My father was a banker. Ours was a middle-class family, well-to-do, comfortable. Like his father before him, my father was imbued with the spirit of a German humanist education, steeped in Latin and ancient Greek, deeply rooted in an unassuming idealism which lasted all his life.

My father was also a Zionist. When he married my mother, in 1913, some of his friends gave him as a wedding gift a document stating that a tree had been planted in his name in Palestine. But Zionism, in pre-Hitler Germany, did not mean immigration to Palestine; I don't believe this idea ever entered my father's head. It meant, first of all, to be nonconformist (and I strongly suspect my father amused himself by upsetting the assimilationists around him, who hated Zionism). It also meant an awareness of the suffering of the Jews elsewhere, and a sympathy for the striving of the few pioneers who were trying to build a new country in the Near East-a place too far away to be quite real.

Yet Zionism saved our lives. I never forgot this when later I became a non-Zionist, perhaps an anti-Zionist.

I was nine years old when Hitler came to power. The brown terror broke loose the year I started high school. I found myself the only Jewish pupil there. As I remember it, every day or two some ancient victory of German arms was celebrated. All the pupils would be assembled in the great hall and made to sing the old and new patriotic songs. I remember one day-I believe it was the day of the battle of Belgrade-I stood small and alone among a thousand German boys who were singing the blood-churning hymn of Naziism, the Horst Wessel song. I did not sing, nor did I raise my hand in the Nazi salute like all the others. After it was finished, a group of my classmates told me that if I ever failed again to raise my arm while the hymn of the new Germany was being sung, they would "show me."

They never did. A week later we were gone from Germany for good.

I believe my father was one of the first German Jews

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