anything," Hagemann says. "And I can't judge how far you could have done anything."

For his part, Hagemann is involved in social issues. He supports the Green Party, one of two parties now leading Germany's coalition government. He plans to study environmental management when he returns home. Even the music he listens to is filled with political messages.

"In America, I've met young people who tell me I'll never understand the Holocaust because I'm not Jewish," Hagemann says. "But sometimes I feel I've dealt with it more than they have." He shrugs. "I mean, I'm in this program. They're not."

At the end of the Hanukkah party, Hagemann says good night to his Selfhelp friends. "You still haven't fixed your glasses," he reminds one. Another stops him to review her recent chess lesson.

Under his arm, Hagemann holds a package. It's a book of photos from Chicago's South Side, and he wants to send it to a girl in Berlin. Inside he's included a Hanukkah card, a small introduction to Judaism.

Hagemann only recently learned about Hanukkah, a holiday that recalls ancient Jewish miracles and military victories. But he says the holiday spirit feels familiar to him.

"It's about Jewish survival, but there's also something you find in all religions," he says. "It's about life, it's about celebration."

He takes his package and gets ready to go home.

Copyright © 2001, Chicago Tribune